07.08.19 Works of Art 0603 Auction Catalogue August 2019 Contemporary, Modern and Historial Works of Art
Michael Harrison Shadow of a shadow
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02
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Entries Invited 20-26 August 2019
Fine & Rare Wines Lot 465 Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz South Australia Price Achieved: $112
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Theo Schoon Untitled c.1966
THE ART OF THE WILD
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Frances Hodgkins Wings over Water (detail) 1931–1932, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries, gift from the Contemporary Art Society, 1940
E U RO P E A N
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Asian Art Tom Pan Head of Asian Art tom@webbs.co.nz +64 21 045 0118
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5 September 2019
A Chinese ‘Huanghuali’ Corner-Leg Table (Banzhuo) 17th/18th Century 十七/十八世纪 黄花梨束腰雕龙纹马 蹄足半桌 H1030 W850 D505mm
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PETER ATKINS, ERIC BRIDGEMAN, SIMON DENNY, CHERINE FAHD, FIONA FOLEY, THEASTER GATES, ALICE LANG, JAMES LEMON, DAN MCCABE, COLIN MCCAHON, GENEVIEVE FELIX REYNOLDS, AMBERA WELLMANN & MORE
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ISSU E 27 · AUGUST to OC TOBER 2019
Peter Atkins, Eric Bridgeman, Simon Denny, Cherine Fahd, Fiona Foley, Theaster Gates, Alice Lang, James Lemon, Dan McCabe, Colin McCahon, Genevieve Felix Reynolds, SPRING1883, Sydney Contemporary, Ambera Wellmann & more
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ERIC BRIDGEMAN AND HAUS YURIYAL Mori Kaupa, 2017 archival Inkjet print on rag 95 x 115 cm edition of 5 Courtesy the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane and Gallerysmith, Melbourne 12
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18 August 2019 Collectors' Cars Featuring the First Class Classics Collection
1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith Estimate $200,000 – $250,000
Caolan McAleer Single Owner Collections caolan@webbs.co.nz +64 27 929 5603 Webb's
2019
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Sensory Agents The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery presents work by Len Lye alongside installations and new commissions by Yuko Mohri (JP), Sergei Tcherepnin (US) and Danae Valenza (AU), three international artists working across sculpture, sound and musical composition. Curated by Sarah
Aug – Nov
2019
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre is Aotearoa New Zealand's contemporary art museum. Opening 10 Aug: Fiona Clark: Raw Material Yuichiro Tamura: Milky Mountain / 裏返りの山 Waking Up Slowly: Elizabeth Thomson and Len Lye Open Window – Ana Iti: beyond the ash cloud Also showing: Mikala Dwyer: Earthcraft WharehokaSmith: Kūreitanga II IV Fiona Clark Pan Pacific Womens' Body Building Championship posing, Auckland 1981 1981. Cropped image. Courtesy the artist and Michael Lett
42 Queen Street New Plymouth Aotearoa New Zealand Webb's govettbrewster.com
Open seven days: 10am – 5pm
August
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3 August 2019 – 19 January 2020
christchurchartgallery.org.nz
#chchartgallery
Image: Bill Hammond The Fall of Icarus (after Bruegel) (detail) 1995. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1996
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Entries Invited 25 September 2019
Art After Banksy Flower Bomber polystone 390mm x 330mm x 90mm (widest points)
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Featuring major works by Colin McCahon from the 1950s to the 1970s and drawing upon Auckland Art Gallery’s extensive collection, this exhibition considers McCahon’s sustained relationship with Auckland and the significance of the physical, spiritual and cultural landscape on his painting.
Principal partner
10 Aug 2019– 27 Jan 2020
Colin McCahon May His light shine (Tau Cross) 1978–79, Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 1994. Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.
Upcoming Auction
26 November 2019 Entries Invited Works of Art
Shane Cotton Nahash signed SWC., dated 2003./2004 and inscribed NAHASH in brushpoint lower right 1900mm x 3000mm Charles Ninow Head of Art charles@webbs.co.nz +64 21 053 6504
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2019
W W W.B R OT H E R S B E E R .CO. N Z
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Works of Art
Auction Wednesday 7 August 6:30pm
Specialist Enquiries Charles Ninow Head of Art charles@webbs.co.nz +64 21 053 6504 AD Schierning Manager, Art ad@webbs.co.nz +64 27 929 5609 Condition Reports Tasha Jenkins Administrator, Art art@webbs.co.nz +64 9 529 5600 Webb's
2019
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Table of Contents
Programme List of Essays
Plates Terms & Conditions Index of Artists
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26 28
29 104 108
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Programme
Preview Evening Tuesday 30 July
Viewing Wednesday 31 July - Friday 2 August Saturday 3 August - Sunday 4 August Monday 5 August - Tuesday 6 August Wednesday 7 August
Auction Wednesday 7 August
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6pm – 8pm
10am – 5pm 10am – 3pm 10am – 5pm 10am – 1pm
6:30pm
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List of Essays Rita Angus Soft Capture By Lucy Jackson
46, 47
Colin McCahon A Matter of Light and Dark By Andrew Paul Wood 50 - 53 Michael Parekowhai Passchendaele By Kelly Carmichael
56, 57
Frances Hodgkins Transient Modernist By Lucy Jackson
60, 61
Michael Parekowhai The Moment of Cubism By Kelly Carmichael 64, 65 Matt Hunt Dreaming of a New Heaven on Earth By AD Schierning
68, 69
Bill Hammond Fly By Mary-Louise Browne
74, 75
Shane Cotton Shadow of Symbolism By Leafa Wilson 78, 79 Peter Siddell Imaginary Realist By Richard Wolfe
82, 83
Raymond Ching Hyper-Surreal By Andrew Paul Wood 88, 89
Webb's
August
Max Gimblett One-Stroke Bone for Anthony Fodero By Paul Jackson
94, 95
Charles F. Goldie Paris By Elizabeth Rankin
98, 99
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Plates
Specialist Enquiries Charles Ninow Head of Art charles@webbs.co.nz +64 21 053 6504 AD Schierning Manager, Art ad@webbs.co.nz +64 27 929 5609 Condition Reports Tasha Jenkins Administrator, Art art@webbs.co.nz +64 9 529 5600 Webb's
2019
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01 Gordon Walters untitled 1990 gouache on paper collage inscribed 40" x 30" in graphite upper edge 195mm x 135mm est
$6,000 — $9,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, December 2006. Webb's
August
Collection Another from the series held by Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o TÄ maki (acquired 1993).
32
02 Peter Robinson Spirit Sticks 2013 wool felt on wood dowel, edition 23/75 405mm x 18mm (each) est
$2,000 — $4,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland, April 2013. Webb's
2019
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03 Michael Harrison Shadow of a Shadow 2003 acrylic on paper signed M.C Harrison in graphite lower left; dated 6.5.03/8.5.03 in graphite upper left verso; inscribed 5 13/SC in graphite upper right verso; inscribed Shadow of a Shadow in graphite lower right verso 300mm x 205mm est
$2,000 — $3,000
Provenance Private collection, Taranaki. Acquired from Ivan Anthony, Auckland, September 2003. Webb's
August
Exhibitions Wrong Intelligence, Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 10 September - 4 October 2003.
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04 John Tole Blue Truck c. 1954 oil on hardboard printed Name: John Tole/Title: 'BLUE TRUCK'/ Medium: oil/Dimensions: 11 " x 14"/Support: Hardboard on label affixed verso; inscribed CAT. No 29 in ink verso 270mm x 350mm est
$6,000 — $9,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Warwick Henderson Gallery, Auckland, 1990. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions John Leech Gallery, Auckland, 1977; Warwick Henderson Gallery, Auckland, 1997. Note The hill depicted in this painting is Pohaturoa, which sits adjacent to the Waikato River (Whakarewarewa, Rotorua). The work was likely made during the construction of the hydroelectric dam at Atiamuri, which sits just below the hill. 35
05 Steve Carr Powder No. 2 (from the series Dive) 2003 acrylic and scientific glass 415mm x 210mm x 98mm est
$2,500 — $3,500
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Michael Lett, Auckland, 2003. Webb's
August
Exhibitions Dive, Michael Lett, Auckland, 1 April - 3 May 2003. 36
06 Steve Carr Foam No. 2 (from the series Dive) 2003 acrylic and scientific glass 455mm x 220mm x 120mm est
$2,500 — $3,500
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Michael Lett, Auckland, 2003. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions Dive, Michael Lett, Auckland, 1 April - 3 May 2003. 37
07 Julian Dashper untitled 2000 acrylic on canvas, edition 2/3 signed JULIAN DASHPER and dated 2000 in graphite verso; printed Julian Dashper/Untitled (2000)/2000/40.5 x 40.5cm (ed. 2/3)/acrylic on stretched canvas/JD050 on Sarah Cottier Gallery label affixed verso 405mm x 405mm est
$4,500 — $6,500
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from The Jim Fraser Collection, Webb's, Auckland, 9 November 2006, lot 32; Collection of Jim Fraser, Auckland. Acquired from Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 2000. Webb's
August
Exhibitions Julian Dashper, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney, 2000; Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand's Julian Dashper, Sioux City Art Center, Iowa, 2005; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, 2006; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, 2006. Literature Julian Dashper, Midwestern Unlike You and Me: New Zealand's Julian Dashper (Iowa: Sioux City Art Centre, 2005), cover illus.
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08 Stephen Bambury Ghost (XII) 2004 silver leaf on aluminium signed STEPHEN BAMBURY, dated ©04 and inscribed GHOST (XII)./SILVER LEAF & ALUMINIUM./1 (OF 2). in ink verso (left panel); signed S. Bambury, dated ©04 and inscribed GHOST XII/BAMBURY/2 (OF 2). in ink verso (right panel) 170mm x 340mm (overall) est
$5,000 — $7,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Nadene Milne Gallery, Arrowtown, December 2004. Webb's
2019
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09 Ava Seymour Gas Mask Wedding 1997 C-type print, edition of 5 715mm x 910mm est
Exhibitions Health, Housing and Happiness, Artspace, Auckland, 1997; Physics Room, Christchurch, 1998.
$4,000 — $7,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired directly from the artist, 1997. Webb's
August
Literature Ava Seymour, Health, Housing and Happiness (Auckland, 1997), n.p. 40
10 Laith McGregor untitled 2013 graphite and ink on paper 1575mm x 1100mm est
$6,000 — $9,000
Provenance Private collection, Wellington. Acquired from Sullivan+Strumpf at Auckland Art Fair, Auckland, 2013. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions Animal, Sullivan+Strumpf, Auckland Art Fair, Auckland, 2013. 41
11 Ricky Swallow Purple Skull 1 2001 watercolour on paper signed R Swallow, dated 01 and inscribed 'PURPLE SKULL' in graphite lower right; printed RICKY SWALLOW (Born 1974, San Remo, Australia)/'Purple Skull 1' 2001 watercolour on paper/38 x 28 cm/Exhibited - Ricky Swallow Matrix 191/For those who came in late: Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, USA. 22 April - 27 May 2001. on Darren Knight Gallery label affixed verso 380mm x 280mm est
$4,000 — $8,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. Webb's
August
Exhibitions For those who came in late: Matrix 191 Project, University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, 2001. 42
12 Ricky Swallow Purple Skull 2 2001 watercolour on paper signed R Swallow, dated 01 and inscribed 'PURPLE SKULL' in graphite lower right; printed RICKY SWALLOW (Born 1974, San Remo, Australia)/'Purple Skull 1' 2001 watercolour on paper/38 x 28 cm/Exhibited - Ricky Swallow Matrix 191/For those who came in late: Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, USA. 22 April - 27 May 2001. on Darren Knight Gallery label affixed verso 380mm x 280mm est
$4,000 — $8,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions For those who came in late: Matrix 191 Project, University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, 2001. 43
13 Roger Mortimer Aotea 2015 watercolour on board signed R Mortimer, dated 2015 and inscribed 'Aotea' in graphite verso 600mm x 800mm est
$5,000 — $8,000
Exhibitions Resolution Island, Bartley + Company Art, Wellington, 2 November 3 December 2016
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Webb's
August
44
14 Roger Mortimer Ruakumara 2015 watercolour on board dated 2015 in brushpoint; signed R Mortimer, dated 2015 and inscribed 'Ruakumara' in graphite verso 600mm x 905mm est
$5,000 — $8,000
Exhibitions Resolution Island, Bartley + Company Art, Wellington, 2 November 3 December 2016
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Webb's
2019
45
15 Shane Cotton Climbing 2011 acrylic on linen signed S. Cotton and dated 2011 in brushpoint lower right; signed Shane Cotton and inscribed CLIMBING in graphite verso; printed SHANE COTTON/CLIMBING/2011/ACRYLIC ON LINEN/275 X 275MM/SC2123-01 on Michael Lett label affixed verso 275mm x 275mm est
$5,000 — $8,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Michael Lett, Auckland, 2011. Webb's
August
Exhibitions Supersymmetry, Michael Lett, Auckland, 28 April - 11 June 2011.
