Rivkin's Art Sale Pricing Bears A Few Surprises

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday May 19, 2001

Peter Fish

Mr Rene Rivkin, a prominent business pundit and acknowledged astute trader, appears to be underpricing some of the artworks to be offered at a gala auction at the Art Gallery of NSW on June 3.

Mr Rivkin is selling the contents of his former Bellevue Hill home and moving to Point Piper, where he plans to refurnish in a different style.

The auction, which includes a big array of paintings, antique furniture, sculpture and decorative items, is expected to raise more than $10 million, with additional artworks worth several million dollars to be sent overseas for sale.

The catalogue for the Rivkin sale emerged this week, and the estimates given show that expectations on some of the top items are below or in line with what Mr Rivkin paid for them more than 10 years ago.

Among these are Sir William Dobell's signed oil, ``Wangi Boy", which is one of Australia's best-known images, Walter Withers's ``Morning Mist, Eltham", and a grand English double-domed bureau cabinet in exotic field maple which dates from around 1700.

Wangi Boy carries an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000 in the catalogue. It last changed hands at auction at Sotheby's in 1987 for $264,000 fractionally above its lower estimate today. It was previously owned by Mr James Fairfax, a former chief executive of the Fairfax newspaper group and a noted art connoisseur.

Another version of Wangi Boy, a larger but later (and unsigned) work, changed hands for $497,500 in 1998, and it seems the two paintings are sometimes confused. This Wangi Boy originally came from the Darrell Lee estate and has passed through the hands of Tempo Services' art-loving chairman Mr John Schaeffer.

The Withers painting is estimated at $120,000 to $180,000, though Rivkin paid $418,000 for it in 1987.

As for the bureau cabinet, it has an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000, though it was reportedly priced at #134,000 (currently $360,000) when Mr Rivkin bought it at London's prestigious Grosvenor House fair early in 1988.

Estimates normally reflect a compromise between the vendor's sometimes optimistic expectations for an artwork and the auctioneers' more sober view of what the market might pay for it. The lower end of the estimated range is often the lowest figure the vendor will accept, which is known as the reserve.

In the auction world, pitching estimates is something of an art in itself an ambitious ``ask" can put buyers off.

So the puzzle with the Rivkin art is whether the apparently low estimates are there as a bait to lure in more buyers, or simply reflect a genuine desire to clear the goods out, with price a secondary factor.

Of course Mr Rivkin, with a reputation as a big spender, may have been happy to have paid over the odds back in the ``bubble" days of the late 1980s especially as at the time he was involved in an art gallery venture known as Artmet.

Even after the sharemarket hit the wall in October 1987, art prices continued to boom for a while underpinned by Mr Alan Bond's purchase of Van Gogh's ``Irises" for an unprecedented $US53.9 million within weeks of the crash.