If it’s too good to be true . . .
AMcCahon sold at auction for less than $ 17k? Kim Knight smells a rat
id someone just get the art deal of the century — or was the bargain basement sale of works labelled Colin McCahon and Gordon Walters too good to be true?
Experts here are questioning the authenticity of two items that went under the hammer in East Sussex, England, earlier this month.
Eastbourne Auctions bills itself as a 21- year- old family- run business “offering everything from a masterpiece to the kitchen sink”. This month its fine arts catalogue included an apparent Kiwi connection.
Lot 888 was described as an acrylic on canvas board, “inscribed and labelled ‘ Colin McCahon 1978 Truth from the King Country, Load Bearing Structure — Large Eight’ ” with an auctioneer’s estimate of £ 200- 300 ($ 350-$ 530).
In New Zealand, an authentic painting from that series would sell for between $ 50,000-$ 100,000. At Eastbourne Auction’s high- ceiling brick and steel warehouse an hour’s drive from London, it went for £ 9500 ($ 16,800).
Minutes later, Lot 923, a gauche and collage work listed as a “yellow and black Kosu [ sic], bearing a signature Gordon Walters ’ 75 ” fell for £ 6000 ($ 10,600) — well above the auctioneer’s estimate of £ 50-£ 80, but a far cry from the $ 20,000 an authentic Walters collage could fetch here.
How did artworks with the signatures of two of New Zealand’s greatest painters come to be selling dirt- cheap at a provincial auction house in the United Kingdom? Where did they come from? And are they genuine?
The Weekend Herald contacted Eastbourne Auctions last week. Over the phone, an employee acknowledged the receipt of emailed questions, but the business has, so far, failed to respond.
Meanwhile, based on the online catalogue images and comparisons to other work by the artists from the same period, experts have told the Weekend Herald the so- called Walters i s “unequivocally” a fake, and the McCahon likely to be one too — but all were puzzled by a sage- green label affixed to the back of both works.
The label, in spindly art deco font, advertises Tasman Gallery, a Christchurch- based art dealership and picture framing business operated nearly four decades ago by Colin K. Ritchie.
Ritchie died in 1988. A former employee, who did not wish to be named, confirmed the green label was in use by the Tasman Gallery’s framing workshop until the early 1980s. She said although “many hundreds” of works brought in for framing would have been stickered, the label was not affixed to works handled by the sales side of the business which specialised in older New Zealand landscapes, rather than the contemporary abstract art of the likes of McCahon and Walters.
Colin McCahon is regarded as this country’s most important contemporary painter. An online project to catalogue his complete works, dating from the mid- 1930s to the early 1980s, contains more than 1000 entries. It includes numerous paintings from The Truth from The King Country series, which included six sub- series, each of multiple works. There is, however, no record of a “Large — 8”.
Peter Simpson, who has written books on McCahon, says the database is incomplete, but its descriptions of other paintings from the “large” series call the UK sale into question.
The work auctioned in Eastbourne had a white backing with an inscription in the manner of McCahon’s distinctive cursive font. By contrast, the reverse of authenticated “large” paintings, as listed on the McCahon database, are inscribed in block letters. One original, viewed last week by the Weekend Herald, was black