Apartment v painting of apartment: which wins the price rise race?
Since when is art a better investment than real estate?
Answer: when it’s Howard Arkley’s luminous painting O.Y.O. Flats, which just sold for more than one of the apartments in the real-life apartment block it depicts.
O.Y.O. Flats was inspired by 867 Rathdowne Street in Melbourne’s suburb of Carlton North. As viewed on Google street view, the property is a seemingly unremarkable building with a Federation cottage at either elbow.
But the block was singled out for Arkley’s eye-popping fluoro treatment when he painted it in 1987 in pinks, blues, orange and green, giving it a modernist monumentality that recalls in miniature the facade of Le Corbusier’s famous 1952 housing block, Unite d’Habitation in Marseille.
O.Y.O. Flats has actually performed better, financially speaking, than the units in the Carlton North block itself.
The painting fetched $12,500 through Sotheby’s in Melbourne in 1994.
Just a few years later, in 1999, flat number 7 at 867 Rathdowne Street changed hands for $193,000.
Fast-track to last Wednesday, when O.Y.O. Flats sold for $937,500 (including 25 per cent buyer’s premium, as do all art prices in this report) at Deutscher + Hackett’s final major sale of the year in Melbourne. Now compare that price with the $750,000 fetched for flat number 7 in September 2024.
It’s the kind of appreciation in value that auctioneers live and breathe for, but rarely get.
Not to say there weren’t other good prices achieved in the Deutscher + Hackett auction. The evening’s top price was $2,312,500 for Australian artist John Peter Russell’s painting, Portrait of Dodge Macknight, c.1888, whose estimate was a much lower $1 million to $1.5 million.
Portrait of Dodge Macknight went into a private collection, auction house chairman Damian Hackett told Saleroom.
Second-top price of the sale was fetched by another Arkley. The freeway, 1999, described by Deutscher + Hackett as the late artist’s final masterpiece, sold for $1,875,000 against its estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million. And rounding out a strong night for Arkley, his Arrows and crosses, 1980, which is exactly what its name suggests, sold for $159,545 on an estimate of $50,000 to $70,000.
Jeffrey Smart’s Night stop, Bombay, 1981, fetched $1,625,000, which was the artist’s second-highest price at auction.
O.Y.O. Flats came in at number four, and John Olsen’s painting, Flooded river, Kimberley, 1983, came in fifth at $450,000.
Flooded river, Kimberley was a “beautiful example” of Olsen’s calligraphic style and aerial perspective, Hackett said.
The painting was helped by having featured in Olsen’s solo exhibition, The Land Beyond Time, which toured nationally between 1983 and 1990. Measuring 167 x 152 cm, it was also a lot of oil paint and canvas.
A triptych by James Gleeson that closes up, cabinet-style, to protect the more easily embarrassed visitors from the shock of so much naked male flesh also attracted attention.
Spain II, 1959-61, fetched a bullish $143,750 against an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000.
“Gleeson’s market has been soft, or let’s say it has been stronger in the past,” Hackett said.
“However a work like this comes out and it really attracted interest and fascination by the audience.”
In fact, so many people “saved” Spain II on the auction website that Deutscher + Hackett staff began referring to it as “clickbait”.
As to what Gleeson himself would think of being clickbait, we’ll never know. Gleeson died in 2008, a very correct and gentlemanly person whose outward persona belied the psychologically charged images that poured on to his paper and canvases.
That’s it for Deutscher + Hackett this year, barring their online auction which closes on Tuesday. It’s a mixed auction with some “nice stocking fillers”, Hackett said.