Rare Whiteley hits Australian art auction market

While many of Australian icon Brett Whiteley’s (1939-1992) paintings are well-known to the secondary art market, every now and again one that hasn’t been seen for years comes into contention.

Such a work is Sketch of a Magnolia 1977 – a vibrant still life held in the same family collection since its acquisition in 1978 from Melbourne’s Joseph Brown Gallery.

The painting is a major feature (lot 41) of Menzies forthcoming auction from 6.30pm Wednesday August 20 at Menzies Gallery, 1 Darling Street, South Yarra.

With a catalogue estimate of $400,000-$600,000, the painting was created at Whiteley’s Sydney harbourside studio in Lavender Bay during a particularly fruitful and inspired phase of his career.

In 1978, the artist won the trifecta of the Art Gallery of New South Wales annual prizes – the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman – in the process becoming the only person to do so.

Whiteley’s biographer Ashleigh Wilson describes Sketch of a Magnolia as sprung from an artist who has long embraced the dualities of life.

“This is not a one note picture,” he explains in the catalogue essay. “There’s beauty, stillness and harmony, but there’s also an unsettled, restless quality – and it is that combination that gives the surface of his picture such astonishing vitality.”    

The estate of esteemed Sydney collector the late Richard Blair, who died last year, has provided three masterpieces for the auction.

One is a Rupert Bunny (1864-1947) nude entitled Sunbath c1915-16 also known as Bain de Soleil and Sun Bath (lot 38) painted at the height of his international career.

Living between France and England at the turn of the 20^th century, Bunny became the first Australian painter to receive an honourable mention at the Paris Salon, won a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle and was the first expatriate artist to have his work purchased by the French Government.

The New Salon influences saw Bunny abandon religious and allegoric imagery in favour of subject paintings, landscapes and portraiture.

French artist Pierre Bonnard’s (1867-1947) Bouquet de Cheminee 1913 also known as Fleurs sur une Cheminee (lot 39) is another from the Blair estate and carries a catalogue estimate of $800,000-$1.2 million.

A massive influence on contemporary artists with buyers always after his works, Bouquet de Cheminee was sold the year it was painted to an important early collector of Impressionist and Post-impressionist in Paris, Jacques Cannone – who with his father Henri had a collection that included 40 Claude Monet paintings.

The painting was subsequently sold to American collectors and Hollywood royalty, husband and wife William Goetz and Edith Mayer Goetz – the former one of the founders of Twentieth Century Pictures and later vice-president of 20^th Century Fox, and the latter the daughter of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer.

The last of the three Blair paintings is Arthur Boyd’s (1920-1999) Figure in a Hillside 1961-62 (lot 40) – an important painting from the June-July 1962 Arthur Boyd Retrospective Exhibition at Zwemmer Gallery, London.

One of Australia’s greatest painters Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) features in the auction with African Family 1963 (lot 42).

Of Scottish descent, Fairweather enlisted in the British Army and was sent to France in the opening days of World War I, where he was captured by the Germans and interned as a prisoner of war.

He used the long hours of idleness to educate himself about art and Oriental languages and after the war studied at The Slade in London, and in The Hague and Munich before travelling throughout Asia, America and the South Seas.

In 1934, Fairweather arrived in Melbourne where he met artists from a community formed by George Bell and began painting using some of the Asian traditions of calligraphy he had seen on his travels along with the Oriental philosophies of Confucianism and Tao.

Representing Australia at the Sao Paolo Biennale, African Family was painted some 10 years after he moved to Queensland’s Bribie Island where he lived until his death in a bush hut constructed from found materials.

John Olsen (1928-2023) is another famous Australian artist represented in the auction with Landscape, Body and Sea 2018 (lot 27), along with Rick Amor’s The Waiter (lot 34), Garry Shead’s Young Prince of Tyre 2003 (lot 35) and Tim Storrier’s Stars and Embers (lot 36). 

Among the sculptures on show are Bruce Armstrong’s (1957-2024) painted fibreglass on a bronze base creation Bunjil 2003 (lot 31), Clement Meadmore’s (1929-2005) Emanation 2000 (lot 30) and Inge King’s (1915-2016) Two is a Crowd 1985 (lot 32).