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16 Georgie Hill Horseshoe Wreath 2007 watercolour and graphite on paper signed G Hill and dated 2007 in graphite lower right 315mm x 230mm est
$2,000 — $4,000
Provenance Private collection, Taranaki. Acquired from Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 2007. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions Every colour by itself, Ivan Anthony, Auckland, 2007. 47
Rita Angus - Soft Capture Essay by LUCY JACKSON
17 Rita Angus untitled (Sumner Beach) c.1948 - 1949 watercolour on paper signed R Angus in brushpoint lower right 195mm × 285mm est Webb's
Rita Angus lived a life dedicated to paint. In a letter to Gordon Brown, the artist wrote, “I, as other painters do, live to paint and paint to live”.¹ A leading figure in the development of modern art in New Zealand, Angus lead an independent life dedicated to being an artist, and developed a unique version of the quintessential New Zealand landscape that would be forever referenced to and studied in years to come. Over her art career, Angus worked with multiple art media. She was at ease using oil paint, pencil and ink, and watercolour. In a 1983 issue of Art New Zealand, Janet Paul noted that Angus was able to use any of these with “equal assurance”.² Seen in her watercolours is an immediacy of movement, both in the landscape and in the act of painting it. Angus did not stray far from realism, so the subjects of her compositions are instantly familiar to a wide audience. Untitled (Sumner Beach) is a bird’s-eye view of where the estuary meets the ocean in Sumner, Christchurch. The view depicted in the work is from Whitewash Head on Clifton Hill, and across the spit is Brighton. In 1943, Angus’s father purchased a cottage at 18 Aranoni Track on Clifton Hill, and in 1951 he altered it to make it easier for her to live and work in. In 1954 the property was sold.³ The view depicted in the Sumner scene was a mere few minutes’ walk away from the cottage on Aranoni Track; the artist would have regularly overlooked this very view. Angus was familiar with the Cantabrian landscape after attending Canterbury College School of Arts, exhibiting in Christchurch, and living in the area for several years. It was because of this connection that Angus could use paint to embody a Cantabrian landscape that was both specifically recognisble and also universal to New Zealand. Painted in watercolour on paper, the Sumner beach scene is a subtle work. Angus paints the sea, using slight differences in gradation to reference the waves, long and strong, coming in to meet the land. Small, singular brush strokes produce an illusion of ripples in the continuous monotony of waves that flow in and out with the tide. It is obvious where the estuary meets the ocean, there is a clash of the influx of water to the wave, and at the centre of the watery tumult is a smooth stillness. In this glassy space are two boats, on their way out, or on their way in. The very nature of watercolour, in its fluidity, echoes the sea. When Angus attended art school, the teaching was based on the Royal College of Art (London) model, and as art historian Julie King notes, it “instilled close observation and truth to nature… Angus, a meticulous and methodical artist, used the opportunity to improve her technical ability in portraiture, figure work and composition”.⁴ There was a strong sense of the landscape as a subject in the Cantabrian tradition, and Angus was taught by several artists who had an interest in this area, such as Cecil Kelly, Archibald Nicholl and James Cook. In Sumner beach the sand mimics the patterns of the waves, and deep redbrown meets the frothy white-capped edge of the sea before the sand fades out back up the beach. Through the differences in the paint’s density, and therefore colour, we can see the points where the sand becomes progressively drier. Small marks interrupt the natural landscape with human elements and activities, in the form of buoys in the sea or buildings on the land. Located in the centre left of the composition, and beside the channel, the rock mound is Cave Rock, a well-known landmark of Sumner. These interferences help break up the long lines and stabilise the environment within the frame. The viewer’s eye moves across the sea and stops at these tiny interruptions. They are delicate, not overt. Across the spit is Brighton, and in the distance Bottle Lake Forest Park is covered in a light layer of fog. Further along and almost out of the frame, the ocean meets the Waimakariri River. Behind it is more forest and in the far, far distance we see the outline of Arthur’s Pass National Park hills – the location of her iconic 1936 painting, Cass. Angus carefully crafts these knolls in the background, sitting almost invisible on the horizon.
$20,000 — $30,000 August
48
The location of Untitled (Sumner Estuary) is less recognisable, but the forms Angus paints are familiar. As if above the landscape, we look out over the sea and towards the horizon line. Angus paints small mounds of browns, purples, blues and greens, that rise up and out of the sea in the bottom half of the composition. These soft mounds have spherical edges, rising like the tide itself. Delicately painted soft lines echo the shapes of these knolls, showing where the ocean meets the sand. The nature of watercolour paint causes these forms to have a delicate translucency, which in this case adds to the overall ambiguity. The colours blend into one another and through them is a pervading lightness. In one rounded form, Angus signs her name on the landscape. The upper half of the watercolour is ombré, changing from oranges to pinks to yellows. The background is split by a light, pink line, gesturing to perhaps another unknown land mass in the distance. Both works are delicate and balanced in both composition and technique. Angus was a great admirer of Cézanne’s compositions and studied them closely. Where the properties of watercolour allow colours to bleed and wash into one another, Angus uses this to her advantage. However, she also refutes traditional conventions around the use of watercolour at the time, in both paintings using clean, crisp lines, alluding to the boundaries, pushes and pulls within the landscapes. Angus experimented with the landscape as a subject over her entire painting career. The Sumner beach scene is an easily recognised Canterbury landscape that held a resonance for the artist; in the second watercolour Angus is closer to abstraction. Perhaps it is a particular place, but in it the forms take over so instead of it being a specific landscape, it is one we have to imagine. Both works are typical of Angus’s oeuvre. They showcase her ongoing commitment to the New Zealand landscape, as well as her continued drive to explore a new, New Zealand way of showcasing it. That this work has elements of abstraction endorses Angus’s steadfastness in adapting and creating new ways to depict the landscape she was committed to throughout her life.
18 Rita Angus untitled (Sumner Estuary) c.1948 - 1949 watercolour on paper signed Rita Angus in brushpoint lower right 290mm x 228mm est
$15,000 — $20,000
1 Jill Trevelyan, “Live to Paint & Paint to Live,” in Rita Angus: Live to Paint & Paint to Live, eds. Vita Cochran and Jill Trevelyan (Random House New Zealand, 2001), 7. 2 Janet Paul, “What Makes Rita Angus Different?,” Art New Zealand (26), Autumn 1983, www.art-newzealand.com/ Issues21to30/angus.htm. 3 Janet Paul in Rita Angus, (Wellington: National Art Gallery, 1982), 200.
Julie King in Rita Angus: Life & Vision, eds. William McAloon and Jill Trevelyan (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2008), 20. 4
Webb's
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17 Rita Angus untitled (Sumner Beach) c.1948 - 1949 watercolour on paper signed R Angus in brushpoint lower right 195mm x 285mm est
$20,000 — $30,000
Provenance Private collection, New South Wales. Passed by descent. Formerly on long term loan to Macmillan Brown Library - Te Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown, University of Canterbury, Christchurch; Private Collection, Christchurch. Gifted by the artist, c. 1948 - 1949. Webb's
August
50
18 Rita Angus untitled (Sumner Estuary) c.1948 - 1949 watercolour on paper signed Rita Angus in brushpoint lower right 290mm x 228mm est
$15,000 — $20,000
Provenance Private collection, New South Wales. Passed by descent. Formerly on long term loan to Macmillan Brown Library - Te Puna Rakahau o Macmillan Brown, University of Canterbury, Christchurch; Private Collection, Christchurch. Gifted by the artist, c. 1948 - 1949. Webb's
2019
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Colin McCahon - A Matter of Light and Dark Essay by ANDREW PAUL WOOD
Most of my work has been aimed at relating man to this world, to an acceptance of the very beautiful and terrible mysteries that we are part of. I aim at very direct statement and ask for a simple and direct response. Any other way the message gets lost. — Colin McCahon Webb's
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20 Colin McCahon Southern Landscape 1967 acrylic on paper signed McCahon and dated '67 in graphite lower left; signed Colin McCahon, dated 1967 and inscribed Southern Landscape verso 275mm × 210mm est
Webb's
$45,000 — $65,000
The first of August this year marks the 100th anniversary of Colin McCahon’s birth. McCahon (1919-1987) is the unassailable fixture of Aotearoa modernism. Neither Gordon Walters nor Ralph Hotere has shaken him from his pre-eminence in our art history. His biography accumulates mythology – modernist painter-hero, a Man Alone of the nationalist literary cultus, tortured artist, household name, and so on. He is one of the few New Zealand artists to make a significant inroad into the Western canon: in 2002 he was the subject of a major survey exhibition, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and described as “de Van Gogh van Australasia” by curator Marja Bloem – which is not bad going for a boy from Timaru. In an era when devotional art largely exists as kitsch, McCahon was almost unique in being a twentieth century religious painter in startlingly innovative ways. In that regard he was more of a Piero than a Vincent. The divine painters of Quattrocento Florence transferred the Bible stories from the Jordan to the Arno. McCahon uplifted them once more and resettled them on the low hills of Central Otago, and filtered them through expressionism and comic books. Then he merged that spirituality, in an animistic synthesis, with landscapes inspired by a copy of G. A. Cotton’s The Geomorphology of New Zealand, which he and his wife Anne McCahon (née Hamblett) (1915-1993) had received as a wedding present in 1945. These he eventually pared back to their irreducible essence in a kind of Mondrian-cum-Rothko-esque sublimity. Finally, when even that failed what he was trying to express, he painted the words themselves in a transcendent recapitulation of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the word.” Beyond mythology, and quite irrespective of what McCahon was trying to do, what is true is that he forged from disparate parts a robust, compelling visual identity for New Zealand – that the country hadn’t yet entirely grasped that it needed – and in such a way that it could hold its head high in the international modernist project as the work of genius. He grasped the nettle of New Zealand’s romantic cliché of the landscape and made it into something new, alive and awesome in all senses of the word. As Australian writer Murray Bail put it, he “reconceived Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, as the land of the long black shadow”. The poet James K. Baxter wrote to McCahon in a letter, “I think you put on the canvas something I know about New Zealand but have not learnt how to say: the raw vitality and brutal simplification…”. In 1953, the midpoint of his life, McCahon moved his family from the South Island to Titirangi’s bosky prospect of kauri, in West Auckland. It almost seems like New Zealand’s cultural epicentre moved with him, from Bloomsbury South in Christchurch and Landfall in Dunedin, to the institutions of Auckland and Wellington. Nonetheless, while he may have left the south, the south never left him, and long after he had exorcised the kauri of the Waitakeres in his pseudo-cubist works, the South Island would continue to reappear in his work in subsequent decades. As a young part-time student at Dunedin’s King Edward Technical College art school, McCahon would spend his summers in the Nelson area working in the orchards and tobacco fields. The landscapes he cycled through to get there were a continuous touchstone of inspiration throughout his career. Eventually the landscapes of the various tūrangawaewae of his lifetime seamlessly blended into a single vocabulary of form and colour. These two paintings, Southern Landscape and Near Craigieburn are very much part of that gazing south with the mind’s eye. Southern Landscape sits somewhere between the small, black landscapes and the looser, more relaxed “North Otago” landscapes that interrupted their flow in 1967. It is a darker, streamlined redux of A Southern Landscape (1950) of nearly two decades earlier, the maternal greens and curves stripped out. What remains is a landscape of brooding, hieratic blue-black hills and water reflecting blue-grey sky above, reduced 53
to an ingenious rhythm of bands of colour playfully dancing between representation and abstraction. The water is defined by the sky it reflects. Hills and sky are separated by a thin band of white like the coming dawn. The white repeats as a thinner band, suggesting water breaking on the shoreline, which itself is a reiteration of the not-quite-black of the silhouetted hills. It is brilliant in its simplicity and execution. The solemnity of the hills, the mass of the overcast sky and the chilly palette might give the impression of melancholy or spleen, but what McCahon is really responding to is the memory, perhaps nostalgic, perhaps yearning, for the majesty and beauty of that landscape. There is a sadness, but it is in the landscape and not his. As he would write of his text-based Teaching Aids paintings of 1975, “[the paintings are] cold and distant…I think them beautiful, so very, very sad. Only I’m not a sad person. Maybe that’s why I do so many sad paintings? I’m aware of the sadness.” In 1968, McCahon put up an industrial shed on a property recently acquired by Anne in Muriwai, on the Auckland’s west coast. This became his studio. By then, McCahon was in the full swing of his symbolist phase – where landscape was metaphor – and the text-based paintings in his immediately recognisable hand, white on black like the blackboard sign of a roadside fruit stand or a country church. The painting Near Craigieburn was produced in the following – and his most prolific – year, one of a series of minimalist landscapes in grey and sepia tones, with sand incorporated into their acrylic polymer paint. They are highly significant: 1969 was the year McCahon began experimenting with acrylic paint. The sand was collected from Muriwai Beach while the artist was on his rambles from his studio. Craigieburn is a mountainous region on the south banks of the Waimakariri River, south of Arthur's Pass and about an hourand-a-half’s drive from Christchurch. The landscape is dominated by the Craigieburn Range, rocky scree and alpine tussock. The sparseness of the composition recalls the wild, empty spaces and atmospheric solitude of the place as he remembered it. The gritty texture and tawny palette accurately capture the experience of the north-west South Island. North Island sand and South Island imagery. The result is an odd hybrid of his past and present, something very much in keeping with McCahon’s process. It was less about the landscape he was remembering, and even less about the landscape he was inhabiting, than it was about his inscape, the distinctive intellectual, psychological and spiritual pattern making up individual identity. “My painting is almost entirely autobiographical,” he wrote. “It tells you where I am at any given point in time, where I am living and the direction I am pointing in. In this present time it is very difficult to paint for other people – to paint beyond your own ends and point directions as painters once did.” McCahon was hardly the first artist to mix sand in his paint. Everyone from Picasso to Pollock has used it as a filler in their pigments, but one gets the impression that for McCahon it was more than just added texture; something almost talismanic, a literalisation of landscape by including some of the land itself. This painting captures so much potency and, to borrow a term from Heidegger, Dasein (is-ness, existence) within a modest square, no frills (like a Byzantine ikon), tactile, devotional and present in dialogue with landscape and memory. Even in what appears to be a straight landscape, the religious impulse is unavoidable. McCahon is searching for God in the land, trying to explain the existential joy and pain he finds there. “I imagine people looking at [the paintings],” he said, “and then looking at the landscape and for once really seeing it and being happier for it and believing in God and…in the impossibility of people owning and having more rights to a piece of land and air than anybody else.” Strangely enough, for one who so often circled and thought about religion, McCahon was never formally a member of any church. It is his humanist side that provides the generosity (or is it noblesse oblige?) to leave space in it for us, his audience, so we
19 Colin McCahon Near Craigieburn 1969 synthetic polymer paint and sand on board signed McCahon. and dated March '69. in brushpoint upper right; signed Colin McCahon, dated MARCH '69 and inscribed NEAR CRAGIEBURN/1. in brushpoint verso; signed Colin McCahon and inscribed 10 Partridge St/Auckland 1. in ink verso 300mm × 300mm est
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can be amazed at how much is done with so very little. This is the point where the landscape is being taken down to its absolute bare minimum, where it dissolves entirely into abstraction and eventually gives way to that Platonic ideal of words and numbers in white on black. “I only need black and white to say what I have to say,” McCahon told his son. “It is a matter of light and dark.” That holds true for Near Craigieburn as well; so much is accomplished with nuance of shade and dark lines against a light background. It says all he wanted it to say and all it needed to say. There is no excess, nothing unessential, not a spare gesture or mark. There is a poignancy to this work too, as things began to go downhill for McCahon from there. True, Auckland City Art Gallery mounted a touring survey show of his work in 1972, and six years later the New Zealand Government gifted Victory Over Death 2 to their Australian counterpart (then-Prime Minister Robert Muldoon intended it as a barb, which backfired somewhat) but the 1970s were marked by his sharp decline in health, brought on by his alcoholism manifesting in Korsakoff’s syndrome-related dementia. Unfortunately the philistine criticisms that had dogged McCahon earlier in his career had made him suspicious of such shows of appreciation. He began no new paintings after 1980. By the time of his major exhibition I Will Need Words, presented as part of the 1984 Sydney Biennale, he wasn’t in much of a condition to appreciate it, and famously went missing from Sydney’s Botanic Gardens, only to be picked up the police in Centennial Park the following day. He died in Auckland Hospital on 27 May, 1987, after a drawn-out illness, and a little over a year later his ashes were scattered on the Muriwai headlands that had given him so much spiritual nourishment. What that leaves us with is over 45 years of staggeringly brilliant work ranging widely over subjects and styles, adapting the tropes, themes and techniques of modernist painting to the hyper-local specifics of the New Zealand landscape and mood. What he did with landscape is as dramatic and revolutionary as what Michelangelo did with the human body, making it monumental, stylised, theatrical, contemplative and sculptural, while simultaneously allowing it to be a spiritual metaphor for the yearning quest of a flawed humanity groping in the dark to reunite with the divine. A century on from his birth, 32 years after his death, McCahon’s paintings retain all of their extraordinary power and terribilità, passing the tests of time and taste. It is just a shame he did not see more of this appreciation in his lifetime.
