From the Gibson Desert, big-name artists at small prices
Wrestling with the wheel of a LandCruiser on an unsealed road through the Gibson Desert, Ben Danks had one eye out for wild camels and the other one on sand dunes.
Avoiding a camel coming through the windscreen, or getting sand-bogged in 45 degree heat with no telephone reception, seems like a strange way to collect art. But Danks’ job as assistant manager with Indigenous-run art company, Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd, positioned him to build a very personal collection of desert art.
Usually driving alone, he regularly did the 1400 km round trip between Papunya Tula in Alice Springs and the two Indigenous communities – Kintore and Kiwirrkurra – where many of the Pintupi and Luritja artists of Papunya Tula lived and worked.
Danks would sometimes fall in love with certain artworks, and buy them through Papunya Tula Artists where he worked on and off from 2002 to 2018.
“My time there was interspersed with work on the APY lands in South Australia and jobs in the Top End and locum jobs on the Tiwi Islands,” Danks told Saleroom.
“The Pintupi and the Western Desert kept drawing me back.”
Now driving around Australia – this time accompanied by his wife and children – Danks has decided to get his collection out of storage and on to the market for new owners to appreciate.
Leonard Joel auctioneers will offer 63 of Danks’ works in an online auction called A Private Collection of Indigenous Art. The auction closes for bidding from 2pm Thursday, July 24.
The auction features works by Pintupi artists such as Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, George Ward Tjungurrayi, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Walangkura Reid Napurrula, Naata Nungurrayi and Dini Campbell Tjampitjinpa.
The highest estimate in the catalogue ($7000 to $9000) is for lot 3, Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula’s painting, Untitled, 2004, which measures 153 x 122 cm.
The lowest estimates are in the range of a couple of hundred dollars. The total estimate range is $71,000 to $119,200.
It’s not a glamour sale like this year’s Deutscher + Hackett’s Important Australian Indigenous Art, where the top price fetched for a work by Emily Kame Kngwarreye was over $1 million including buyer’s premium.
Rather, the Danks auction could be characterised as a very personal, single-owner collection assembled at that moment when the works were leaving the isolated communities they were created in.
There’s the interesting touch that Danks was working for the artists at the time, taking art materials out to communities and collecting finished works for framing, administrative processing, exhibition and sale in Alice Springs.
Danks even met members of the so-called “Pintupi nine” who had famously appeared out of the Gibson Desert in 1984 and made their first encounter with non-Indigenous people.
“It gives you a different perspective on the world. It was very humbling,” Danks said.
Many of the works in the Danks auction are being offered unframed and not even on stretchers (the wooden frame to which canvas or linen is nailed and made taut for painting).
The artists worked on stretched canvases in their communities. But the canvases were taken off the stretchers for easier transportation to Alice Springs.
Included in the sale are artworks by Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa and Dini Campbell Tjampitjinpa, among many others.
Anyone familiar with Australia’s Indigenous art will recognise those names as leading Papunya Tula artists whose canvases have fetched large sums in past auctions.
Turkey Tolson’s auction price record is $180,000 and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa’s is $353,169, for example.
However, screenprints by the three artists are estimated at just $200 to $400 each in the Danks sale.
While still being original artworks, screenprints are works on paper known as multiples. As such, their estimates reflect the fact that each one is part of a series of prints pulled from the same base motif.
Among the many other Pintupi artists in the auction are Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula, Walangkura Napanangka, George Ward Tjungurrayi, Anatjari Tjampitjinpa and Walangkura Reid Napurrula.
In 2002 Danks joined “a young and passionate team of colleagues (at Papunya Tula Artists), employed by Western Desert artists to take care of logistics and promote the artwork from that small shopfront to an international audience”.
“The work would take us from the remote, red sandhills of the desert, to upmarket galleries and institutions in cities around the country and the world,” Danks said in an online Leonard Joel interview.
Danks made many of his purchases from Papunya Tula Artists, but he also patronised galleries focusing on work by artists of other language groups such as Tiwi, Pitjantjatjara and Gija.
Papunya Tula Artists was established in 1972 and is owned and directed by Aboriginal people from the Western Desert. Today it represents around 120 artists.
Moving on to a sale at Lawsons on July 17 called Fine Art, keen eyes would have spotted a small sculpture by George Rayner Hoff.
The UK-born artist moved to Australia in 1923 and rose to prominence as an artist and as a teacher at the National Art School in Sydney where a studio is now named after him.
Rayner Hoff’s sculpture in the Lawsons sale was Faun and Nymph, 1924, which sold for $7,812.50 including buyers premium.
But hold on, didn’t Deutscher + Hackett sell the work for $54,900 (including fees) in its 2017 auction of Important Australian and International Fine Art?
They were two different works, and here’s the difference. The Hoff that sold in 2017 was an original bronze. Another original cast of the work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The version of the sculpture sold at Lawsons, however, is a different beast. It’s in bonded bronze powder and resin, and was one in an edition of 100 reproductions produced by the AGNSW in 1997-98.
Multiples, as noted earlier in this article, are generally far cheaper than the original, especially if made posthumously.
Hoff, whose beautiful sculptures can be admired at the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, died of an illness in 1937 aged 42.
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