Genesis of an Art Boom

IT BEGAN ON A DAY of prickly Sydney heat, a last hard burst of the dying summer in late March 1962. Over seven hundred people jammed into the plain upstairs auction room at Castlereagh Street to see the selling off by James R. Lawson Ltd of the art collection of the late Norman Schureck, a prominent cosmetics entrepreneur. Probated at £30,000, it was an impressive cluster of paintings. The most popular Australian historical artists—Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Hans Heysen, Conrad Martens, G.W. Lambert—were represented with choice pictures among the 282 lots, and there were significant pieces by overseas masters such as Gustave Courbet, Augustus John and J.M.W. Turner. The main strength was in modern painting, Schureck having amassed thirty-four oils by William Dobell.

Balding, bespectacled and visibly perspiring in his dark suit, Max Lawson started the proceedings in his seasoned barker’s voice, keeping things moving with a combination of amiable patter and businesslike efficiency. Hands were raised in bids around the room for the first dozen or so pieces, although within an hour it was apparent that the sale was a three-cornered contest. There were puzzled looks as people craned to watch three bidders in the stuffy room, not everyone present recognising the vigorous trio.

Two were art dealers. Most visible was the stocky middle-aged figure of Rudy Komon, the director of Komon Gallery in Paddington, who stood poker-faced in dark sunglasses and shirtsleeves near the auctioneer to one side of the room, indicating his bid with a slight flick of the hand and corresponding tilt of his head. Then there was the lean and tanned Terry Clune, the twenty-something owner of Clune Gallery in Potts Point who, sporting a dazzlingly coloured tie, sat midway back against the aisle, signalling his bids with a determined salute amidst the sea of curious heads. The third player was the short, executive-looking Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, an eccentric grazier and art collector from Brisbane, who restlessly moved about through onlookers standing and smoking at the rear of the room, bidding by raising his catalogue to chin level, then impishly beaming as others dropped out.

Others might have started the bidding on major paintings, but either Komon, Clune or Rubin seemed to finish it. Even Hal Missingham, the frizzy-haired Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, stopped raising his hand and sat on a rickety wooden chair near the front, morosely chewing gum as the crisp rap of the gavel punctuated the evening. One, if not all of the three, seemed determined to get everything Missingham’s gallery was interested in, driving the prices way too high for his budget. Only the federal government’s Commonwealth Art Advisory Board seemed to score a victory in securing an oil sketch for Dobell’s portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore for the national collection at 2100 guineas; and that was because Komon was bidding for it on the Board’s behalf.

By the end of the auction, the collector and two dealers had pushed the prices beyond all expectation and raked in nearly a quarter of the total paintings (beside purchasing works by Friend, Passmore, Heysen, Roberts, Streeton, Lambert, Martens, Gruner and Kmit, they bought eighteen of the thirty-four Dobells). In fact, the three were collectively responsible for over half of the full amount realised by the sale (having spent £17,000 on works, Terry Clune Gallery alone contributed 20 per cent of the auction’s gross profit).

THE SCHURECK SALE caught the media unprepared. Australians were not thought to be interested in art, let alone suspected of being eager to spend their hard-earned savings on paintings. This is probably why art auctions were such a rarity in the late 1950s and early 1960s (most sales focused on antiques), and when they did take place, the modest trade in local art was so inconsequential that it appeared art did not rate in the Australian consciousness. Having realised £81,858, over two and a half times the expected amount, the Schureck sale suggested popular perceptions were utterly wrong. People were now prepared to shell out serious money for art, and the modern variety at that.

So newspaper editors took notice. What captured their attention were the comparatively high prices paid for Australian modern paintings. Many works had entered the four-figure bracket; in fact, where pieces by the French masters Courbet and Utrillo took only 420 and 900 guineas respectively and a handsome Turner watercolour did not rise over 150 guineas, a small oil sketch by Dobell, Study for Woman in Restaurant, attracted 4200 guineas. So news of the sale made the front page of most newspapers the next day, a first in Australian journalism.

Still, in media reports of the auction at Lawson’s there was not a single sentence of analysis. These were the days when no newspaper had a specialist auction reporter (that was not to happen until the Australian Financial Review appointed Terry Ingram in 1968) and no one really understood what to do. Setting a pattern that would continue across much of Australia’s print and electronic media until this day, no journalist attempted to discuss the artistic qualities of the works—whether they were inventive, characteristic or dull, large or small, in good or poor condition—not that they would probably have known. Nor, inaugurating another continuing media tradition, did they consult independent experts to find out, assuming the names of the artists alone were a guarantee of quality.

Apart from explaining that it had been “a day of spectacular bidding” and “fantastic prices”, reporters did not provide much solid information on the proceedings at all. The Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Herald, Adelaide Advertiser and Hobart Mercury, which carried long reports on the sale, did not list such basic information as the main paintings under the hammer, their preauction valuations and their eventual prices (only the Bulletin published a brief list of the top prices—a fortnight after the event). Instead, they went for a financial beat-up, serving readers sensationalised accounts of supposedly frenzied bidding in the humid room.