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19 Colin McCahon Near Craigieburn 1969 sand, synthetic polymer paint on board signed McCahon. and dated March '69. in brushpoint upper right; signed Colin McCahon, dated MARCH '69 and inscribed NEAR CRAIGIEBURN/1. in brushpoint verso; signed Colin McCahon and inscribed 10 Partridge St/ Auckland 1. in ink verso 300mm x 300mm est
$40,000 — $50,000
Provenance Private collection, Whanganui. Gifted by the artist, 1970. Webb's
Literature Marja Bloem and Martin Browne, A Question of Faith (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 2002), 210. 56
20 Colin McCahon Southern Landscape 1967 acrylic on paper signed McCahon and dated '67 in graphite lower left; signed Colin McCahon, dated 1967 and inscribed Southern Landscape verso 275mm Ă— 210mm est
$45,000 — $65,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from New Zealand & International Fine Art, Watson's Auctioneers, Christchurch, 16 August 2009, lot 57. Webb's
Note Colin McCahon Online Catalogue (www.mccahon.co.nz) number: cm000408. 57
Michael Parekowhai - Passchendaele Essay by KELLY CARMICHAEL
We see the immaculate fake blooms at their fullest but frozen in stillness, a memorial to the lives of the MÄ ori Pioneer Battalion lost at Passchendaele, one of the most infamous battles of the First World War. Barely 50 years after the New Zealand Wars ripped lives and tribes apart, MÄ ori volunteered to fight for King and Country in the Great War. Webb's
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Michael Parekowhai (Ngā Ariki Kaiputahi, Ngāti Whakarongo, Pākehā) creates work across a wide range of materials and diverse outputs including sculpture, photography and installation. He has made monumental public artworks (The Lighthouse Tū Whenua-a-Kura, Auckland, and Tongue of the Dog, Hamilton) and tiny, delicate sculptures the size of birds. Parekowhai’s practice offers complex and open-ended narratives, weaving multi-layered references drawn from a rich vein of vernacular and high-art vocabularies. Altering scale to alter impact has often been used in his practice, as has the notion of play. Parekowhai has made giant children’s toys and games, blowing up wooden letters, Cuisenaire rods, pick-up sticks, and blocks to many times their usual size. By adding titles from philosophy, history, religion or popular culture he adds a complex raft of associations and references – grown-up notions introducing grown-up issues to the discussion. Parekowhai’s signature is a fusion of appropriated and imported concepts recast with a distinctly homegrown spin. Passchendaele (2001) presents a lavish arrangement of flowers in a Crown Lynn vase. This cream, white and soft lemon bouquet looks pristine. However, whether symbols of celebration or of comfort, flowers are messengers. Despite its timelessness and beauty this work speaks of commemoration and of soldiers who died on foreign soil. We see the immaculate fake blooms at their fullest but frozen in stillness, a memorial to the lives of the Māori Pioneer Battalion lost at Passchendaele, one of the most infamous battles of the First World War. Barely 50 years after the New Zealand Wars ripped lives and tribes apart, Māori volunteered to fight for King and Country in the Great War. The photograph is part of the series The Consolation of Philosophy: Piko nei te matenga, a title that fuses a text by the Medieval philosopher Boethius with practices from Te Ao Māori. The 543 AD text reflects in part on how evil can exist in a world governed by God, while “Piko nei te matenga”, a traditional lament for a fallen chief and a hymn associated with the first full Māori Battalion, translates as “When our heads are bowed with woe”. Flowers are traditionally given. In presenting this attractive arrangement to the viewer – even photographing it from an angle slightly above as if we are looking down at an offered bunch of flowers – but teaming it with a poignant title that leaves no illusions, Parekowhai entices the viewer then incites us to unpick the work’s meaning. The generous bouquet and high-gloss photographic surface seem intentionally at odds with reports of thick mud, machine-gun fire, barbed wire, and multitudes of dead and wounded from this Belgian battlefield. But Parekowhai is known for exploring perceptions of place and nationhood while prompting consideration of complex ideas. Here he evokes Aotearoa New Zealand’s history and unfolding bicultural identity under the cover of a characteristically polished and colourful surface. Passchendaele acts as a political and mental archaeology, acting to offer symbolic and unifying elements for moving forward as a country. Although large in scale and visually powerful, Passchendaele is an intimate artwork. Cast in a creamy glow, the bouquet suggests commemoration but also beauty, hope, transition and unity.
21 Michael Parekowhai Passchendaele 2001 C-type print, edition of 8 1550mm × 1250mm est
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Exhibitions Another from the edition exhibited in 2002 Biennale of Sydney: (the world may be) fantastic, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 May 2002-14 July 2002; Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland, 2015.
21 Michael Parekowhai Passchendaele 2001 C-type print, edition of 8 1550mm × 1250mm est
$16,000 — $20,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Webb's
Literature Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land (Queensland: Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, 2015), 96. Collection Another from the edition held by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland (acquired 2001); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (acquired 2002). Note From the series The Consolation of Philosophy: piko nei te matenga. 60
22 Andy Warhol Green Pea Soup, from Campbell’s Soup 1 (F. & S. II.50) 1968 screenprint on paper, edition 138/250 signed Andy Warhol in ink and stamped 138/250 lower left verso 890mm × 580mm est
$25,000 — $35,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Old Master, Modern & Contemporary Prints, Sotheby's London, 1 July 2004, lot 447. Webb's
Literature Arthur Danto and Donna deSalvo, Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne (New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Inc, 1985), 72-73. 61
Frances Hodgkins - Transient Modernist Essay by LUCY JACKSON
23 Frances Hodgkins Pink Parasols c. 1911 watercolour on paper signed F Hodgkins in brushpoint lower right 305mm x 360m est Webb's
“In New Zealand art history Frances Hodgkins is an expatriate; in the United Kingdom she is a British modernist.”¹ She is, of course, both. Frances Hodgkins left for Europe in 1901 to begin her artistic journey. She was prolific, forever on the move, and very receptive to new approaches to her subject matter. These ingredients culminated in her distinctly modern approach. She would return to live in New Zealand in 1903 for three years, and again from 1912-13, but the majority of her life was spent living in Europe, due to her love of exploring scenes and places there.² In 2019 the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki launches the exhibition Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys, as well as two books, and a complete online catalogue raisonné on the artist’s practice. Taking years to develop, the study includes finding many of Hodgkins’ works that are located overseas, studying her time abroad, and publishing in-depth texts by scholars regarding her European journey. In the introduction to the main compendium, Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler write that Hodgkins is “Resistant to any particular style, forever on the move, her place within modernist art has never been settled”.³ What was consistent in her practice was a freedom of expression that was highlighted through her application of the brush. After experiencing the grey palette and conservatism London sometimes offered, in 1901, shortly after arriving in Europe, Hodgkins decided to settle in France, and lived there for several years. The artist felt that Paris was “humming with innovation”⁴ and she was taken by numerous subjects of the Mediterranean, writing that the place “affects your spirits like champagne”. ⁵ There is no doubt that Hodgkins loved Europe, which saw her enjoy new subject matters such as markets, beaches, harbours and boats. Geographically, Europe was rich with new subject matter, a different light, and a new palette, unlike that of London or indeed New Zealand. Hodgkins was greatly empowered by the diversity and exciting new content. It is no surprise she could not settle. From 1912-13 the artist briefly returned to New Zealand and Australasia to visit her family and hold exhibitions at venues in Australia, and in Dunedin and Wellington in New Zealand. It was around this time that Hodgkins painted Untitled (c. 1912), a bold and lively watercolour on paper. Pink Parasols is quintessential Hodgkins: it depicts an outdoor scene, combines colour and fluidity, and though not detailed, it is representational to a degree. Due to this freedom, colours and subjects blur within the picture’s composition, taking the viewer a minute to adjust and find the figurative within the frame. Pink Parasols features a group of people sitting on portable chairs on the beach, sheltered by pink parasols, seemingly engaging in group conversation. In the distance we can see blue sea dotted with white yachts. Parasols were a somewhat common occurrence in Hodgkins’ works, such as in The Parasol (1910) and later The Pink Parasol (c. 1931). Artists, such as Eugène Boudin, used the parasol within their work as an object to visually tie together groups on a beach. Perhaps this same technique is employed in Pink Parasols, people are grouped under the parasol, and from Hodgkins’ vantage point it becomes a still life on the beach. Hodgkins’ watercolour paint cascades together and is intrinsically immediate. Loose, wavy and blurred brush strokes, along with vivid colour, add to the feeling of mirage in the painting, imitating the slight movements of heatwaves that distort perfect clarity. This is not unlikely, on a beach. Living in Europe, Hodgkins had greater exposure than she would have had in New Zealand to new techniques and stylistic traits that formed the modernist movement. During these early years in Europe and in the Mediterranean, Hodgkins was drawn to artists who explored colour and form, such as postimpressionists Gauguin, Cézanne and van Gogh.⁶ Hodgkins’ subjects were often of social interactions in public spaces such
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as marketplaces, on the riverside, or just the outdoors. Pink Parasols is positioned within this oeuvre, and could easily be a seaside or a riviera. We know from her myriad of letters that Hodgkins was a social person and her time spent in Europe was often with at least one companion. But in this scene the viewer gets the sense that the artist is slightly on the outer, the observer, which empowers her to capture an everyday beach scene with such gaeity and honesty. And as Hodgkins’ early biographer E.H. McCormick noted in 1981: “From the beginning Frances Hodgkins was attracted to people rather than nature. That preference – and not exceptional talent – distinguished her at the outset from most of her contemporaries.” ⁷
1 Joanne Drayton, Frances Hodgkins: A Private Viewing (Godwit, 2005), 279. 2 Mary Kisler, “Beginnings: New Zealand to Europe 1890-1914,” in Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys, eds. Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland University Press, 2019), 71. 3 Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler, “Introduction: Locating Frances Hodgkins,” in Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys, eds. Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland University Press, 2019), 1.
Kisler, “Beginnings: New Zealand to Europe 1890-1914,” 71. 4
5
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Ibid., 48. Ibid., 71..
