The results of last night’s Sotheby’s sale in Sydney are evidence of a super-charged art market, seemingly unaffected by growing uncertainty about the economy. With a relative shortage of top quality artworks available for sale, the competition among moneyed collectors is frenzied.
In that context, it’s interesting to note the price achieved last night for an important painting by the late Sid Nolan, and compare that price to another Nolan work that sold to the National Gallery of Victoria two years ago.
A portrait of bushranger Ned Kelly, bearing the simple title Kelly and painted by Nolan in 1955, sold last night for $810,000. It was a respectable price given that Sotheby’s had estimated it would go for between $700,000 and $900,000. The portrait is from Nolan’s second series of Kelly paintings. While the second series is not ranked as highly as the first series of Kelly pictures, painted by Nolan in the 1940s, anything from the second series is still highly sought after.
It is odd, therefore, that the portrait auctioned last night fetched around the same price as what the National Gallery of Victoria paid two years ago for a Nolan picture from a less popular period and of a less popular subject.  In 2004 the NGV paid $800,000 for Nolan’s Temptation of St Anthony, which a year earlier had featured in an exhibition of Nolan’s desert pictures curated by Geoffrey Smith. The picture belonged to Nolan’s stepdaughter Jinx Nolan. In 2003, when she was midway through a legal battle with Nolan’s widow, her solicitor, Gary Singer, notified the Victorian Supreme Court that he’d been informed by Geoffrey Smith that the St Anthony painting had been insured for $600,000.  A year later the NGV paid $200,000 more than that to take the picture off Jinx’s hands, with the gallery claiming at the time that it got the picture for less than market value. Jinx sold the picture to help pay mounting lawyers bills from a series of unsuccessful court actions against Lady (Mary) Nolan over ownership of three other Nolan paintings.