Menzies knack for firsts evident in latest Australian art auction

Australian art auction house Menzies has a knack for firsts when it comes to major art sales.

It’s 6.30pm Wednesday November 20 Melbourne auction at 1 Darling Street, South Yarra is no exception – with a work by iconic Australian modern artist Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) entitled The Cable Coils 2000-01 (lot 38), carrying an estimate of $650,000-$850,000 and featuring on the catalogue front cover, making its first auction appearance.

Another Australian auction first among the 123 lots, with a total low estimate of $4.84 million, is the appearance of Spanish sculptor Manolo Valdes, who is now 82 years old.  

His show-stopping monumental bronze Reina Mariana 2004 (lot 37), with a $400,000-$600,000 estimate, was inspired by Diego Velazquez’s official Portrait of Mariana of Austria (1652-53) – while Valdes’s various works of the Spanish-born Austrian queen (1634-1696) have become true contemporary European art icons, with one prominent example in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao collection.

Smart’s Cable Coils is yet another testament to the artist’s ability to manufacture formal beauty from everyday items.

The immense scale of the industrial strength coils piled in a field is further accentuated by the foreground appearance of a small child – the only visible human element.

From 2017-20, Cable Coils hung on the walls of Smart and his long-term partner Ermes De Zan’s Italian home at Posticcia Nuova after the painting’s current owners bought their house.

American artist Robert Indiana (1928-2018) surged to the front of the United States pop art movement with a polychrome aluminium sculpture featuring the word LOVE, in 1965 turning the four letters into a Christmas card for New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The image became one of the most recognisable graphic 20^th century symbols, while Indiana virtually disappeared from public view.

Four decades later, he was commissioned to create a new body of work for a young Chicago Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

The work, entitled HOPE, was the campaign’s central message and the auction’s polychrome aluminium example is one of eight.

Lot 39, it is entitled Hope (Blue/Red) 2009, originally from Indiana’s Maine deceased estate and now in a private Melbourne collection.

A strong reminder of Melbourne’s 2024 Spring Racing Carnival can be seen in Robert Dickerson’s (1924-2015) In the Birdcage 2002 (lot 35) – a reflection of the artist’s teenage passion for horse racing.

In an extraordinary turn of events, Dickerson’s artistic career took off after a race bet. In 1957, the Australian Women’s Weekly commissioned Dickerson to decorate a promotional Kelvinator refrigerator and the 100-pound fee he then placed on a horse. The resultant winnings turned him from menial entrepreneur to full-time artist.  

In the Birdcage depicts the mounting yard parade from a vantage point inside the ‘birdcage’, an exclusive invitation-only area at Flemington Racecourse.

Albert Tucker’s (1914-1999) Luna Park 1987(lot 40) is another painting of note. A central and vocal contemporary Melbourne art scene figure of the 1930s and 1940s, Tucker was part of the Heide Circle – a group of artists, writers and intellectuals centred on art patrons John and Sunday Reed.

With World War II having such a profound effect on Melbourne and the rest of Australia, artists like Tucker rebelled against the more traditional depictions of the urban landscape.

The attractive seaside history of St Kilda, with its fun-loving attractions such as Luna Park and St Moritz ice-skating rink, co-existed with sex work, alcoholism and crime – a conflict captured by Tucker in a painting entitled Luna Park 1945 housed in the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

The auction painting, completed more than 40 years later, after the artist returned to Melbourne following 15 years in relative seclusion with his wife Barbara at their Hurstbridge bush property, reinforces Tucker’s disdain for St Kilda’s seedy lifestyle while continuing to show an ongoing interest in Pablo Picasso’s fragmented bodily forms and surrealist fascination for the uncanny and carnivalesque.

One of Tucker’s fellow Heide Circle artists, Sidney Nolan (1917-1972), is represented with his 1945 version of Luna Park (lot 34).

Better known for his fascination with and resultant paintings of infamous Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, as a boy Nolan haunted St Kilda – later using the area as the inspiration for about 40 works through which he developed his unique modernist/primitivist style.

Female Australian artists, including Ethel Spowers (1890-1947), figure prominently in the auction with works such as The Battle 1933 (lot 24) – one of only three of her oil paintings to appear at auction.

Set in a children’s nursery, The Battle is a magnificent example of her preoccupation with fairy tales, nursery rhymes and children.

There are several Tim Storrier paintings, including Night Wind (on Waning Moon) 2010 (lot 41) underscoring the artist’s enduring relationship with the Australian landscape – while prominent indigenous artist Tommy Watson (c1935-2017) features with Walunja 2014 (lot 30).

The Lute Player c1924 (lot 43) is a tribute to well-known Australian artist and cartoonist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), a prime mover in the cultural renaissance that followed the end of World War I.

 

Viewing:

10am-5pm Saturday November 9

1pam-5pm Sunday November 10

12 Todman Avenue, Kensington NSW

10am-5pm Thursday November 14 to Saturday November 16

1pm-5pm Sunday November 17

10am-5pm Monday November 18 and Tuesday November 19

1 Darling Street, Soutdh Yarra VIC