E.H. McCormick, Portrait of Frances Hodgkins (Auckland University Press; Oxford University Press, 1981), 5. 7
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23 Frances Hodgkins Untitled c. 1911 watercolour on paper signed F Hodgkins in brushpoint lower right 305mm x 360m est
$45,000 — $65,000
Provenance Private Collection, Invercargill. Passed by inheritance; Geoffrey Hall Jones. Passed by inheritance; Patricia Clay Thomson. Either gifted by the artist or acquired from Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 1913. Webb's
Exhibitions A Notable Exhibition of Watercolours by Miss Frances Hodgkins, Anthony Horderns' Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, May 1913; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, August 1913. Note The Complete Frances Hodgkins (www.completefranceshodgkins.com) number: FH0530 64
24 Seraphine Pick untitled 1994 oil, graphite and coloured pencil on canvas signed S Pick and dated 94 in graphite lower right 580mm x 765mm est
$5,000 — $8,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Michael Lett, Auckland, 2007. Webb's
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Michael Parekowhai - The Moment of Cubism Essay by KELLY CARMICHAEL
The Moment of Cubism borrows its title from an essay by art critic John Berger arguing the moral and ethical implications of our modern experience. Berger’s text explores the way colonial expansion and exploitation have formed the Western worldview, changing the understanding of our world and our place in it. Webb's
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Michael Parekowhai (Ngā Ariki Kaiputahi, Ngāti Whakarongo, Pākehā) creates art that at first glance often confounds. The Moment of Cubism is no different, being one of seven unique and individually cast lemon-tree saplings. Although cast in bronze, the young tree feels fragile, each detailed leaf susceptible to rough handling and delicate supple trunk uncertain of surviving the winter. This lemon sapling looks familiar enough, fresh from the garden centre, still in its bag of potting mix, and ready to plant. But in characteristic Parekowhai fashion, the sculpture appropriates the form of an everyday object, re-presenting and recasting it as a potent symbol or commentary. The Moment of Cubism borrows its title from an essay by art critic John Berger arguing the moral and ethical implications of our modern experience. Berger’s text explores the way colonial expansion and exploitation have formed the Western world-view, changing the understanding of our world and our place in it. His essay suggests the emergence of cubism from the colonisation of indigenous African art by Western classicism. From Berger’s essay come the lines relevant to almost any situation: “The Cubists imagined the world transformed, but not the process of transformation.” As we find the lemon-tree sapling packaged and ready to go, so too did the Western world approach indigenous art-forms and traditions, the sculpture suggests, as theirs to commodify, take away and repurpose. Cultural interplay between the old and new world has long been a rich and rewarding line of artistic enquiry for Michael Parekowhai, and The Moment of Cubism creates a distinct way of reflecting the complex and still forming identity of Aotearoa New Zealand. While the sculpture itself presents a ubiquitous object, The Moment of Cubism could be understood as a monument reflecting on our country’s past. It is surely no coincidence that this artwork is cast in bronze, the traditional choice for sculptures of serious matters, including statues of the important and powerful. Currently there’s significant focus at local, national and international levels about monuments and what they represent. Monuments are typically designed to be imposing, but this elegant bronze of a humble lemon sapling questions whether or not that makes sense. What if monuments had a more active relationship to the world? Historical bronze sculptures referencing colonialism are some of the most cynical examples of how art has glorified political ideology. In 2014, students joyfully celebrated the fall of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes’ bronze at the University of Cape Town, and closer to home statues of Captain Cook are vandalised with great frequency. Cultural values are always changing, as are the individuals and ideas that society considers appropriate. Parekowhai’s practice has often revealed a preoccupation with revisiting history and popular culture, while revealing the relationship between people and place. Key themes have included deliberate takes on notions of introduced species and values, and the sometimes uneasy juxtaposition of the indigenous and the imported in New Zealand culture. Positioning the lemon tree – introduced by missionaries in the early 19th century – in relationship to Berger’s text, Parekowhai invites interpretations relevant to the cultural context of New Zealand, its own imported species and ways of being. A lemon tree to our colonial heritage? Why not. Underplayed? Not at all. Here the obvious gives way to deeper reflection.
25 Michael Parekowhai The Moment of Cubism 2009 unique hand finished bronze 1230mm × 540mm x 350mm est
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25 Michael Parekowhai The Moment of Cubism 2009 unique hand finished bronze 1230mm × 540mm × 350mm est
$25,000 — $35,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland.
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Exhibitions Michael Parekowhai: The Moment of Cubism, Michael Lett, Auckland, 28 November 2009 - 23 January 2010; Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland, 28 March - 21 June 2015. Literature Michael Parekowhai: The Promised Land (Queensland: Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, 2015), 58.
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26 Ralph Hotere Song Cycle 1975 watercolour and gouache on paper signed Hotere, dated 75 and inscribed SONG CYCLE/Port Chalmers in brushpoint lower edge; inscribed "SONG CYCLE" - poems Bill Manhire dance John Casserly Chas Hummell Music Jack Body Barry Morgan SOUND MOVEMENT THEATRE in graphite lower edge; inscribed Pille - Song Cycle $120 in ink verso 550mm x 405mm est
$16,000 — $20,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Important Paintings and Contemporary Art, Mossgreen-Webbs, Auckland, 29 November 2017, lot 47. Webb's
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Matt Hunt - Dreaming of a New Heaven on Earth Essay by AD SCHIERNING
Hunt’s work Dreaming of a New Heaven on Earth (2009) proposes an escape to a dreamworld that sits outside our understanding but is a combination of recognisable Eurocentric suggestions of an afterlife and utopia. Webb's
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27 Matt Hunt Dreaming of a New Heaven and Earth 2009 oil on canvas inscribed DREAMING OF A NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH in brushpoint upper right; signed M. Hunt, dated 2009 and inscribed DREAM OF A NEW HEAVEN & EARTH in graphite verso 890mm × 2400mm est
$10,000 — $15,000
Dating back to the ice age, and some of the very first recorded examples of artistic creation, cave drawings were used as a form of communication and as a way to describe and give meaning to the world surrounding the artist. Throughout art history this drive for art to act as a vessel to communicate a rationale for human existence has not declined. Looking at Matt Hunt’s career as an artist causes me to think of a hybrid genre, a contemporary conceptual cubism. As the train was to the cubists in the early 1900s, so search engines and superfast internet speeds can be to contemporary artists. Saturated in a maze of instantly available references, the artist’s work is a collage of propositions. Often using references to a variety of Eurocentric religions, popularist conspiracy theories and political statements, Hunt traverses the realm of the unknown by pooling resources. Dreaming of a New Heaven on Earth (2009) is a work laden with meaning and intrigue; the work invites the viewer to come to their own understanding from the myriad of signifiers within. Reading the work from left to right we begin with a group of naked figures, both male and female, standing in the shade of a tree: they possibly refer to Adam and Eve – but there is no snake present. The tree is devoid of any tempting fruits but hosts a selection of endemic, native and tropical birds. Fantail (piwakawaka), kingfisher (kōtare) and macaw parrot all sit comfortably together in uncanny harmony. The macaw speaks to us, in the first of three speech bubbles within the work, explaining that “this dimension lies beyond the stars of physical reality & the E.H.R”, introducing the work as a fantastical scene outside of our understanding. As the eye continues we see in a very open space the kiwi, our endangered and iconic New Zealand bird, assisting its chick to emerge from an egg. Here there is no danger of predation; tuatara and kiwi roam freely, firmly placing this painted scene as a utopian version of Aotearoa. In the centre of the painting stands an archway, referencing many cultural versions of a mythical gateway to a dimension following life on earth. Hunt’s gateway is itself a mash-up of references, almost Roman in its architecture, while a small sphinx-like cat sits upon a plinth within with an LED display stating WELCOME. The city that beckons from beyond the gateway seems like a futurist version of Oz’s Emerald City, a fabled site wherein lie the answers to all questions. As we scroll to the right of the canvas, we see a figure in a space-suit and an incoming space craft hovering above green fields where flamingos pad over the lush ground. Another Romanesque structure sits further to the right, sheltering a figure clad in robes who, with eyes closed, faces the viewer, her hand poised in the international peace sign. A family of apes sits behind the figure, the only other mammals in the scene and a symbol of evolution; they sit restfully showing a familial closeness and love for each other. The structure they sit within is inscribed at the top with the words Faith Love Hope. Under the window within which the apes sit is a control panel with knobs and dials and another LED display. Perhaps the figure is the gatekeeper, but with Faith Love Hope and WELCOME upon the entrance there is no indication that dismissal from this utopian dream is a possibility. Hunt’s work Dreaming of a New Heaven on Earth (2009) proposes an escape to a dreamworld that sits outside our understanding but is a combination of recognisable Eurocentric suggestions of an afterlife and utopia. These references sit comfortably beside symbols of popular culture, science fiction and 1980s technological advances. “The appeal of his art lies in its disarming blend of epic Old Testament drama with comicbook levity.” ¹ Hunt, with punk-rock bravery, combines a multitude of known image references, painted in pristine detail. Dreaming of a New Heaven on Earth is a new and unknown world about which the viewer is asked to draw their own conclusions.
1 Gerald Barnett, New Zealand Listener, June 30, 2001 p. 55.
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27 Matt Hunt Dreaming of a New Heaven and Earth 2009 oil on canvas inscribed DREAMING OF A NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH in brushpoint upper right; signed M. Hunt, dated 2009 and inscribed DREAM OF A NEW HEAVEN & EARTH in graphite verso 890mm x 2400mm est
$10,000 — $15,000
Provenance Private collection, Wellington. Purchased from Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, 2009. Webb's
Literature Katy Corner, "Postcards-Wellington", Art News NZ (Spring, 2009), 33. 72
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28 Grahame Sydney Crucifix with Bones 1968 oil on board signed GRAHAME C. SYDNEY and dated APL-MAY 1968 in brushpoint lower right 450mm x 360mm est
$12,000 — $18,000
Provenance Private collection, Kapiti Coast. Acquired directly from the artist, 1969. Webb's
August
Exhibitions Grahame Sydney: Recent Paintings, Dawson’s Downstairs Gallery, Dunedin, 1969. Literature Grahame Sydney, The Art of Grahame Sydney (Dunedin: Longacre Press, 2000), 11. 74
29 Maryrose Crook Lamb of Constant Sorrow 2007 oil on canvas Maryrose Crook/Lamb of Constant Sorrow/VxHmm 1200 x 1000/Oil on canvas/$16,000 printed on SOCA gallery label affixed verso 1220mm x 1100mm est
$5,000 — $8,000
Provenance Private collection, Wellington. Acquired directly from the artist. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions Showcase: a group exhibition, Bartley + Company Art, Wellington, 27 June - 14 July 2012.
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Bill Hammond - Fly Essay by MARY-LOUISE BROWNE
In Fly, an emerald-green world recalls a primordial time: before time, before man, before colonisation. It is occupied by figures with the heads of native birds, most notably the huia, which was driven to extinction by an overzealous trade in its plumage. Here, they also provide a pictorial link between the past, when these birds lived undisturbed and undiscovered, and the present where conservation endeavours are being undertaken to prevent the extinction of further species. Webb's
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30 Bill Hammond Fly 1999 acrylic on canvas signed Bill Hammond, dated 1999 and inscribed FLY in brushpoint upper edge; printed Title: Fly/Medium: Acrylic on canvas/Date:/Artist: Bill Hammond/ RATA COLLECTION - RC025 on label affixed verso 600mm × 400mm est
Webb's
$50,000 — $70,000
Fly belongs to the Zoomorphic Dream series produced in the late 1990s, which further expanded on Hammond’s distinctive visual repertoire, through his exploration into both subject matter and painting techniques. Zoomorphism is the representation of animal forms and the transformations between them. It is an omnipresent theme, which recurs in much of Hammond’s work and depicts beings ranging from the humanoids of his earlier paintings to the elegant bird creatures from recent years. This striking menagerie of hybrid beasts and shape- shifters emerged from Hammond’s enduring interest in medieval art, particularly the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whereby cryptic mythological themes concealing supernatural elements and animal forms can be found buried within the picture plane. Hammond’s travels to the subantarctic Auckland Islands in 1989 gave rise to an epiphany of sorts. For Hammond, these islands were reminiscent of ‘paradise lost’, an archetypal ‘birdland’ which existed in the way it would have been before the European colonisers or Māori reached its shores. Hammond is quoted in Gregory O’Brien’s Lands and Deeds: Profiles of Contemporary New Zealand Painters, 1996, as saying of the experience, “You feel like a time traveller, as if you have just stumbled upon it – primeval forests, ratas like Walt Disney would make. It’s a beautiful place, but also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death.” In Fly, an emerald-green world recalls a primordial time: before time, before man, before colonisation. It is occupied by figures with the heads of native birds, most notably the huia, which was driven to extinction by an overzealous trade in its plumage. Here, they also provide a pictorial link between the past, when these birds lived undisturbed and undiscovered, and the present where conservation endeavours are being undertaken to prevent the extinction of further species. The figures represent the guardians of an unspoiled world, an early-warning system to perils which are yet to come. However, these winged creatures seem to be lounging dreamily amongst the branches of trees or socialising – some hold silver fern fronds as if to fan themselves, unaware of any impending doom. In folklore, the depiction of a bird represents the spirit world, where birds are considered to be harbingers of fortune and evil, and in dream mythology they represent the dreamer’s personality. In Fly, however, the birds are the dreamers preoccupied in their own world. Far from appearing unnerving or unsettling, the scene could be considered calm and inviting. The figures seem to embody an adaptable and prevailing force of nature at one with its environment. Hammond presents a myriad of possible readings, creating complex layers of meaning through his imagery. He weaves many strands of narrative, mythology and history into the painting, conjuring a rich visual syntax for viewers to decode. A multiplicity of references, ranging from renaissance art to science fiction, serves to create finer points of interest that require constant revision by the viewer. Hammond’s knowledge and salient use of paint serve to create a richly textured world and a unique setting for the characters inhabiting the work. The painting’s surface is stained with the ‘patina of time’ and daubed with trails of dribbling paint. Max Podstolski, in his 2000 article Painting the Island of the Day Before: W.D. Hammond, states that: “Ultimately, Hammond’s work succeeds on visual as much as symbolic terms, balancing the painterly and sensuous against his obsessive reprocessing of graphic information, reaching out to enlist the viewer on his voyage of mythical discovery and open-ended imaginative transformation”.
77
31 Bill Hammond Fly 1999 acrylic on canvas signed Bill Hammond, dated 1999 and inscribed FLY in brushpoint upper edge; printed Title: Fly/ Medium: Acrylic on canvas/Date:/Artist: Bill Hammond/RATA COLLECTION - RC025 on label affixed verso 600mm x 400mm est
$50,000 — $70,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Important Modern & Contemporary Paintings & Sculpture, Webb's, Auckland, 2 April 2007, lot 49. Webb's
August
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32 Francis Upritchard Ancestral Box 2004 polymer clay, thread, feathers and velvet in wooden and brass pencil case inscribed L Ford with incision in another hand on brass plate affixed to case, signed F Upritchard and dated 2004 in ink on side of case, inscribed L W Ford in graphite in another hand on underside of case, inscribed W H Ford in graphite in another hand on interior of lid 200mm x 83mm x 30mm est
Exhibitions Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed, Artspace, Auckland, 2005.
$7,000 — $9,000
Provenance Private collection, Christchurch. Acquired privately, 2008; Flutter Buy Art Group, Christchurch. Acquired directly from the artist, c 2004. Webb's
2019
Collection Another from the series held by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (acquired 2017).
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Shane Cotton - Shadow of Symbolism Essay by LEAFA WILSON
15 Shane Cotton Climbing 2011 acrylic on canvas signed S. Cotton, dated 2011. and inscribed CLIMBING in graphite verso; printed SHANE COTTON/CLIMBING/2011/ACRYLIC ON LINEN/275 X 275MM/SC2123-01 on Michael Lett label affixed verso 275mm × 275mm est Webb's
$5,000 — $8,000
The paintings of Shane Cotton synthesise Māori mysticism, colonial skeletons, Western formalism and arthistorical references with eloquence; he is a painterly tōhunga (Māori wise person, equivalent to a priest). This is not to say that his intentions are at all to convince or proselytise any particular dogma, but each signifier from his extensive Māori and Western art-historical visual lexicon is evident throughout Cotton’s work during his lengthy career as an artist. Three Thoughts (2016) is one of a series of works from Cotton’s solo exhibition Dirt Cache, mounted at Michael Lett (Auckland, New Zealand) in 2016. To understand the colours within this particular work, it is important to consider its place in the original exhibition and the way that this work could be read as part of an entire gallery composition. The monochromatic suite of works that included Three Thoughts was a cohesive visual narrative. The predominance of deep greys is punctuated throughout with colours belonging to the red whānau (family group) – illuminated oranges and pinks – and with rectangles and circles that could be read as references to Malevich compositions or, more broadly, suprematism. Three Thoughts contains within it three distinct thoughts of imagery that emerge from the cloud-like deep, dark grey, and a loud orange rectangle that jars the eye and provides the visual colour reference throughout the work. The first thought is a black rectangle that frames a series of sinewy marks that suggest parts, or outlines of parts, of a hei tiki. A painting within the pictorial space. At the centre of the work is the likeness of a mokomōkai (traditional preserved head) masked partially by Cotton’s superimposition of flat, geometric and amorphous shapes in lighter grey, orange and apricot. These both mask and redefine the facial structure of the rangatira (chief). The third picture completes the thoughts and appears almost like an abstracted mokomōkai upon the outline of a rhombus, and acts as a kind of outro to the composition. The mokomōkai is considered tapu (sacred), and could be considered to have been used by the artist in an irreverent manner, in terms of Māori tikanga (protocols or etiquette); however, Cotton includes the likenesses of mokomōkai in a way that speaks of their literal disembodiment from their whānau (family) and whenua (land). The masking of the ancestral head seems to disrupt the full visibility of the facial tā moko. In doing so, Cotton disables the potential for exploitation and appropriation. In this sense, Cotton locates the special and sacred nature of the mokomōkai and assists in distancing us as viewers, asking us to consider that we can never really get close to this ancestor, whose mauri (life force) is still very much alive in Te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview). Cotton’s mastery of composition is apparent, and while the text may appear to be dense and impenetrable, it becomes more obvious that these are quite simply three thoughts that have been transcribed into visual form. In true Cotton style, he moves us, as viewers, towards lands we have never seen before. Climbing (2011) and Closed Neighbourhood (2014) both employ light (te ata) and contrasting shadow (te atakau), using a white figurative element in the foreground to contrast with the deep dark background. This is a simple and powerful pictorial element that elevates the subject to an almost deistic reading of light piercing the darkness. The work Climbing, for example, from 2011, bears resemblance to a tree. Its body fills most of the foreground and advances toward the viewer. The climbing organism is a conglomeration of parts that allude to specific motifs from the art of whakairo (Māori wood-carving practice). The lines are like haehae, or rows of deep v-gouges, that pick up the light and remain dark on the underside. At the top left of this growing organic shape, three raised fingers of the hand of Māui quietly reach upward toward Ranginui (sky father), who is just visible at the top of the picture plane in an embrace with Paptūānuku (earth mother). Ranginui is resplendent with a kākahu (cloak) 80
33 Shane Cotton Closed Neighbourhood 2014 acrylic on Steinbach on linen signed S. COTTON and dated 2014 in brushpoint lower right; printed Shane Cotton/Closed Neighbourhood/2014/acrylic on paper/1000 x 700 mm/ SC4033-01 on Michael Lett label affixed verso 1000mm × 700mm est
of stars. Māui’s hand is embroiled in a knotted series of pākura, or crescent forms, and the partial mouths of carved ancestral figures and Manaia (creatures with the head of a bird, the body a of human and the tail of a fish). Like the rectangular composition-within-a-composition in Three Thoughts, and from the same suite of works, Closed Neighbourhood becomes a gated community and dark diamond within the rectangle of the canvas. Cotton has painted beautiful languid trails, from an aerial view, that possess a gentle luminescence, giving light to the dark pictorial space. This may be a direct reference to the Māori prophet Rua Hepetipa Kēnana (Ngai Tūhoe, 1868/9-1937), who had a vision on Maungapōhatu after which he called himself The Diamond of Maungapōhatu – a precious stone from a biblical reference. Kēnana created a temple, The Hiona, for his community – which he called the Israelites or Iharaira ¬– that became their place of safety and light after the darkest turbulence during colonial and tribal hostilities. Kēnana established The Hiona in 1907 at Maungapōhatu. The unique building is adorned with the symbols of Kēnana – the blue club and yellow diamond (lozenge) shapes. Alternately, perhaps Cotton has created a series of pictorial spaces that somehow protect whakairo (thoughts), tinana (body) and Māori aspirations. Each space is privy to us though, thoughts and all.
$14,000 — $18,000
34 Shane Cotton Three Thoughts 2016 acrylic on Steinbach on linen signed S. COTTON, dated 2016 and inscribed THREE THOUGHTS in brushpoint lower right; printed Shane Cotton/Three Thoughts/ 2016/acrylic on canvas/910 x 910mm/SC4740 on Michael Lett label affixed verso 910mm × 910mm est
Webb's
$30,000 — $40,000
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33 Shane Cotton Closed Neighbourhood 2014 acrylic on Steinbach on linen signed S. COTTON and dated 2014 in brushpoint lower right; printed Shane Cotton/Closed Neighbourhood/2014/acrylic on paper/1000 x 700 mm/SC4033-01 on Michael Lett label affixed verso 1000mm Ă— 700mm est
$14,000 — $18,000
Exhibitions Blank Geometry, Michael Lett, Auckland, November 2014 January 2015.
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Webb's
August
82
34 Shane Cotton Three Thoughts 2016 acrylic on canvas signed S. COTTON, dated 2016 and inscribed THREE THOUGHTS in brushpoint lower right; printed Shane Cotton/Three Thoughts/ 2016/acrylic on canvas/910 x 910mm/SC4740 on Michael Lett label affixed verso 910mm x 910mm est
$30,000 — $40,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Michael Lett, Auckland, 2016. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions Dirt Cache, Michael Lett, Auckland, 2016. 83
Peter Siddell - Imaginary Realist Essay by RICHARD WOLFE
36 Sir Peter Siddell Lopdell House 1996 oil on canvas signed PETER SIDDELL and dated 1996 in brushpoint lower edge; signed PETER SIDDELL, dated 1996 and inscribed 'LOPDELL HOUSE'/painted with Schmincke oil paints & Schmincke rapid medium & Terpin/Varnished with Winsor & Newton Retouching Varnish in graphite verso 910mm × 1210mm est Webb's
$60,000 — $90,000
Michael Dunn has described how the 1930s and 40s saw a “widening acceptance” of modernist approaches to painting in New Zealand, as awareness of new movements percolated through from Europe. However, at this stage local understanding of these new ‘–isms’ produced little in the way of radical developments. Instead, New Zealand painting was dominated by a local version of American regionalism, as understood through reproductions of work by such artists as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. In response, New Zealanders Rita Angus (19081970), William Sutton (1917-2000) and Russell Clark (1905-1966) produced realist depictions of scenes typical of small-town and rural life. By the mid-1950s the impetus behind this activity had become exhausted, but the following decade saw a revival of interest in regionalism. This was due to the emergence of a new generation of realist painters, in particular Don Binney (19402012), Michael Smither (b. 1939), Robin White (b. 1946) and, later, Peter Siddell (1935-2011), Glenda Randerson (b. 1949) and Graham Sydney (b. 1948).¹ Peter Siddell grew up in Auckland’s inner suburb of Grey Lynn, and left school to become an electrician, later switching to primary school teaching. He became a full-time artist following the commercial success of his first solo exhibition in 1973, at Moller’s Gallery on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. He quickly established a reputation for his highly individual and carefully crafted urban landscapes, inspired by Auckland’s harbour, landforms, and colonial and Edwardian architecture. In particular, his metropolitan views were characterised by suburbs of wooden villas, with their typically white-painted weatherboards and red corrugated-iron roofs. Siddell suggested he might be classified as an “imaginary realist”. His was a uniquely personal view; while his subject was obviously and identifiably Auckland, it was in fact nowhere in particular, and owed as much to memory and imagination as it did to observation. As defined by Roger Blackley, closer inspection reveals Siddell’s “immaculate representation” to be a “scrambled simulacrum”.² Appearing to be frozen in time, these were serenely becalmed visions of a city also strangely devoid of people, traffic and telegraph poles. While there was popular support for this new regional realism, its emergence in this country coincided with the now growing acceptance of more modernist approaches, a belated response to such European movements as post-impressionism, cubism and expressionism. This alternative development was exemplified by the work of Colin McCahon (1919-1987), whose highly personal and generally landscape-based images drew from a wide range of influences, among them American abstractionism and Japanese scroll painting. By comparison, the type of realism championed by Siddell and others can be seen as moving in a more conservative direction. It offered a local equivalent to the popular style most famously associated with American Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), admired for his meticulous rendering of quiet subjects and apparent ability to evoke the personality and life of inanimate objects. In his imagined cityscapes, Siddell avoided any suggestion of narrative. While there may appear to be nothing going on here, the viewer’s eye is encouraged to wander, past white picket fences and through windows for a sense of the lives within these ubiquitous villas. If such paintings had a precedent in this country, a likely candidate is the c.1939 watercolour Sunday Morning by Russell Clark (1905-1966), a (busy) street scene in a typical New Zealand town. These urban views might also be seen as part of the tradition that included American Edward Hopper (1882-1967), although his concern was not human activity – or the lack of it – but rather the loneliness and vacuity of the big city. Accentuated by their stillness, Siddell’s uninhabited cityscapes evoke a sense of nostalgia, perhaps a longing for a less complicated – and traffic-free – past. They are also likely to reflect the artist’s own memories of early-morning Auckland as a New Zealand Herald delivery boy. This looking back was a feature of the British neo-romantic painters of the 1930s, although their 84
37 Peter Siddell Aoraki from the Coast 2002 oil on canvas signed PETER SIDDELL and dated 2002 in brushpoint lower left 760mm × 1520mm est
$50,000 — $70,000
concern was for a nation’s heritage threatened by war. Siddell may not have considered Auckland to be at risk, although his inclusion of long shadows could suggest an arcadian twilight. However, this was a tumultuous time for the Queen City’s architectural fabric, and Siddell also rose to the challenge of acknowledging the expansive mirror-glazed façades that began dominating corporate Auckland in the 1980s. In his 1988 painting Foundation for the Blind Building, Siddell places the 1909 red-brick Gothic Revival landmark in Parnell in the right foreground. The other half of the canvas is dominated by one of Auckland’s many volcanic cones, pristine apart from its pre-European terracing and the villas which now cling to its desirable northern slopes. Beyond the confines of the metropolis, Lopdell House (1996) also depicts a well-known building, while a cluster of kauri frames a view across the Titirangi ridge and Waitakere Ranges towards another area of personal interest to the artist, Auckland’s west coast. Four years earlier his series of five magnificent sweeping panels of the Karekare cliffs were included in the Auckland Art Gallery’s 1992 exhibition, Panoramas of Auckland 1841-1991. In his youth Siddell had been a keen tramper and mountaineer, and in 2000, after a family trip to the south and west coasts of the South Island, he reworked those parts of the country in his studio. As well as his own versions of some of this country’s most recognisable landscapes, such as Milford Sound and Lake Wakatipu, he dealt to the less well-known Gillespies Beach, west of Fox Glacier. This was the likely location of his Aoraki from the Coast (2002), a panorama capturing the many changing landforms extending from sea-level to the snowcapped peak of the nation’s highest mountain. Further, it may have been the same breathtaking sight Abel Tasman had beheld almost exactly 360 years earlier, on 13 December 1642, when he described this as a “land uplifted high”. In 2008, in recognition of his services to art, Peter Siddell became a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. The following year that order was redesignated and he became only the second New Zealand artist to be knighted – after Sir Toss Woollaston in 1979.
