Investor-speculators setting art prices

Press, 1 July 1985, Page 28

Investor-speculators setting art prices

Recent sales of New Zealand paintings have seen increasingly large numbers of Australian buyers and dealers attending art auctions in the country.

footsteps.” The Bank. of New Zealand, Challenge Corporation, Databank arid New Zealand Insurance have joined the trend.

The best New Zealand paintings are still cheap by international standards, and the Australians are looking for bargains, local dealers say. Mr Peter Webb, who has an art auctioneering firm in Auckland, says: “Things are quite definitely changing at the moment. Recent years have seen the rise of a new breed of investor-specula-tors who collect paintings for the joy of it but also resell and make a profit. Nowadays the traditional buyers, the public galleries and private collectors, are having a much smaller impact on sales. “Then there are the new corporate collections of which there are an increasing number as board members realise that it is time to take down the White’s Aviation photographs or the pictures hung because the typist wanted something that matched the curtains. Now they want to have something that is good. George Fraser, who masterminded the very large collection at Fletcher House in

Prices paid for New Zealand paintings were steadily rising as demand increased, Mr Webb said. In Australia, prices well in excess of $lOO,OOO were commonplace for work by the best artists. The works of the best New Zealand nineteenthcentury painters were considered to have great potential for speculation, Mr Webb said. These included works by John Gully, J. C. Hoyte, Alfred Sharpe, J. C. Richmond, Petrus van der Velden, William Matthew Hodgkins, and Frances Hodgkins, as well as more modern painters such as John Weeks, Rita Angus, and Colin McCahon. “With the arrival of big corporations into the art buying scene, the availability of quality pictures is going to be drastically reduced in the near future,” Mr Webb said. “In spite of the fact that they are not buying, to resell, the paintings purchased now are a particularly good investment because of the increasing scarcity of good work.”

Auckland, was the first to Mr Webb will hold an begin this trend. Now there auction of jewellery and art are others following in his in the ballroom at the new

Auckland hotel, the Regent, on July 24. One of the pictures auctioned will be van der Velden’s “Marken Funeral Procession.” This realised 511,000 when auctioned by Mr Webb in November, 1980. This time he expects it to fetch $25,000 to $30,000. A Canterbury landscape by Rita Angus will be one of the works auctioned. Entitled “Mount Stewart, Waiau,” the work was painted in 1931-32 and was first exhibited at the 1932 Christchurch Group show. During the Depression Rita Angus began to paint landscapes in the country around Springfield, Cass, and Castle Hill. The most well known of these is the picture called “Cass,” which depicts the little railway station against a background of summerbrown North Canterbury hills. This work she signed Rita Cook, a designation she dropped when she and her husband separated in 1934.

“Mount Stewart, Waiau” has considerable similarities to the magnificent “Central Otago,” now in the collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery.

“Mount Stewart” was formerly reported as one of Rita Angus’s last works, especially after the experts involved in organising the National Art Gallery’s 198283 Retrospective Exhibition were unable to trace it. They knew of the painting’s existence from earlier exhibition records and from photographs found in the artist’s studio, but its whereabouts remained a mystery. Fifty years after it was painted, this example of an early oil by Rita Angus was discovered in England by a former New Zealander, Lance Crawford, now a successful Melbourne art dealer. Recent prices for this artist’s work were $24,000, $31,000 and $35,000.