Arkley’s freeway races out of the boardroom trailing a hefty price tag
Roger Wood, of Wood Marsh architects in Melbourne, knows the frustration when people come to him with rigid design concepts in mind for the home of their dreams.
“It’s slightly questionable when clients come in with Time magazines with Post-it notes everywhere, having come to us to design a house for them,” Wood said with a chuckle.
So, when Wood and his business partner Randal Marsh commissioned a painting from their friend Howard Arkley, they instinctively knew not to interfere in the creative process.
The pair only requested that the picture should be of a freeway, since they wanted to commemorate their recent success in being awarded the Victorian Architecture Medal for their work on Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway extension in 1995.
“The best commission is always when it’s left to the artist, and that’s exactly what we did (with Arkley) both in scale and colour and everything,” Wood told Saleroom.
Arkley’s commissioned painting, delivered two years later, was The freeway, 1999.
The cinemascopic work, measuring 150 cm x 366 cm, depicts the looping sweep of a highway bridge as it crosses a lesser road on its way in and out of the city that crouches in the distance.
The picture has hung in Wood Marsh’s boardroom since 1999 but will now be offered for sale in Deutscher + Hackett’s Important Australian and International Fine Art auction in Melbourne on November 26.
The freeway carries a pre-sale estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million – the highest estimate in the sale. If it hammers at the top of that range it would join two other Arkley works that have sold for $2 million, or $2.55 million with buyer’s premium, this year. The combined total estimates of all 59 artworks in the auction catalogue are $7,927,500 to $11,011,000.
The freeway was to be Arkley’s last major work, on a subject he was keen to explore further.
On his way back to Australia from the Venice Biennale in 1999, where he represented Australia, Arkley went to Los Angeles for his first international commercial show at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery.
Travelling with his friend, the Melbourne artist Callum Morton, Arkley shot numerous photographs of LA’s characteristic tangle of freeways.
“At one point, I remember, he ran across all four lanes of the Glendale Freeway, that skinny body flailing across the asphalt and me with my hand over my eyes,” Morton once recalled. But within days of returning to his Melbourne studio, Arkley was dead of a drug overdose.
Roger Wood is still upset at the memory of that time.
“It was terribly sad because my understanding was he’d been clean for a couple of years and had great global success and went to a gallery in LA and that was a sellout, so he came home on top of the world,” Wood said.
As to why Wood Marsh is selling The freeway, Wood said: “It’s simply that we’ve had it for 25 years and we’d like other people to have the opportunity to see it”.
Elsewhere in the Deutscher + Hackett auction, and with the second-highest estimate ($1.4 million to $1.8 million) is Jeffrey Smart’s deceptively simple Night stop, Bombay, 1981. The buyer of this painting will also receive a sketch for the work with hand notations by the artist pertaining to composition and colour.
The third-highest estimate ($1 million to $1.5 million) is attached to a portrait by Australian artist John Peter Russell that was once praised by no less a figure than Vincent van Gogh.
Portrait of Dodge Macknight, c.1888, was “perfection”, the Dutchman wrote in a letter to Russell on April 19, 1888. Van Gogh was writing from Arles, where he was living in the south of France.
Russell, Van Gogh and American artist Dodge Macknight all became friends in the 1880s when they were studying under the great French painter Fernand Cormon at his famous studio in Montmartre.
In 1886, Russell painted his Portrait of Vincent van Gogh and the likeness pleased Van Gogh so much that he wrote to his brother Theo: “Take good care of my portrait by Russell which I hold so dear”. Portrait of Vincent van Gogh now hangs in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Around 1888, Russell also painted Macknight, who was Russell’s junior by only two years. Macknight later left Europe and returned to the US village of East Sandwich, Massachusetts, where the portrait hung in his comfortable home, The Hedges, until his death in 1950.
Macknight’s wife and son predeceased him, so he left the portrait to his sister-in-law, Elise Queyrel, who had lived with the family. The picture passed down by family descent until 2007 when Deutscher + Hackett sold it for a shade under $250,000 to a private collection in Melbourne. That private collection is the present vendor.
Another fascinating work in the November 27 auction is Australian Surrealist painter James Gleeson’s Spain II, 1959-61, a searing depiction referencing the Crucifixion, figures in Purgatory, hooded penitents, Spanish bullfighting and a woman’s flayed body.
Spain II was commissioned from Gleeson by Honor Smith, wife of Edward M. Smith who had tutored Gleeson in art in the 1930s at East Sydney Tech. The picture is now being sold from a private collection in Melbourne.
Spain II is estimated at $80,000 to $120,000 and is remarkable for its construction. It resembles an altarpiece, with two end panels that fold in to conceal the imagery.
A tapestry by Arthur Boyd in the auction foreshadows the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition next year of the artist’s series of 20 tapestries on the theme of St Francis of Assisi.
Cloud, 1969 (estimate $30,000 to $40,000) was among the first tapestries to be woven from Boyd’s paintings. Like the later St Francis tapestry cycle, Cloud was made by the master weavers at the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre, in Portugal.