35 Peter Siddell Foundation for the Blind Building 1988 oil on canvas signed PETER SIDDELL and dated 1988 in brushpoint lower left 600mm × 900mm est
$35,000 — $45,000
1 Michael Dunn, A Concise History of New Zealand Painting, Craftsman House, BVI, 1993, pp. 81, 95-98. 2 Roger Blackley, Two Centuries of New Zealand Landscape Art, Auckland City Art Gallery, 1990, p. 106.
Webb's
85
35 Peter Siddell Foundation for the Blind Building 1988 oil on canvas signed PETER SIDDELL and dated 1988 in brushpoint lower left 600mm x 900mm est
$35,000 — $45,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Important, Early & Rare, International Art Centre, Auckland, 22 August 2019, lot 12; Collection of Terry & Moira Wood. Acquired from International Art Centre, Auckland, 1990. Webb's
August
Exhibitions Peter Siddell: Paintings 1970-2010, Lopdell House, Auckland, 30 June - 21 August 2011. 86
36 Peter Siddell Lopdell House 1996 oil on canvas signed PETER SIDDELL and dated 1996 in brushpoint lower edge; signed PETER SIDDELL, dated 1996 and inscribed 'LOPDELL HOUSE'/ painted with Schmincke oil paints & Schmincke rapid medium & Terpin/Varnished with Winsor & Newton Retouching Varnish in graphite verso 910mm x 1210mm est
$60,000 — $90,000
Provenance Private Collection, Auckland. Acquired from Important, Early and Rare, International Art Centre, 22 August 2015, lot 12; Collection of Terry & Moira Wood. Acquired directly from the artist, 1996. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions 10th Anniversary Exhibition, Lopdell House, Auckland, 1996. 87
37 Peter Siddell Aoraki from the Coast 2002 oil on canvas signed PETER SIDDELL and dated 2002 in brushpoint lower left 760mm x 1520mm est
$50,000 — $70,000
Provenance Private Collection, Auckland. Webb's
Exhibitions Peter Siddell: Landscape, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, 7 December 2002 - 23 February 2003; Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Invercargill, 25 April - 25 May 2003; The Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, 6 June - 20 July 2003; Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, 12 September - 9 November 2003; Millenium Art Gallery, Blenheim, December 2003 - January 2004; Te Manawa, Palmerston North, February - April 2004; Hawkes Bay Museum, Napier, May - July 2004. Literature Michael Dunn, Peter Siddell: Landscape (Auckland: Artis Gallery, 2002), 13; Peter Siddell, The Art of Peter Siddell (Auckland: Godwit Press, 2011), 232-233. 88
38 Stanley Palmer Karamea 2004 oil on canvas signed S. PALMER. and dated 04. in brushpoint lower right 1100mm x 1360mm est
$15,000 — $20,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Important, Early & Rare, International Art Centre, Auckland, 22 August 2015, lot 20. Webb's
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Raymond Ching - Hyper-Surreal Essay by ANDREW PAUL WOOD
40 Raymond Ching That Night, Some Mistook the Gulls for Sirens 2004 oil on canvas signed RAY HARRIS CHING and dated 2004 in brushpoint lower edge 1350mm × 960mm est Webb's
$25,000 — $35,000 August
As a young boy on a class trip to the Dominion Museum, Wellington-born artist Raymond Harris Ching laid eyes on a collection of stuffed hummingbirds. It was love at first sight, the impetus for a lifelong obsession with birds that had already been stirred by interactions with nature on the family farm in Nelson. He left school at 12 years of age to apprentice in an advertising firm, and in due course became an art director. Painting birds, however, was his true calling and he began exhibiting with John Leech Galleries in Auckland in 1966. The exquisitely detailed avian portraits, technical tours de force worked in a dry brush, caught the eye of Sir William Collins, of what is now HarperCollins Publishing. At the time, Collins, a passionate bird-lover himself, was putting together a high-end book series on birds with ornithologist Sir Peter Scott (only son of the ill-fated Antarctic explorer) and was searching the world for artists to illustrate them. On the promise of this project Ching moved to London, but before Collins and Scott could start, The Reader’s Digest, then planning The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds with Collins, and despairing of ever finding an artist up to their standards, were so rapt with Ching’s work that they commissioned 230 full-colour paintings. Ching impetuously promised to deliver the paintings within a year, which he did. The effort left him impoverished and ill, and he moved to Rye on the East Sussex coast to recuperate. The resulting book, published in 1969, became a best seller and the world’s most successful book of its kind. Eleven books later, Ching still lives in the United Kingdom, in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire with his wife, author Carol Sinclair. He regularly shows in New Zealand and around the world as the pre-eminent painter of birds, working in oils and watercolour on canvas or gessoed Masonite to extract the very finest detail of an almost photographic degree of realism. For many of his bird paintings Ching studies birds in their natural habitat, on the wing, but he also works from taxidermically preserved birds in his studio. Even so, there is nothing stiff or overly clinical about the way he presents his feathered subjects, often in entirely believable flight. The paintings are not mere illustrations of a text. He sets the birds where they live and depicts them in their natural behaviours, frequently capturing animals in a range of motion that would normally escape the eye. In an elite category all of his own, he has few contemporary peers and perhaps can only be compared with the great ornithological painters of the past, like John James Audubon, Louis Agassiz Fuertes or, closer to New Zealand, William Belcher. The ornithologist Penny Olsen, in her book Feather and Brush: Three Centuries of Australian Bird Art (2001), notes that it was the influence of Ching’s 1978 book Raymond Ching: The Bird Paintings that liberated Australian wildlife painters “from the stilted approach of the past” and that the artist “is not afraid to challenge the viewer by depicting birds in action, captured in seemingly impossible poses partway through a movement, at a point not normally registered by the human eye.” The combination of life, character, beauty, naturalism and observation in the paintings drew no less than Sir David Attenborough to commission a painting from Ching in 2012. This work, End to the Squandering of Beauty (Entry of the Birds of Paradise into Western Thought), graced the cover of Attenborough’s book (with Errol Fuller) Drawn from Paradise: The Natural History, Art and Discovery of the Birds of Paradise with Rare Archival Art (2012). Truly the highest of accolades. Another prominent collector of his work is the present Duke of Bedford, and Ching’s Nine Owls can be found at his seat, Woburn Abbey, on the border of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. Ching has never been exclusively a painter of natural history, nor does he identify himself as such. He is also a superb portraitist and interpreter of the human form, as well as a consummate designer. In 1999 the Royal Mail commissioned Ching to create a postage stamp, Darwin's Theory, as part of a series on famous scientists. In the last two decades or so, Ching’s work has embraced the surreal and fantastical. The painting That 90
Night, Some Mistook the Gulls for Sirens (2009) is an example of this, a literalised fever-dream of a lonely mariner where the dreamer imagines the cries of seabirds are the seductive calls of the deadly bird-women of Greek myth, but also a sensitive study of the female nude at a time when such observational skills are rarely taught in the academy any more. Ching has also turned to picture books, like the wonderful Aesop's Kiwi Fables (2012) and the equally wonderful Dawn Chorus: The Legendary Voyage to New Zealand of Aesop, the Fabled Teller of Fables (2014), and Aesop’s Outback Fables (2018), which have brought postmodernist anthropomorphic and light-heartedly humorous cartoon elements into his work. That is reflected in The Cat and the Kiwi Chick, a fable warning of stranger danger reset as an ecological narrative of the Aotearoa bush in the manner of sentimental Victorian illustration, with the introduced cat replacing the disguised wolf or fox. As an extra touch, the painting is, in fact, an installation. The physical bag that the villainous cat is attempting to inveigle the kiwi chick into is part of the work. The awkward, hand-written speech bubbles recall Colin McCahon’s use of the same in the latter’s religious paintings, an artful synthesis of high- and lowbrow to create something charming and fun. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Brighton Art Gallery and Museum in the UK, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, in the USA, and are held in prestigious public collections including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Wyoming, USA.
39 Raymond Ching The Cat and the Kiwi Chick 2010 oil on board, leather bag 1070mm x 1250mm (painting); 200mm x 350mm x 200mm (bag) est
Webb's
$30,000 — $40,000
2019
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39 Raymond Ching The Cat and the Kiwi Chick 2010 oil on board, leather bag 1070mm x 1250mm (painting); 200mm x 350mm x 200mm (bag) est
Exhibitions Aesop’s Kiwi Fables, Artis Gallery, Auckland, 2010.
$30,000 — $40,000
Provenance Private Collection, Auckland. Acquired from Artis Gallery, Auckland, 2010.
Webb's
92
40 Raymond Ching That Night, Some Mistook the Gulls for Sirens 2004 oil on canvas signed RAY HARRIS CHING and dated 2004 in brushpoint lower edge 1350mm x 960mm est
$25,000 — $35,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Artis Gallery, Auckland, 2005. Webb's
Exhibitions The Last Tree Fell, Artis Gallery, Auckland, 2005. Literature Raymond Ching, The Last Tree Fell (Auckland: Artis Gallery, 2005), 15, 36-37. 93
41 Chris Charteris Forces of Land and Ocean 2005 southland granite 1025mm x 1095mm est
$10,000 — $20,000
Provenance Private collection, Wellington. Acquired from FHE Galleries, Auckland, 2005. Webb's
August
Exhibitions FHE Galleries, Auckland Art Fair, Auckland 2005.
94
42 Julia Morison Myriorama SUB-TITLE (set) NALNALNALNAL 2008 gesso, acrylic and ink, synthetic wax finish on aluminium polyurethane laminate signed Julia Morison in ink on label affixed verso; printed MYRIORAMA/SUB-TITLE (set) NALNALNALNAL/ID : 1013/JULIA MORISON/ MEDIUM: gesso, acrylic & ink, synthetic wax finish on aluminium polyurethane laminate./12 pieces/ DIMENSIONS: 2270 X 2270 mm/DATE: 2008/ HISTORY: Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland - July 2008 on label affixed verso 2265mm x 2265mm (widest points) est
$10,000 — $18,000
Provenance Private collection, Wellington. Acquired from Two Rooms, Auckland, 2008. Webb's
2019
Exhibitions Myriorama:02, Two Rooms, Auckland, 2008.
95
Max Gimblett - One-Stroke Bone for Anthony Fodero Essay by PAUL JACKSON
There are clear parallels between this Bhuddist-inspired process and those of the action painters of the mid 20th century such as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. However, unlike the practices of these antecedents, the ancient tradition of ensĹ? painting that Gimblett participates in has a very specific intended output. Webb's
96
43 Max Gimblett One-Stroke Bone - for Anthony Fodero 2002 ink on canvas signed MAX GIMBLETT, dated 2002 and inscribed "ONE-STROKE BONE FOR ANTHONY FODERO" in ink verso 2400mm (diameter) est
Webb's
$45,000 — $55,000
Max Gimblett’s approach to painting is directly informed by his identity as a practicing Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk: as with Zen Buddhist ink painting, Gimblett’s production of the Zen circle or “ensō” is essential to the large majority of his work. Aside from a few exceptions, such as those created by the Zen master Bankei Yōtaku, most ensō are created by a single continuous gesture produced while in a mental state known as “mushin no shin” or “the mind without mind”. While in this state practitioners act intuitively, free from the burden of discursive thought. In an attempt to achieve mushin, Gimblett has trained himself not to second guess his initial decisions. Of his painting process, Gimblett states: “When I’m doing an ink drawing if it says in my mind “Throw the ink” I throw the ink. To not throw the ink is to be dishonest.” According to Zen Buddhist teaching, each ensō represents every thing that was necessary in order for it to come into existence. Each ensō is unique and, like their creators, visibly imperfect; they are indexical of a particular moment in time and, as such, instantiate a particular arrangement of the contents of the universe. Gimblett’s creation of ensō paintings such as One Stroke Bone - for Anthony Fodero begins with a ritual. Two buckets, one filled with water, the other with black acrylic paint, are placed on the floor next to a huge doughnut-shaped stretched canvas. Wielding a large mop with two hands as a samurai might hold a katana, Gimblett positions himself next to the canvas, staring at it. He then spends a few silent moments repeatedly dunking the mop into the bucket of water, lifting it out and waiting for the water to drain, then placing it back into the bucket. The same process is repeated in the second bucket of black paint: Gimblett submerges the mop head into the paint, lifts it out and carefully waits for it to drain back into the bucket, then places it back. Once complete, like an athlete seconds before the flawless execution of a dive or a jump, Gimblett stands to the side of the canvas and begins mentally preparing himself. After a long period of meditation, with loud battle cry, he strikes the canvas with the mop, expelling his prepared energy in a single, focused circular movement lasting only a few seconds.