What most drew journalists’ attention were the lots by William Dobell. The artist had been a favourite with copywriters since a controversial court case nearly twenty years before when he had been accused of winning the celebrated Archibald Prize not with a legitimate portrait. The court ruled in Dobell’s favour, although his works remained suspect so far as the media and the general public were concerned. Dobell was equated with controversy, and journalists proceeded to make a fresh one by outlining the bidding over his work. While the actual prices paid for his pictures were not listed, all newspapers covering the auction still found it grippingly important to mention that one of the painter’s old palettes had been knocked down for fifteen guineas. If this was not trivial enough, the Sydney Morning Herald also confidently informed readers that his oils were henceforth worth “an average of 1408 guineas each”, whilst the Melbourne Herald declared in a special frontpage auction analysis that major Dobells were now valued at “£76 a square inch”. And, having discovered that Dobell’s Wangi Boy, which went under the hammer for 4000 guineas, had been sold by the painter six years before for £150, one enterprising journalist even telephoned the artist at home to ask if he felt swindled. Rather than being angry, Dobell was dismayed: “They must be mad,” he ejaculated. “Those paintings are not worth it. Some people have more money than sense.”

THE FUSS HAD calmed down by the following day, although the media still hadn’t digested what had occurred. The Schureck sale jarred editors into alertness, and they began to view contemporary Australian art in a new light. Some commissioned follow-up articles about the art market, sober yet confident pieces which forecast that collecting Australian painting was becoming “a sound business” and a “wise investment”, even that the local art market was experiencing a “boom”. Noting the emergence of highly entrepreneurial art galleries in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide over the previous five years, there were many respectful words describing the importance of Tam and Anne Purves of Australian Galleries, Kym Bonython of Bonython Gallery, Max Hutchinson of Gallery A, Barry Stern of Barry Stern Gallery, and, especially, Rudy Komon and Terry Clune, of how they were guiding their artists into highly successful careers, not to mention advising the rich and influential on art collecting for fun and profit.

Komon and Clune were treated as glamorous figures, the artistic equivalent of quick-witted upwardlymobile stockbrokers. Better publicity could not have been desired (a man appeared at Terry Clune Gallery two days after the auction and hurriedly bought a small Dobell, Seated Woman, for 700 guineas). Indeed, Clune and his business partner Frank McDonald capitalised on the attention in the weeks after the Schureck sale by negotiating the purchase of the much larger art collection of Leonard Voss-Smith, the Australian agent for the London publisher Hutchinson, for £30,000; then, once they had secured it, announcing that they would be consigning his collection to a rival Sydney auction firm, Gray’s, for another high-profile sale later in the year.

AND YET DESPITE all the paper and print expended on the Schureck sale and its aftermath, the basic questions were not just left unanswered. They were never asked. Did no one in the media think to probe what had occurred? The discrepancy at the auction between Dobell’s prices and those works of equivalent size and surely greater aesthetic appeal should have spoken for itself. Augustus John’s East Indian Girl fetched 1000 guineas; a handsome painting by Heysen the same figure; an appealing oil by Eugene Boudin fetched 700 guineas. Roberts’s top price was 600 guineas, as also was Streeton’s. Yet Wangi Boy, a cloying example of 1950 pictorial kitsch, fetched 4000 guineas; several more of Dobell’s oils, including The Cockney Mother and a portrait of Schureck, reached 3000 guineas; and a number of unimportant studies by Dobell easily climbed over 1000 guineas.

The painter himself was baffled. It was strange enough that such undistinguished pieces as My Lady Waits and Falstaff each reached 1700 guineas, but even a slight oil sketch, Russian Incident, fetched 825 guineas. “Funny thing is,” Dobell remarked, “they could have come to my studio and with much less money got far better work.”

So why had prices at the auction been so high? Why were those three chief bidders paying such astounding prices for the pictures: were they speculating on, or directing the market?

Consider Rubin—no journalist looked into his activities. Not that they were hard to sniff out, because the intentions of the collector-cum-speculator were plain to see over the years 1960 to 1963, when he annually spent December to June trading pictures around Sydney. He would appear at a gallery opening and ostentatiously buy several exhibits, then later, when excitement rose and people started following his lead, he would quietly unload the pieces for higher prices elsewhere. On occasion Rubin turned over art this way in a matter of months.

It was not all cavalier speculation, for Rubin did cling to work by his favourites. He, Clune and Komon had invested heavily in the painters they so relentlessly pursued at the Schureck auction: the two dealers had numerous Dobells in their stockrooms, for instance, and Rubin held the largest private collection of Dobell pictures in the country (he purchased yet another canvas, The Charlady, for 3000 guineas from Terry Clune Gallery six weeks later). So had they been “ramping”— that is, using the sale to push up prices and build public confidence in the stocks they held, thus ensuring their own holdings increased in value? One lone voice evidently thought so: “It’s a sophisticated country,” the arts commentator Max Harris mused, “where one can watch a Rudy Komon juggle the market.”

And what did artists make of it all? “At the auction there was mass hysteria,” the painter Judy Cassab recorded in her diary six weeks later. “Since then it’s not unheard of for others to put £200 on their pictures. People buy. A Passmore jumped from £100 to £200 at Terry Clune’s. A Kmit from £300 to £400. Collecting has become an investment.”

Christopher Heathcote is the author of A Quiet Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art 1946–1968 and most recently A Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp.