Smith & Singer In the News

Broadsheet  |  Annelise Answerth

An anonymous couple from central Victoria has donated $250,000 to keep the Castlemaine Art Museum open, after the regional institution announced it would close indefinitely next week due to lack of funding.

Sotheby’s Australia is pleased to announce that it has facilitated an anonymous donation to the Castlemaine Art Museum so it can remain open.  In response to the recent announcement that Castlemaine Art Museum was scheduled for closure on 11 August, friends and clients of Sotheby’s Australia approached them with the request to facilitate a significant financial donation to ensure that the Museum remains open.  The benefactors wish to remain anonymous.  This donation is provided to support the Museum’s operating costs, together with the removal of the current admission fee, to ensure that the public has free access to this valuable and unique national asset.

Castlemaine Art Museum has long been integral to Australia’s cultural heritage.  The collection contains many significant works of art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has been the beneficiary of numerous gifts and bequests for almost a century.  The institution provides much needed access to the visual arts in regional Victoria.

Sotheby’s Australia shares a rich and distinguished history of supporting and nurturing the visual and broader arts in Australia, including scholarly research, curating exhibitions, and assisting public institutions in acquisitions, exhibitions, loan requests, and the gift of works of art and financial support.

Sotheby’s Australia hopes that this generous donation to the Castlemaine Art Museum will encourage others to support the institution in financial and non-financial ways that will secure its long-term future.  We look forward to Castlemaine Art Museum regaining its rightful position as a pre-eminent local, state and national cultural destination and will provide the board with our full support.

In the words of our clients:

We are delighted to be able to lend our support to keep the Castlemaine Art Museum operating during this difficult period of restructuring.  We are a couple from Central Victoria with family links in the district and have been frequent visitors to both the town and the Museum.

We see this donation as an opportunity to secure the Museum’s long-term future and develop it as one of the premium provincial museums in Australia.  Our initial donation of $250,000 over two years will be supplemented by further donations to support exhibitions during this time.  Our commitment of financial support beyond 2019 will depend on the level of support and engagement from the community as a whole and Mount Alexander Shire Council in particular.

We believe this is a great opportunity to grow the Museum, raise its national profile and make it a ‘must visit’ destination.  We urge the Shire Council, local business and the Castlemaine community to take this opportunity to make a commitment to the museum’s future by supporting the Board in its endeavours.

Castlemaine is blessed with a wonderful museum building and a fabulous collection.  Let’s work together to make sure it remains a vibrant and important part of Castlemaine’s future.

‘Sotheby’s Australia hopes that this generous donation to the Castlemaine Art Museum will encourage others to support the institution in financial and non-financial ways that will secure its long-term future.  We look forward to Castlemaine Art Museum regaining its rightful position as a pre-eminent local, state and national cultural destination and will provide the board with our full support.’
Geoffrey Smith, Chairman & Gary Singer, Chief Executive Officer, Sotheby’s Australia

ArtsHub  |  Gina Fairley

An injection of $300,000 in donations has kept CAM’s doors open for a little longer, but staffing remains uncertain for the Victorian gallery.

ABC Radio Australia  | Stephanie Corsetti

With the Castlemaine Art Museum in central Victoria due to close on August 11, hundreds of locals at a meeting are told an eleventh-hour lifeline means the landmark will remain open.

The Age  |  Carolyn Webb

Syndicated: Brisbane Times, Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, WA Today

Shock and anger at the closure of the 104-year-old Castlemaine Art Museum turned to joy on Wednesday night.

White knight private donors have pledged $300,000 to save the key Castlemaine tourist attraction, which was slated for closure after the board said it had insufficient funds to continue operating.

The Australian

Andrew Marks remembers the occasion but not the art. It was 1965, and he was with family in the upmarket Melbourne suburb of Toorak for the 100th birthday party of his great-grandmother, Esther Abrahams.

Acquired directly from the artist’s solo exhibition in Adelaide in 1953, The Pink 1953 was recently included in the comprehensive Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art where, with the assistance of Sotheby’s Australia, it was fully catalogued and reproduced for the first time.  During the process another painting of a schoolgirl at Kooyong Stadium was revealed on the reverse and is reproduced for the first time by Sotheby’s Australia.

One of the most subtle and beautiful touches in The Pink – and its companion composition There Was (sold Sotheby’s Australia for $840,000 May 2012) – is the careful placement of the delicate flower in the schoolgirls’ hand.  In an overall monotone composition, this burst of pink enhances the dreamlike quality of the work.  It underscores the painting’s tone of emotional fragility, its sense of imminent collapse – or flight.

Like much of Blackman’s work, the Schoolgirl series has its origin in a synthesis of real-world experience and literary inspiration.  In the early 1950s, Charles and Barbara Blackman were living in Hawthorn, and Charles would see flocks of independent schoolgirls in uniform in the streets of the neighbourhood and when walking to his casual gardening jobs.  The imagery of everyday experience was focused, highlighted and shadowed in the artist’s imagination by the story of the Gun Alley Murder of 1921, in which a 12 year old girl was raped and strangled in a city laneway this dark occurrence echoed another, recent murder closer to home, the bashing of his wife’s university friend Betty Shanks. 

‘The Pink is one of the most significant images from the artist’s schoolgirl series ever offered for auction.  Blackman’s Schoolgirl paintings are sensitive, powerful explorations of childhood.  In urgent, streaky brushstrokes, in baby pinks and blues or in steely, near-monochrome grey-greens and pale ochres, Blackman’s schoolgirls dance and float and cast their long shadows across claustrophobic inner city lanes and agoraphobic emptiness.  We were thrilled to discover another painting on the verso of The Pink, a previously unknown work by the artist.  We are honoured to be entrusted with such an important work by one of Australia’s greatest living artists' said Geoffrey Smith, Chairman of Sotheby's Australia.

Works from Charles Blackman’s Schoolgirl series are held in Australia’s major public collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Parliament House Collection, Canberra; and TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria.

pictured above:
Verso: Charles Blackman, The Pink 1953.
© Charles Blackman. Licenced by VISCOPY Ltd, Australia

Pictured main:
Charles Blackman, The Pink 1953
© Charles Blackman. Licenced by VISCOPY Ltd, Australia

Australian Financial Review | Peter Fish

A large Arthur Boyd oil which has twice attracted public admiration and two Brett Whiteley views of Sydney's Lavender Bay, where the artist lived from the 1970s, are among the highlights of a sale next month.

The Australian Financial Review | Peter Fish

A Demetre Chiparus bronze and ivory sculpture of a scantily clad woman 67cm high, Antinea, scored equal top price at a Sotheby's sale of Australian and European art and design in Sydney last week.

Australian Financial Review | Peter Fish

Paintings by John Perceval and Rupert Bunny and a Chiparus bronze and ivory figure stand out at Sotheby's Australia's upcoming sale of Asian, Australian and European arts and design.