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43 Max Gimblett One-Stroke Bone - for Anthony Fodero 2002 ink on canvas signed MAX GIMBLETT, dated 2002 and inscribed "ONE-STROKE BONE FOR ANTHONY FODERO" in ink verso 2400mm (diameter) est
$45,000 — $55,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Important Paintings and Contemporary Art, Webb's, Auckland, 29 November 2016, lot 20; Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland. Webb's
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Exhibitions Max Gimblett: The Brush of All Things, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, 19 June 2004 - 29 August 2004; City Gallery, Wellington, 12 December 2004 - 6 March 2005. Literature Max Gimblett: The Brush of All Things, (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 2004) 24-25. 98
44 Max Gimblett Enso Circling 2011 ink on paper signed MAX GIMBLETT and dated 2011 in ink lower right; inscribed ENSO.CIRCLING in ink verso 780mm x 560mm est
$5,000 — $8,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from The Collection of Nadine Milne, Webb's, Auckland, 28 November 2016, lot 38.
Webb's
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Charles F. Goldie - Paris Essay by ELIZABETH RANKIN
Enrolling at the Académie Julien in 1893, Goldie worked under the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, whose paintings have been aptly described by Roger Blackley as “soft-core mythological confections”.³ But this overlooks their almost photorealistic representation: it was under this influence that Goldie honed his skills as a painter, also making copies of the great masters in the Louvre. Webb's
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45 Charles Frederick Goldie Paris 1896 oil on board signed CFG, dated 25/4/96 and inscribed PARIS in brushpoint lower right 150mm × 230mm est
$22,000 — $32,000
The name Charles Goldie immediately conjures up his memorable portraits of Māori men and women, highly valued for their verism and consummate skill. Although their reputation declined while modernism was in the ascendancy in New Zealand, the works have acquired iconic status and no New Zealand art gallery collection would today seem complete without them. They so dominate our idea of Goldie’s painting that it comes as a surprise to find a landscape by him, such as this appealing small study of Paris. However, it is one of a number of early landscapes documented by Alister Taylor.¹ The painting represents a significant if less familiar period of Goldie’s career, and tells us something of the choices he made as a mature artist. Born in Auckland in 1870, Goldie already excelled in art as a boy, winning prizes at the Auckland Society of Arts. The studied naturalism of his paintings, often still lifes including recognisably local objects, soon attracted positive attention. We are told that none other than Sir George Grey admired his youthful talent and encouraged his father, a well-to-do timber merchant, to send his son to study art in Paris.² Enrolling at the Académie Julien in 1893, Goldie worked under the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, whose paintings have been aptly described by Roger Blackley as “soft-core mythological confections”.³ But this overlooks their almost photorealistic representation: it was under this influence that Goldie honed his skills as a painter, also making copies of the great masters in the Louvre. Goldie seems to have turned his back on more recent painting such as that of the impressionists, which could be viewed at the Palais de Luxembourg following a generous bequest in the 1890s. Yet, like them, he made expeditions to picturesque spots to paint – Toulon, Genoa, Venice, for example – inscribing the works with the place and the precise date as he has done here: “Paris 25/4/96”. Goldie did not favour the vivid undegraded colour of Impressionist paintings, however; his is a muted warm palette of creams, greys, olives and ochres with touches of pinkish red. Nor does he use the impressionists’ insistently broken brush-strokes that capture the flicker of light; but Goldie’s paint is applied with verve in lusciously thick strokes that animate the surface. The artist probably thought of such paintings as esquisses – oil studies rather than finished works. Dashes of paint capture figures and trees on the banks of the Seine, and the arched bridge over the river and the familiar silhouette of Notre Dame are portrayed with economical ease. When Goldie returned to Auckland in 1898, he soon embarked with John Steele on The Arrival of the Māoris in New Zealand, and developed his Māori portraits to great acclaim. In focusing on them, Goldie set aside the freshness and fluidity of his land and townscape studies like this one – which are reminiscent of the School of Paris and might have become the basis of a more modern approach – in favour of the highly realistic attention to detail that became his hallmark.
1 Alister Taylor, C.F. Goldie 1870-1947: His Life and Painting vol. 1, Martinborough, 1977, 167. Taylor mistakenly reads the somewhat sketchy date as 20/4/96. 2 Roger Blackley, 'Goldie, Charles Frederick', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 1996: Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https:// teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3g14/goldiecharles-frederick (accessed 8 July 2019). 3 Roger Blackley, Goldie, Auckland Art Gallery, 1997, 8. Blackley provides an extensive and lively account of Goldie’s early life and time abroad.
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45 Charles Frederick Goldie Paris 1896 oil on board signed CFG, dated 25/4/96 and inscribed PARIS in brushpoint lower right 150mm x 230mm est
$22,000 — $32,000
Provenance Private collection, Australia. Acquired from the sale of the estate of Olive Ethelwyn Goldie (nee Cooper), Cordy's, Auckland, 1967. Webb's
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Exhibitions Goldie, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o TÄ maki, Auckland, 28 June- 28 October 1997. Literature Alister Taylor, C.F. Goldie 18701947: His Life and Painting vol. 1 (Martinborough: Alister Taylor, 1977), 167. Goldie (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 1997), 167. 102
Exhibitions Another from the edition exhibited in Colin McCahon: The Mystical Landscape, National Art Gallery, Wellington, 1983; McCahon's Titirangi, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, 2002; Making a Mark: the Hand of the Artist, Te Manawa Museum of Art, Science and History, Palmerston North, 2008.
46 Colin McCahon Puketutu Manukau 1957 lithograph on paper (four panels) inscribed Puketutu/Manukau/ed. 100/Published by Peter Webb./ High St./Auckland/3 lithographs, 1957./by Colin McCahon on plate (first panel); inscribed Puketutu/from my boat/ed.100 '57 on plate (third panel); inscribed McC. '57 on plate (fourth panel) 215mm x 265mm (each panel) est
$7,000 — $9,000
Provenance Private collection, Whanganui. Acquired from fundraising event for Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland, 1970. Webb's
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Literature Peter Simpson, Colin McCahon: The Titirangi Years 1953 to 1959 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007) 124; Marja Bloem and Martin Browne, A Question of Faith (Amsterdam: Craig Potton Publishing; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2002), 186; Gordon H.Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1984), 66. Collection Another from the edition held by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (acquired 1958, gift of Peter Webb). Note Colin McCahon Online Catalogue (www.mccahon.co.nz) number: cm001346.
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47 Trevor Moffitt Nude Model 1977 oil on board signed Moffitt and dated 77 in brushpoint lower left; inscribed Title: Trevor Moffitt/Title: 'Nude Model'/Medium: Oil on Board/Date: 1977/Size: 82 x 59cm on Warwick Henderson label affixed verso; inscribed Gwen/$5000.00/1977 in ink verso 550mm x 790mm est
$8,000 — $12,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Warwick Henderson Gallery, Auckland. Webb's
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48 Trevor Moffitt The Empty Mailbox 1996 oil on board signed Moffitt and dated 96 in brushpoint upper left; inscribed Medium: Oil on board/Date:1996/Size 88 x 88 cm on Warwick Henderson Gallery label affixed verso; inscribed No 16/Human Condition III Series/"The Empty Mailbox"/$6500 in ink verso 885mm x 885mm est
$6,000 — $10,000
Provenance Private collection, Auckland. Acquired from Warwick Henderson Gallery, Auckland. Webb's
Exhibitions Retrospective exhibition, Warwick Henderson Gallery, Auckland, 2001. Literature T. J. McNamara, Trevor Moffitt exhibition bears witness to cold, hard truth, The New Zealand Herald, 7 October, 2001. 105
Terms and Conditions The terms and conditions of sale listed here contain the policies of Webb’s Ltd. They are the terms on which Webb’s Ltd and the Seller contract with the Buyer. They may be amended by printed Saleroom Notices or oral announcements made before and during the sale. By bidding at auction you agree to be bound by these terms.
1. Background to the Terms used in these Conditions
property is therefore made between the Seller and the Buyer.
The conditions that are listed below contain terms that are used regularly and may need explanation. They are as follows:
3.
“the Buyer” means the person with the highest bid accepted by the Auctioneer. “the Lot” means any item depicted within the sale for auction and in particular the item or items described against any lot number in the catalogue. “the Hammer price” means the amount of the highest bid accepted by the auctioneer in relation to a lot. “the Buyer’s Premium” means the charge payable by the Buyer to the auction house as a percentage of the hammer price. “the Reserve” means the lowest amount at which Webb’s has agreed with the Seller that the lot can be sold. “Forgery” means an item constituting an imitation originally conceived and executed as a whole, with a fraudulent intention to deceive as to authorship, origin, age, period, culture or source, where the correct description as to such matters is not reflected by the description in the catalogue. Accordingly no lot shall be capable of being a forgery by reason of any damage or restoration work of any kind (Including re-painting). “the insured value” means the amount that Webb’s in its absolute discretion from time to time shall consider the value for which a lot should be covered for insurance (whether or not insurance is arranged by Webb’s). All values expressed in Webb’s Ltd catalogues (in any format) are in New Zealand Dollars (NZD$). All bids, “hammer price”, “reserves”, “Buyers Premium” and other expressions of value are understood by all parties to be in New Zealand Dollars (NZD$) unless otherwise specified. 2.
Webb’s Auctions as Agent
Except as otherwise stated Webb’s Ltd acts as agent for the Seller.
Before the Sale
1. Examination of Property Prospective Buyers are strongly advised to examine in person any property in which they are interested before the Auction takes place. Neither Webb’s nor the Seller provides any guarantee in relation to the nature of the property apart from the Limited warranty in the paragraph below. The property is otherwise sold “AS IS” 2. Catalogue and Other Descriptions All statements by Webb’s in the catalogue entry for the property or in the condition report, or made orally or in writing elsewhere, are statements of opinion and are not to be relied upon as statements of fact. Such statements do not constitute a representation, warranty or assumption of liability by Webb’s of any kind. References in the catalogue entry to the condition report to damage or restoration are for guidance only and should be evaluated by personal inspection by the bidder or a knowledgeable representative. The absence of such a reference does not imply that an item is free from defects or restoration, nor does a reference to particular defects imply the absence of any others. Estimates of the selling price should not be relied on as a statement that this is the price at which the item will sell or it’s value for any other purpose. Neither Webb’s nor The Seller is responsible for any errors or omissions in the catalogue or any supplemental material. Images are measured height by width (sight size). Illustrations are provided only as a guide and should not be relied upon as a true representation of colour or condition. Images are not shown at a standard scale. Mention is rarely made of frames (which may be provided as supplementary images on the website) which do not form part of the lot as described in the printed catalogue. An item bought “on Extension” must be paid for in full before it will be released to the purchaser or his/ her agreed expertising committee or specialist. Payments received for
The contract for the sale of the Webb's
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such items will be held “in trust” for up to 90 days or earlier, if the issue of authenticity has been resolved more quickly. Extensions must be requested before the auction. Foreign buyers should note that all transactions are in New Zealand Dollars so there may be a small exchange rate risk. The costs associated with acquiring a good opinion or certificate will be carried by the purchaser. If the item turns out to be forged or otherwise incorrectly described, all reasonable costs will be borne by the vendor. 3. Buyers Responsibility All property is sold “as is” without representation or warranty of any kind by Webb’s or the Seller. Buyers are responsible for satisfying themselves concerning the condition of the property and the matters referred to in the catalogue by requesting a condition report. No lot to be rejected if, subsequent to the sale, it has been immersed in liquid or treated by any other process unless the Auctioneer’s permission to subject the lot to such immersion or treatment has first been obtained in writing. 4.
At the Sale
1. Refusal of Admission Webb’s reserves the right at our complete discretion to refuse admission to the auction premises or participation in any auction and to reject any bid. 2. Registration Before Bidding Any prospective new buyer must complete and sign a registration form and provide photo identification before bidding. Webb’s may request bank, trade or other financial references to substantiate this registration. 3. Bidding as a Principal When making a bid, a bidder is accepting personal liability to pay the purchase price including the buyer’s premium and all applicable taxes, plus all other applicable charges, unless it has been explicitly agreed in writing with Webb’s before the commencement of the sale that the bidder is acting as agent on behalf of an identified third party acceptable to Webb’s and that Webb’s will only look to the principal for payment. 4. International Registrations All International clients not known Webb's
to Webb’s will be required to scan or fax through an accredited form of photo identification and pay a deposit at our discretion in cleared funds into Webb’s account at least 24 hours before the commencement of the auction. Bids will not be accepted without this deposit. Webb’s also reserves the right to request any additional forms of identification prior to registering an overseas bid.
should contact be unsuccessful at the time of Auction. You must advise Webb’s of the lots in question and you will be assumed to be a buyer at the minimum price of 75% of estimate (i.e. reserve) for all such lots. Webb’s will advise Telephone Bidders who have registered at least 24 hours before the auction of any relevant changes to descriptions, withdrawals or any other sale room notices.
