The unlikely collector
Why did a rugby-loving Christchurch truckie buy 5.5m worth of Goldie paintings — and who will own them next? Kim Knight investigates.
It was a room dedicated to two of the former truck driver’s favourite things. The giant television fuelled his lifetime love of rugby. The paintings that hung either side of the flatscreen were a more recent obsession — six Goldie portraits with a combined worth of at least $5.5 million.
Don’t judge an art collector by his lack of airs and graces.
Neil Graham was the Christchurch-based co-founder of logistics and transport company Mainfreight. He loved cars and rugby and helping people. He famously once rescued a circus elephant. He funded education programmes in Rwanda, shipped in lights for Hagley Park and, according to his son Dean, was just as likely to wear shorts and jandals into a Mercedes dealership as he was to don a suit for a government investiture.
He also loved art and, increasingly, the art of collecting Goldies.
“He had his big-screen TV in the middle of the wall, and then he had all the Goldies on each side,” recalls Dean. “The room was darkish, and the actual paintings were highlighted with pencil-type lights that just lit up the faces and nothing more. It was amazing. You could walk in there and walk up to them and you could see just how good they were. And he really enjoyed that.”
Graham died in 2015. The Goldies have been in storage in Christchurch ever since. While it’s uncertain whether other private collections might rival this one, what is absolutely unprecedented is its upcoming auction.
Next month, Auckland’s Art + Object will attempt to find buyers for the paintings that have a combined top estimate of $8.4m. The sale is believed to be a first. No auction in living memory has boasted this many works by Charles Frederick Goldie, the New Zealand-born artist who lived between 1870 and 1947 and became famous for his highly detailed portraits of Maori.
The six works range from Daydreams: Ngatirea Haupapa, Arawa Tribe ($450,000-$650,000) to Te Aho O Te Rangi, A Noted Waikato Warrior, the auction’s centrepiece and one of the artist’s favourite subjects — his portrait of the same sitter in a bowler hat (in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection) is one of Goldie’s most well-known works. With catalogue estimates of $2m-$3m it will, if it sells, set a new auction record for Goldie.
How did a former truck driver amass a multimillion-dollar art collection? And why did he focus it on Goldie?
Middle child Dean (who made his own headlines recently when he was outed as the mystery “supermarket angel” anonymously paying for people’s groceries and footing their restaurant bills) says his dad liked to collect things — from Maori artefacts to two taxidermied bears to the New Zealand landscape paintings that adorned his walls and, ultimately, the Goldies.
Graham purchased the paintings relatively late in his life. He bought privately and at auction, between 2005-2013. Canvas understands the prized Te Aho O Te Rangi work was acquired around 2010 from a very reluctant seller.
Negotiations took time and persistence; an
Art+Object spokesperson says the final price was “undisclosed”.
Dean: “Look, he was an appreciator of art, period. It grew on him. He’d get one, and then he’d really love it and then he’d look at another one ... he appreciated it more and more, the quality of what he was getting ... he was like a kid with a new ... well, I’ve never seen him with such a smile on his face.
“But he also understood the background of them. He understood the meaning of them. Why and what was painted. He wanted to learn about that.
“He saw it all. He felt it. He appreciated it. He was a very soulful bugger, that’s for sure ... He saw them as being beautiful and being part of our culture, but he also saw them as an investment.”
Neil Graham was a businessman who was inspired to become a truck driver because of a motorcycle accident. In one interview, he recounted his ride home from picking tobacco in Motueka. He was 16, fell asleep and went “over the bridge, through the bridge and down into the river”.
Uninjured, he was rescued by a Kirby Transport driver. Together, the truckie and the teenager winched the motorbike back to the road before Graham jumped in the cab for a lift home. A year later, he had a job with a local transport company. And, by 1979, he owned his own piece of the industry, signing a business partnership with Bruce Plested and opening Mainfreight’s first Christchurch office. In the six months to the end of September 2023, the company reported revenue of $2.36b and a net profit of $124.6m.
Neil stepped down from the Mainfreight board in 2011, due to ill health. He had brain surgery that same year and, a year later, a tumour was removed from his spine. But his 2015 death still came as a shock to many. The 71-year-old had reportedly been making plans to attend the upcoming Rugby World Cup in England; Christchurch Art Gallery had, just a few days earlier, flicked a switch illuminating another of his great philanthropic acts — the purchase of a 46m-long light work by British artist Martin Creed. The large neon letters spelled a message to a city in earthquake recovery mode: “Everything is Going To Be Alright”.
“His health, in the last 15 years or so, wasn’t overly good,” says Dean. “But he was always positive. If there was a positive side to something, he would pick up on that and run with it. He understood the meaning — that everything’s going to be okay, everything’s going to be all right.”
His dad’s gift to the city, says Dean, “was a nobrainer for him”.
The current top auction price for a painting by Goldie is $1.8m. Works by the artist are sought after by private collectors and held in the country’s major art galleries and museums. Dean says he and his brother and sister did not consider donating their father’s collection to a public institution.
“We’ve done a lot of gifting before, and we still do ... we decided as a group, as a family, that we would put them on the market and we would put them on the market together.”
