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If your faith in contemporary New Zealand art was wavering, last night would have settled your nerves. The Tim and Sherrah Francis collection on sale at Art + Object in Auckland never looked to be anything other than a benchmark for the marriage of serious money with serious art. The first signs were when two Andrew McLeod paintings sold for $36,000 each, and that's the hammer price without commissions. By lot number 48 of the first night's 122 lots, over half a million had gone under the hammer and eight lots later the tally was at $1.5 million. By the end of the evening around (#notthatgoodatadding) $5.5 million dollars worth of art had been knocked down.The big ticket item of the evening was Colin McCahon's eight part painting The Canoe Tainui which sold to a Hamilton collector for $1.35 million making McCahon the top artist at auction (#sorryaboutthatgoldie). Among the big prices were a 1956 koru drawing by Gordon Walters for $66,000, Shane Cotton's He Pukapuka Tuatahi for $252,000 and and Rita Angus's Tree Cutting Hawkes Bay at $255,000. And these prices will all be boosted by commissions. Overall seven paintings sold for over $200,000 and 12 over $100,000.
True to form, Te Papa didn't even bother to show up. This meant of course that it missed out on the opportunity to buy many significant works including Tosswill Woollason's The Poet which obviously belongs in the national collections. Still, the Auckland Art Gallery was there showing that it at least is still an art museum serious about its collections.
If you were there it's hard to believe that the first outing of the two-man band The Woollastons was over 22 years ago. Robert Leonard gives a good account. “It started as a prank. The National Art Gallery, Wellington, invited Dashper and John Reynolds to give a lecture on the work of senior New Zealand painter, Toss Woollaston, on the last day of his 1991–2 show, Toss Woollaston: A Retrospective.” You can read the rest here in Re-reading Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory on Leonard's website. The site now includes a substantial selection of his writing back to 1989 with the exhibition Nobodies. Looping back to The Woollastons, we were there and photographed the event with these pics now up on OTNSTUDIO. Along with Dashper/Reynolds as The Woollastons we have also added photos taken in et al’s studio back in 2004, Shane Cotton’s in 2007 and Peter Robinson's the same year.
“a remarkable collection”
“an unparalleled collection”
“this magnificent acquisition”
“representing high points in the artist’s achievement”
“the most comprehensive representation of his oeuvre held together in any single collection”
“important masterpieces have been added”
“especially strong in late masterpieces”
The James Wallace Trust pumps up its collection of works by Tosswill Woollaston in a recent 500-word PR release.
One person who intruded on just about every conversation you had with the artist Toss Woollaston was another artist, Paul Cezanne. To the day he made his last painting, Woollaston continued with the experiments Cezanne started back at the end of the nineteenth century. You could see as you drove with him in the landscape around Riwaka that Woollaston was seeing it through the eyes of the French artist in much the same way as some of us find it almost impossible not to see the hills of Otago ordered up by Colin McCahon. It’s still a surprise though when you are in front of one of Cezanne’s landscapes to see how capably Woollaston followed Cezanne’s structural reshaping of the landscape form (along with a good slap of South Seas rough and tough rawness) and to recall that for a good part of his painting career all this was done through photographs in books and magazines. It was quite a feat.
Images: top, Paul Cezanne’s The Bay of Marseilles, seen from L’Estaque 1885 in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and bottom, M T Woollaston’s 1986 painting, Tasman Bay
