When Things Started to Move

Inside the Art Market: Australia’s Galleries 1956–1976
by Christopher Heathcote
Thames & Hudson, 2016, 368 pages, $49.95
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Australian newspapers are replete with stories about those Australian art world “stars” John Olsen, Brett Whiteley, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Jeffrey Smart whose works routinely change hands for six-figure sums. So it is a shock to discover in Christopher Heathcote’s sweeping and highly detailed account of the rise of the Australian commercial galleries between 1956 and 1976, a dealer remembering the now legendary Jeffrey Smart: “He sent over a show from Sydney … although it was awful because he never sold anything and he had all the costs of sending the paintings over. It was terrible …”

Such was the plight of artists, Heathcote points out, when Tam and Anne Purves, owners of a small dress-pattern factory in the gritty inner-city Melbourne suburb of Collingwood, decided to open a gallery there, Australian Galleries, in 1956. They knew there was no shortage of talented artists looking to exhibit their works, but there was a dearth of professionally run spaces dedicated to modern art—rather than merely nesting paintings among antiques, bric-a-brac, soft goods and furnishings.

Heathcote confines his twenty-year saga to Melbourne and Sydney—quite rightly, as these two cities between them saw most of the art-world action during those formative two decades, with Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth being mostly peripheral to events.

Until the 1940s, certain cliques of successful artists with strong links to the “establishment” and the conservative art societies and state galleries, had things their own way. Issues of Art in Australia (the country’s only art journal) were bristling with pallid and second-rate pot-boilers by Arthur Streeton, Elioth Gruner, Hans Heysen and the Ashtons, Will and Howard—the latter also a hostile art critic. These polite academic works had calcified into clichés: well-watered paddocks, rolling hills and valleys, storm clouds and cattle and sheep, but a growing number of painters felt the cavalcade of “bush” paintings could give way to radically different interpretations. This meant looser brushwork, the introduction of some obscure symbols, livelier and non-representative colours and mixed perspectives. These were the kind of artists that Tam and Anne Purves would find themselves exhibiting and promoting.

Heathcote points out that Tam and Anne had to find their own way in this novel adventure, and their research—which included reading S.N. Behrman’s splendid biography of the colourful international art dealer Joseph Duveen—might establish how to proceed. They would charge 25 per cent commission on sales (this was later increased to 33 per cent). They would establish a stockroom, so that at any time a potential client might be able to view a range of works not currently on show by an artist in the “stable”. They would offer artists “solo” shows. They would maintain accurate records of every work exhibited, thereby providing a reliable provenance for skittish collectors. They would seek and encourage collectors and they would place some artists on retainers.

Most of these innovations are now solidly, if informally, established in the routines of many an exhibiting gallery in Australia (except the commission, which now starts at 40 per cent and can be as high as 60 per cent) but they were entirely novel at the time. Until that time artists had shown in hired rooms, studios, theatre auditoriums, restaurants and bookshops, and the more progressive ones were always at risk of being snubbed for the annual exhibitions arranged by the cliquey art societies which abounded.

Heathcote delivers the kind of telling anecdote in this carefully researched volume which holds the reader’s attention to the end, something that many dry academic art world publications lack. The unguarded reminiscences he has assembled from of Tam and Anne Purves, and some of the artists they gathered into the fold, give the book intimacy and pungency and are for this reviewer (an art gallery owner) the most rewarding passages in the book. The Purveses remembered when the gallery would go for days without a single visitor. Heathcote observes, “There seemed a baffling chasm between what professional painters regarded highly and what collectors would purchase.”

By 1957 bank loans were discussed and they persisted. Heathcote says, “They ignored the gallery’s receipt book for twelve more months and trusted in talent.” Australian Galleries would ultimately play a large part in the trajectory of artists who are household names today. What is surprising is that artists whose reputations are now unassailable, such as John Olsen and Fred Williams, did not have an easy start. Fred Williams sold very little from his 1958 show and nothing from his 1959 exhibition in Melbourne. John Olsen counted himself lucky to sell one painting from his show at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. After a fee for exhibiting was deducted, he hadn’t even covered his costs.

