Heffel auction shifts to 'digital sale room'
104 pieces of art estimated at $10m to $15m up for bids
Normally hundreds of people turn out to see Heffel art auctions live.
But that's not possible during the COVID-19 pandemic. So David and Robert Heffel have pivoted into a “digital sale room.”
When their next auction happens Dec. 2, the Heffels will be broadcasting online from the Vancouver Convention Centre. But most of the art they're auctioning will be in Toronto — linked to the broadcast digitally.
People will still be able to check out the art at live previews in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, by appointment. The Vancouver preview begins Friday, Oct. 30 and runs to Wednesday, Nov. 4, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.
On auction night, David Heffel said art lovers will be able to compete with “realtime digital bidding, in addition to telephone and absentee bidding.”
It worked just fine in July, when Heffel conducted its first all-digital auction.
“It expands what once was a physical ballroom full of people to a (digital) ballroom full of people in many locations, using digital tools to watch, hear and bid,” said Heffel. “In our first live auctions in Vancouver, we were generating a record audience, with numbers over 500. Now we're four times that with people watching digitally.”
Heffel is also used to selling art to people who aren't physically at the auction.
“By dollar value, over 80 per cent historically has been sold to people participating by telephone bidding,” he said.
The Heffels have also been conducting monthly online auctions for several years.
“We were streaming here at Heffel before Sotheby's and Christie's were at any of their venues globally,” said Heffel. “(But) we like to have strains of traditional elements — we're still using the auctioneer hammers we used in some of our first sales, and our lucky podium.”
He laughs.
“We have two lucky podiums. (So) there's foundations of tradition. We're not reinventing the wheel, we're just putting a Tesla electrified high-horsepower motor behind it.”
There will be 104 works for sale in the auction, which has a presale estimate of $10 million to $15 million.
The highest estimate belongs to a wild Jean Paul Riopelle “dr ip period” abstract from 1953, Sans titre, at $1.2 million to $1.8 million.
But for many British Columbians, the big draw might be a pair of beautiful E.J. Hughes paintings, Steamer Arriving At
Nanaimo (painted in 1950, est. $500,000 to $700,000) and Three Tugboats, Nanaimo Harbour (1952, est. $200,000 to $300,000). Heffel said Steamer Arriving At Nanaimo was one of the Hughes paintings on display at UBC's Faculty Club when the Group of Seven's Lawren Harris took Montreal art dealer Max Stern to lunch there in 1951.
Stern was so impressed he tracked down Hughes on Vancouver Island, with the aid of the RCMP. The timing was
perfect — Hughes was broke.
Former Vancouver Art Gallery curator Ian Thom wrote the catalogue entry for the painting, and said meeting Stern was “a turning point in Hughes's life, because Stern agreed to take on Hughes's work at his gallery.
“More importantly for the financially struggling artist, Stern agreed to buy the paintings outright, thus assuring Hughes of an income.”
The painting itself is a classic Hughes coastal scene — a
Canadian Pacific steamship billowing dark smoke out its funnels as it pulls into the dock, with smaller boats, a lighthouse and islands looming in the background.
The dark blue of the water is reminiscent of the water in Fish Boat, Rivers Inlet, a 1946 Hughes painting that sold for a record $2.04 million in 2018. Three Tugboats, Nanaimo Harbour has lighter colours, more in keeping with his popular coastal scenes in the 1950s and '60s.
Heffel is also very high on Green and Gold, Portrait of Vera, a striking 1933-34 Frederick Horsman Varley painting of his most well-known muse, artist Vera Weatherbie. It's estimated at $500,000 to $700,000.
The fall sale is the 25th anniversary of the first Heffel auction. “Our first live sale was at the Wall Centre in November, 1995,” Heffel recalls. “We had a fabulous Alex Colville, Dog and Groom, on the cover (of the catalogue). In fact we often say that was the sale we had the most fun at, because we were just rookies out of the box.”
The Heffel brothers had taken over the Heffel gallery at 2247 Granville after its founder, their father Ken, died of a heart attack on Oct. 13, 1987. He was only 53.
“Our dad had sort of had $3 to $5 million annual sale years (in the 80s), which were big numbers back then,” said Heffel, 58. “We were fluctuating around a million dollars in annual sales through our gallery (in the early '90s). But when we introduced the auction model to our business model, we doubled our sales.”
The Heffel auction grew and within a few years the Heffel brothers were Canada's top art auction house.
“Our goal when we launched into the auction world was to achieve a million auction within the first five years, with sales once a year,” said Heffel. “We achieved a million dollar sale right out of the gate with our first sale, which was part of the reason we had so much fun.”