Queensland Art Gallery Presscuttings Book 1 : Presscuttings, 1959-1962

"POST" - Melbourne, Vic. 4 * ABOVE: ,,Do 1 hear another bid?" asks Mr Peter Wilson, chairman of the famous Soth- eby's Saleroom, London. He showed no surprise when the bidding reached £40,000 for Ibis Paul Cesanne painting. * BELOW: The highest price ever paid for a picture by a living artist - 155,000 for this Picasso nude-made the picture the property of the Queensland Art Gallery. It was bought overseas in 1959. Fortunes grow on walls as a rich men's hobby_ pays huge dividends * IT doesn't matter if you think a Rembrandt is a musi- cal instrument or Picasso is an Italian seaport - or whether the Central Austra- lian landscapes of Albert Nansatjira look better to you than the nudes of Norman Lindsay or the portraits of William Dobell - you can make a fortune out of art. You can enjoy yourself while you're doing it, just sitting back admiring the pictures hanging on your walls while their value mounts daily. Of course it's not as easy as it sounds. There is the little matter of the capital necessary to buy those pictures in the first place. That can cost a fortune; but as a formula for making the rich richer, it works like a charm. Overseas, buyers who have been called "the blank -cheque connois- seurs" are Investing huge sums in the purchase of pictures which may have little, If any, appeal to them as pictures. They see them as a sure-fire method of making money from a trade which has a certain glamor and distinction to It - as well as being fantastically lucrative. Here In Australia, opportunities for art dealing on the grand scale are limited by our distance from the recognised world markets, hut In London the dealers are enjoy- ing a 20th century bonanza. English writer Douglas Fairey has taken a keen - and sometimes cynical - look at the situation. He has this to say about It: Take a tip from the old masters of the art market - buy now and buy big. You'll be following men who know how to make the bawbees grow, millionaires like Paul Getty, Aristotle Onassis, Stavros Niarchos and Neils Onstad (Sonja Henie's husband.) Here's how it's done. First, pick your picture. ( There's a Canaletto going cheap right now in Speelman's Galleries. Piccadilly. It is called "View of the Piazza San Marco, Venice" and it's yuurs for 125,000). Then hang it on your wall. You are already one up on the neigh- bors, and that alone is worth a pound or two of anybody's money. Next, let it be known that you have it, but that you wouldn't part with it for worlds. This sends the price up. Your investment has already begun to pay dividends. Any financial expert will tell you that the value of your picture will increase more steadily and more hmir beyond price surely than any other form of in- vestment. You don't have to worry about strikes, revolutions, Common Markets or the vagaries of the world copper yield. Just sit back and gaze at your Canaletto (it's not hard to look at) and think of the money you are making. Even if you happen to grow fond of your paint -and-canvas piece of oneupmanship and can't bring yourself to part with it, you still don't lose. When you die your painting will almost certainly be admitted to probate for what you paid for it. In other words, paintings Just aren't art any more. They are an investment and a snob symbol. They are as much a part of inter - CONTINUED OVERLEAF Australasian POST, lune 14, 1952.-Pane I1