And, as for putting the Goldies on their own walls? “When he died, we put them in storage because we didn’t want to damage them. We didn’t want to sell them, because we didn’t want to get rid of something that was so special to him ... we’ve all got other paintings that we really like. I guess the Goldies were just that next level. We’ve got kids, and kids’ kids. We’d all freak out that someone would spill something ... we were never able to put them into our houses because our houses weren’t the same as what dad had.
“It’s time that someone actually appreciates them for what they really are and puts them on display so they can look at them every day.”
Ben Plumbly, Art + Object director, remembers the first time he met Neil Graham. The auctioneer was behind the hammer at a charity event for Christchurch Art Gallery.
“I’ve done a lot of these fundraising auctions and, to be honest, it can be pretty hard getting people to bid ... They were selling the right for someone to hold a dinner in the re-opened gallery. I think we were hoping to get four or five grand.
“I think I called for an opening bid of $2000 — and he yelled out ‘$18,000’. He was incredibly, exceedingly, generous.”
Graham donated money to bring gorillas to Christchurch’s Orana Park. He paid for the rescue of Mila, the former circus elephant who tragically crushed her keeper to death before being sent to San Diego Zoo. He once bought a $2.8m Aston Martin supercar that was, at the time, believed to be the most expensive car in the country. But he was not, admits Plumbly, an obvious art collector.
“I think it is unusual that someone would collect cars with equal vigour to fine art ... never judge a book by its cover.
“There are two ways to build a great art collection. You’ve either got to be there in the moment, which is not possible in this instance because most of these works are more than 100 years old, or you need to be a person of significant funds to go out there, know what you want, and acquire it. And he certainly did that.”
Art + Object is planning a three-day exhibition of the Goldie paintings in Christchurch, ahead of their auction in Auckland on March 25.
“We understand that these works mean and represent different things to Maori and Pakeha,” says Plumbly. “We’re seeking to acknowledge this through the catalogue [which includes commissioned essays by Maori art historians] and it’s a large part of the reason we’re presenting them to the market together in a standalone catalogue and exhibition, as opposed to splitting them up or selling them privately off-market.”
He says it’s “highly unlikely” one collector will buy all six paintings.
And while it was possible they could have commanded higher prices spread across multiple auctions, the one-off “feels like entirely the right thing to be doing”.
“It would be a great opportunity lost to have just filtered them out privately and quietly, one by one ... With collections, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and I think people are really going to relish the opportunity to come in and see six works by Goldie all together. It’s the right thing to do by Neil, by the artist and the art market.”
Plumbly says while the market has cooled “last year was still the third highest on record”. (Art sales figures show the national turnover of $25.7m in 2020 almost trebled in the following Covidimpacted years. Turnover was $61.9m in 2021 and $62.4m in 2022 but dropped back to $38.5m last year).
“Regardless of the vicissitudes of the market, I think such is the strength of this collection that we could probably hold it in a rural woolshed in Southland and it would go quite well.”
Buyers are likely to be local — under the Protected Objects Act an export licence is required to take significant artworks older than 50 years offshore — but high prices may preclude New Zealand’s public art galleries and museums from bidding.
In Graham’s hometown, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu has, for example, an annual acquisition budget of just $380,000.
“I cannot speak for all public art institutions, but without the support of generous donors, it will always be challenging for Christchurch Art Gallery to acquire significantly high-value works of art,” says director Blair Jackson.
Rebecca Rice, curator of historical New Zealand art at Te Papa, acknowledged that with an annual acquisitions budget of $3m (across all areas of its collection) it was one of the few that might have the means to bid.
“It’s definitely a very unique and remarkable occasion to have six Goldies coming up in one hit,” says Rice.
“Every acquisition proposal we put on the table has to be weighed up in terms of its significance. Its historical significance, its aesthetic significance, how it complements what our current holdings are in terms of that artist or that period, and then that all has to be weighed up against that annual budget and what we have available.
“It’s fair to say that when and if we purchase something of this scale, it does have knock-on effects for other acquisitions that can happen in that annual period.”
Previous big-ticket Te Papa art purchases include Colin McCahon’s Walk (series C) which cost $2.75m in 2004 and A Painting for Uncle Frank ($2m in 2000). In 2010, it paid $1.97m for John Webber’s 1785 painting Poetua. In 1990, the national museum bought two major Goldies using money from the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board and discretionary ministerial funding. Rice wouldn’t comment when asked whether the institution might seek similar assistance to bid in the upcoming auction.
She also said that while Te Papa was “always happy” to bring artworks into a public collection, “private collectors are part of the art ecosystem everywhere ... and they also make significant philanthropic contributions to that ecosystem. We don’t exist without each other.”
The increasingly high prices for works by artists like Goldie did have some positive impacts, Rice said.
“It shifts, I think, where you put your energy. We’re all working really hard to increase representation in our institutions ... we are trying to look at who else is operating and who else we should be bringing into the collections to better represent that art world.
“So, who are the women? Who are the other artists operating who will enrich our understanding of the art of that period? And then there is a flow-on to the collectors — ‘Okay, I can’t afford a Goldie — who else was painting portraits that I’m interested in at that time?’ That’s great because it opens up art history in new and exciting ways.”