by NOEL MURPHY
GEELONG property continues to fetch some of the highest prices on the market – the art market that is.
The $2.287 million fetched by the Fred Williams’ painting You Yangs Landscape 1 was the highest single price fetched at the recent record-breaking auction of TV impresario Reg Grundy’s private collection.
The Williams 1963 masterpiece is an abstract expression in the highly-stylised form for which the artist has become renowned. Flecks of dark and light tones are peppered across an ochre plainscape.
Put under the hammer by international auctioneers Bonhams, the work was expected to draw between $1.5 million and $2 million but outstripped that by another quarter million dollars.
The Grundy collection fetched a total of $19.16 million, making it the most valuable single-owner art auction ever held in Australia. The result surpassed the previous record held by the Harold E. Mertz Collection which sold in 2000 for $15.9 million.
Fred Williams, who died in 1982, is considered one of Australia’s greatest artists. His landscapes re-imagined traditional composition, adopting a kind of Aboriginal approach and tilting the landscape.
His You Yangs series, showing trees and other features as if observed from the air, were painted at the peak of his career.
Geelong Gallery director Geoffrey Edwards said Williams’ landscapes hovered between the abstract and very effectively representing the landscape.
“He makes you think, his paintings are happy pictorial puzzles,” he told the Independent before the auction.
“But the more you look into it, as anyone who’s looked out an aircraft window and seen a big Fred Williams painting, it’s so clever.”