Heathcote is tart about some of the dealers, artists and writers who other writers have previously swooned over. The “Macquarie Gallery ladies” Lucy Swanton and Treania Smith, Melbourne’s John and Sunday Reed, Max Hutchinson, Rudy Komon and, in particular, Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan are all raked over with the searching spotlight of Heathcote’s forensic eye and well-turned phrase. Lecturer Terry Smith he calls a “Marxist martinet”. He also dismisses much of the art-buying community with a flourish, commenting on the “dim-witted insularity of Sydney society”, the “empty-headed philistinism of the rich” and “dull businessmen and their snobby wives”.

As the pace quickened and commercial galleries sprang up in the 1960s, there was pressure on some artists who were beginning to sell well not to stray from their recognisable styles, while some galleries attracted the experimental and the restless.

An increase in sales reflected a growing public interest in looking and perhaps buying, so the press was not slow to stoke the fires. One signal event was the sale of Norman Schureck’s collection (which included thirty-four oils by William Dobell) in Sydney in 1962 which realised the staggering sum of £81,858—a record for an Australian art auction.

Another was the return of Albert Tucker from New York and his revelations about the art scene there. These were eye-popping to say the least. It was common for New York galleries to take an artist’s entire output and place him (or her) on a monthly retainer. They were then free to sell the works for whatever the market would pay. Tucker’s show in 1962 at Australian Galleries, in which he insisted on remarkably high prices for his works (they sold) triggered a complete realignment of the Australian art market.

A third notable event was the frenzy among dealers and artists when word spread that an unknown businessman called Harold Mertz had arrived in Australia with a mission to sweep up an entire representative collection of Australian art. (In fact it was almost entirely figurative work.) He was guided in this mission by the equally colourful art dealer, racing car driver and jazz musician Kym Bonython.

Heathcote discusses with some relish the chagrin of some avant-garde artists in Sydney and Melbourne when their visiting hero Clement Greenberg, then the most influential art critic in America, dismissed many of them but took a shine to the self-effacing narrative painter Ray Crooke.

As more money began to change hands, some disgruntled artists complained about painters “selling out”. The artist Mike Brown dismembered an expensive glossy brochure from the Hungry Horse Gallery in 1964 and turned it into a kite with a barbed polemic floating from it. Many dealers were criticised for treating paintings like merchandise, something to be turned around for a quick profit, but as the painter Robert Windsor’s recollections show, this was not necessarily the case. He recalled visiting an exhibition as a student: “carried away in boyish enthusiasm, he bought a screenprint by the Bauhaus master Josef Albers with a $30 deposit. It took him over two years to pay the balance.” The dealer William Mora would just smile when he came in the door.

With each new wave of galleries, each with a different overriding aesthetic of their owners, came a different wave of followers and buyers. Some dealers and artists Heathcote clearly admires while others he lampoons. He is especially animated when evoking the essence of an individual painter’s style. He says of John Olsen:

his paintings were steeped in the earthy graphic release of Jean Dubuffet, although psychologically [his] work was closer in spirit to the world of Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac.

The art world changed (some might say deformed) categorically with the involvement of federal and state bureaucracies in the late 1960s. Agencies were established, supposedly to nurture and support those artists regarded as too lofty for philistine collectors, and these agencies regarded the commercial network as the enemy. This was not ultimately helpful to artists. Heathcote has given too much space to the peripatetic and interfering artist Clifton Pugh in the events that unfolded with the establishment of these bureaucracies.

The book nears its end with some revealing details of the vicissitudes of the architect Harry Seidler, who would beat back the bureaucrats to realise his aim of seeing contemporary Australian art and furniture grace the rooms of the newly designed Australian Embassy in Paris—an initiative which would be followed in Australian official residences worldwide.