This deposit can be made using a credit card, however the balance of any purchase price in excess of $5,000 cannot be charged to this card without prior arrangement.
7. Online Bidding Webb’s offers an online bidding service. When bidding online the buyer agrees to be bound by all terms and conditions listed here by Webb’s.
This deposit is redeemable against any auction purchase and will be refunded in full if no purchases are made. 5. Absentee Bids Webb’s will use reasonable efforts to execute written bids delivered to us AT LEAST 24 Hours before the sale for the convenience of those clients who are unable to attend the auction in person. If we receive identical written bids on a particular lot, and at the auction these are the highest bids on that lot, then the lot will be sold to the person whose written bid was received and accepted first. Execution of written bids is a free service undertaken subject to other commitments at the time of the sale and we do not accept liability for failing to execute a written bid or for errors or omissions which may arise. It is the bidder’s responsibility to check with Webb’s after the auction if they were successful. Unlimited or “Buy” bids will not be accepted. 6. Telephone Bids Priority will be given to overseas and bidders from other regions. Please refer to the catalogue for the Telephone Bids form. Arrangements for this service must be confirmed AT LEAST 24 HOURS PRIOR to the auction commencing. Webb’s accepts no responsibility whatsoever for any errors or failure to execute bids. In telephone bidding the buyer agrees to be bound by all terms and conditions listed here and accepts that Webb’s cannot be held responsible for any miscommunications in the process. The success of telephone bidding cannot be guaranteed due to circumstances that are unforeseen. Buyers should be aware of the risk and accept the consequences
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Webb’s accepts no responsibility for any errors, failure to execute bids or any other miscommunications regarding this process. It is the online bidder’s responsibility to ensure the accuracy of the relevant information regarding bids, lot numbers and contact details. Webb’s does not charge for this service. 8. Reserves Unless otherwise indicated, all lots are offered subject to a reserve, which is the confidential minimum price below which the Lot will not be sold. The reserve will not exceed the low estimate printed in the catalogue. The auctioneer may open the bidding on any Lot below the reserve by placing a bid on behalf of the Seller. The auctioneer may continue to bid on behalf of seller up to the amount of the reserve, either by placing consecutive bids or by placing bids in response to other bidders. 9. Auctioneers Discretion The Auctioneer has the right at his/ her absolute and sole discretion to refuse any bid, to advance the bidding in such a manner as he/ she may decide, to withdraw or divide any lot, to combine any two or more lots and, in the case or error or dispute and whether during or after the sale, to determine the successful bidder, to continue the bidding, to cancel the sale or to reoffer and resell the item in dispute. If any dispute arises after the sale, then Webb’s sale record is conclusive. 10. Successful Bid and Passing of Risk Subject to the auctioneer’s discretion, the highest bidder
accepted by the auctioneer will be the buyer and the striking of his hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the Seller and the Buyer. Risk and responsibility for the lot (including frames or glass where relevant) passes immediately to the Buyer. 11. Indicative Bidding Steps, etc. Webb’s reserves the right to refuse any bid, withdraw any lot from sale, to place a reserve on any lot and to advance the bidding according to the following indicative steps: Increment Dollar Range Amount $20 $0–$500 $50 $500–$1,000 $100 $1,000–$2,000 $200 $2,000–$5,000 $500 $5,000–$10,000 $1,000 $10,000–$20,000 $2,000 $20,000–$50,000 $5,000 $50,000 – $100,000 $10,000 $100,000–$200,000 $20,000 $200,000–$500,000 $50,000 $500,000–$1,000,000 Absentee bids must follow these increments and any bids that don’t follow the steps will be rounded up to the nearest acceptable bid. 5.
After the Sale
1. Buyers Premium In addition to the hammer price, the buyer agrees to pay to Webb’s the buyer’s premium. The buyer’s premium is 17.5% of the hammer price plus GST. (Goods and Services Tax) where applicable. 2. Payment and Passing of Title The buyer must pay the full amount due (comprising the hammer price, buyer’s premium and any applicable taxes and GST) not later than 5 days after the auction date. The buyer will not acquire title to the lot until Webb’s receives full payment in cleared funds, and no goods under any circumstances will be released without confirmation of cleared funds received. This applies even if the buyer wishes to send items overseas. Payment can be made by direct transfer, cash (not exceeding NZD$10,000, if wishing to pay more than NZD$10,000 then this must be deposited directly into a Bank of New Zealand branch 107
and bank receipt supplied) and EFTPOS (please check the daily limit). Payments can also be made by credit card in person with a 2.2% merchant fee for Visa and Mastercard and 3.3% for American Express. Invoices that are in excess of $5,000 and where the card holder is not present, cannot be charged to a credit card without prior arrangement. Personal cheques are accepted, but funds must be cleared before goods will be released. Bank cheques are subject to five days clearance. The buyer is responsible for any bank fees and charges applicable for the transfer of funds into Webb’s account.
rate as we shall reasonably decide. 2.
3.
to cancel the sale.
4.
to resell the property publicly or privately on such terms as we see fit.
5.
to pay the Seller an amount up to the net proceeds payable in respect of the amount bid by the defaulting Buyer. In these circumstances the defaulting Buyer can have no claim upon Webb’s in the event that the item(s) are sold for an amount greater than the original invoiced amount.
3. Collection of Purchases & Insurance Webb’s is entitled to retain items sold until all amounts due to us have been received in full in good cleared funds. Subject to this, the Buyer shall collect purchased lots within 5 days from the date of the sale unless otherwise agreed in writing between Webb’s and the Buyer. 6.
to set off against any amounts which Webb’s may owe the Buyer in any other transactions, the outstanding amount remaining unpaid by the Buyer.
7.
where several amounts are owed by the Buyer to us, in respect of different transactions, to apply any amount paid to discharge any amount owed in respect of any particular transaction, whether or not the Buyer so directs.
At the fall of the hammer, insurance is the responsibility of the purchaser. 4. Packing, Handling and Shipping Webb’s will be able to suggest removals companies that the buyer can use but takes no responsibility whatsoever for the actions of any recommended third party. Webb’s can pack and handle goods purchased at the auction by agreement and a charge will be made for this service. All packing, shipping, insurance, postage & associated charges will be borne by the purchaser.
8. 5. Permits, Licences and Certificates 6. Under The Protected Objects Act 1975, buyers may be required to obtain a licence for certain categories of items in a sale from the Ministry of Culture & Heritage, PO Box 5364, Wellington. 7. Remedies for Non-Payment If the Buyer fails to make full payment immediately, Webb’s is entitled to exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies (in addition to asserting any other rights or remedies available under the law) 1.
Webb's
to charge interest at such a
to hold the defaulting Buyer liable for the total amount due and to commence legal proceedings for its recovery along with interest, legal fees and costs to the fullest extent permitted under applicable law.
9.
to reject at any future auction any bids made by or on behalf of the Buyer or to obtain a deposit from the Buyer prior to accepting any bids. to exercise all the rights and remedies of a person holding security over any property in our possession owned by the Buyer whether by way of pledge, security interest or in any other way, to the fullest extent permitted by the law of the place where such property is located. The Buyer will be deemed to have been granted such security to us and we may retain
such property as collateral security for said Buyer’s obligations to us. 10.
to take such other action as Webb’s deem necessary or appropriate. If we do sell the property under paragraph (4), then the defaulting Buyer shall be liable for payment of any deficiency between the total amount originally due to us and the price obtained upon reselling as well as for all costs, expenses, damages, legal fees and commissions and premiums of whatever kinds associated with both sales or otherwise arising from the default. If we pay any amount to the Seller under paragraph (5) the Buyer acknowledges that Webb’s shall have all of the rights of the Seller, however arising, to pursue the Buyer for such amount.
8. Failure to Collect Purchases Where purchases are not collected within 5 days from the sale date, whether or not payment has been made, we shall be permitted to remove the property to a warehouse at the buyer’s expense, and only release the items after payment in full has been made of removal, storage handling, insurance and any other costs incurred, together with payment of all other amounts due to us. 6.
history, literature or historical relevance. Except as required by local law any warranty of any kind is excluded by this paragraph. 7.
Limited Warranty
Subject to the terms and conditions of this paragraph, the Seller warrants for the period of thirty days from the date of the sale that any property described in this catalogue (noting such description may be amended by any saleroom notice or announcement) which is stated without qualification to be the work of a named author or authorship is authentic and not a forgery. The term “Author” or “authorship” refers to the creator of the property or to the period, culture, source, or origin as the case may be, with which the creation of such property is identified in the catalogue. The warranty is subject to the following: it does not apply where a) the catalogue description or saleroom notice corresponded to the generally accepted opinion of scholars and experts at the date of the sale or fairly indicated that there was a conflict of opinions, or b) correct identification of a lot can be demonstrated only by means of a scientific process not generally accepted for use until after publication of the catalogue or a process which at the date of the publication of the catalogue was unreasonably expensive or impractical or likely to have caused damage to the property.
Extent of Webb’s Liability
Webb’s agrees to refund the purchase price in the circumstances of the Limited Warranty set out in paragraph 7 below. Apart from that, neither the Seller nor we, nor any of our employees or agents are responsible for the correctness of any statement of whatever kind concerning any lot, whether written or oral, nor for any other errors or omissions in description or for any faults or defects in any lots. Except as stated in paragraph 7 below, neither the Seller, ourselves, our officers, agents or employees give any representation warranty or guarantee or assume any liability of any kind in respect of any lot with regard to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, description, size, quality, condition, attribution, authenticity, rarity, importance, medium, provenance, exhibition
the benefits of the warranty are not assignable and shall apply only to the original buyer of the lot as shown on the invoice originally issued by Webb’s when the lot was sold at Auction. the Original Buyer must have remained the owner of the lot without disposing of any interest in it to any third party. The Buyer’s sole and exclusive remedy against the Seller in place of any other remedy which might be available, is the cancellation of the sale and the refund of the original purchase price paid for the lot less the buyer’s premium which is nonrefundable. Neither the Seller nor Webb’s will be liable for any special, incidental nor consequential damages including, without
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limitation, loss of profits. The Buyer must give written notice of claim to us within thirty days of the date of the Auction. The Seller shall have the right, to require the Buyer to obtain two written opinions by recognised experts in the field, mutually acceptable to the Buyer and Webb’s to decide whether or not to cancel the sale under warranty. the Buyer must return the lot to Seller in the same condition that it was purchased. 8. Severability If any part of these Conditions of Sale is found by any court to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable, that part shall be discounted and the rest of the Conditions shall continue to be valid to the fullest extent permitted by law.
possible after the sale. Results will include buyer’s premium. These results will be posted at www. webbs.co.nz. 13.
GST is applicable on the hammer price in the case where the seller is selling property that is owned by an entity registered for GST. GST is also applicable on the hammer price in the case where the seller is not a New Zealand resident. These lots are denoted by a dagger symbol † placed next to the estimate. GST is also applicable on the buyer’s premium. Overseas buyers and buyers nonresident in New Zealand will not be charged GST on both hammer price and premiums under the following conditions: 1.
The items are exported through a Webb’s approved freight company including New Zealand Post
2.
The items are exported within 60 days of the date of the sale
9. Copyright The copyright in all images, illustrations and written material produced by Webb’s relating to a lot including the contents of this catalogue, is and shall remain the property at all times of Webb’s and shall not be used by the Buyer, nor by anyone else without our prior written consent. Webb’s and the Seller make no representation or warranty that the Buyer of a property will acquire any copyright or other reproduction rights in it. 10.
Goods and Service Tax
The invoice supplied by Webb’s for purchases will be regarded as a Tax invoice for GST purposes.]
Law and Jurisdiction
These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New Zealand, unless otherwise stated. 11.
Pre-Sale Estimates
Webb’s publishes with each catalogue our opinion as to the estimated price range for each lot. These estimates are approximate prices only and are not intended to be definitive. They are prepared well in advance of the sale and may be subject to revision. Interested parties should contact Webb’s prior to auction for updated pre-sale estimates and starting prices. 12.
Sale Results
Webb’s will provide auction results, which will be available as soon as
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Index of Artists
A Angus, Rita
W 46 - 49
B Bambury, Stephen
Walters, Gordon Warhol, Andy
30 59
37
C Carr, Steve Charteris, Chris Ching, Raymond Cotton, Shane Crook, Maryrose
34, 35 92 88 - 91 44, 78 - 81 73
D Dashper, Julian
36
G Gimblett, Max Goldie, Charles Frederick
94 - 97 98 - 100
H Hammond, Bill 74 - 76 Harrison, Michael 32, Cover Hill, Georgie 45 Hodgkins, Frances 60 - 62 Hotere, Ralph 67 Hunt, Matt 68 - 71 M McCahon, Colin 50 - 55, 101 McGregor, Laith 39 Moffitt, Trevor 102, 103 Morison, Julia 93 Mortimer, Roger 42, 43 P Palmer, Stanley 87 Parekowhai, Michael 56 - 58, 64 - 66 Pick, Seraphine 63 R Robinson, Peter
31
S Seymour, Ava Siddell, Peter Swallow, Ricky Sydney, Grahame
38 82 - 86 40, 41 72
T Tole, John
33
U Upritchard, Francis
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马爹利 蓝带 The Art of Generosity
享圆融 乐予众 Webb's
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BE curious
好奇于心
enjoy responsibly
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