Detail from Country Club by Quebec painter Jean-Paul Lemieux that was sold for more than $1-million at a live auction in Toronto on Nov. 28, 2011.
Quebec painter Jean-Paul Lemieux has been dead for 21 years. Which is too bad because if he were alive, instead of dead at 86, 2011 would be a banner year.
Monday evening at a live auction in Toronto, Sotheby's Canada sold a canvas Lemieux completed in 1972 for an impressive $1.095-million, including buyer's premium. What made the sale of Country Club – a light-hearted tableau of two affluent ladies at lunch –even more impressive was that it's the third Lemieux canvas to sell for more than $1-million this year. Last week, also in Toronto, Heffel Fine Art set a new auction record for the Quebecois master, unloading his 1970 masterpiece Nineteen Ten Remembered for $2.34-million. That smashed the old record of $1.024-million Heffel had set only six months before with Les Moniales. While auction interest in Mr. Lemieux has been building in the last two or three years, clearly it is peaking now.
It was this success and that of another deceased Quebec master, J.W. Morrice (1865-1924), that powered Sotheby's performance at the Royal Ontario Museum. Selling about 130 of the 182 lots it had been consigned for bidding, it was able to report at auction's end a total sale of close to $8-million on a pre-sale estimate of $4.7-million to $6.6-million (premium excluded). Contributing mightily to the tally was Evening Stroll, Venice, an oil Mr. Morrice painted in the early 20th century, that fetched almost $1.5-million – the result of a heated bidding battle between two titans of the Canadian art market, Winnipeg-based gallerist David Loch (and former confidant of the late Kenneth Thomson) and Toronto collector Ash Prakash (who has been known to bid on behalf of Mr. Thomson's son, David). It was Mr. Prakash who finally prevailed.
In fact, Mr. Prakash bought the other two Morrice's on offer – a small oil sketch, titled Venice, that sold for $82,000 (est. $50,000-$80,000) and a French garden scene, consigned by a New York collector, that went for $232,500 (est. $200,000-$300,000). He followed these triumphs minutes later by purchasing a 1920 water-colour by David Milne, Kelly Ore Bed, for $244,000, an auction record for the artist in that medium.
On the contemporary side of the spectrum, there's been a big push to brighten the fortunes at auction of Painters Eleven, the loosely knit collective of Toronto artists from the 1950s and early '60s. Sotheby's enjoyed strong results from some of its members, most notably Jack Bush whose abstraction On the Nose sold for $175,000, and Kazuo Nakamura whose Core Waves, from 1961, went for $94,500, almost double the old Nakamura record established in 2006.
Works by perennial favourite Alex Colville, who turns 92 next year, also proved popular. Two paintings from the 1950s, Cattle Show and Woman, Jockey and Horse, both consigned by the same New York collector, together earned $660,500.
Monday's auction began about 10 minutes later than its scheduled start as attendees had to wend their way through an information picket outside ROM that had been set up by supporters of art handlers at Sotheby's New York who have been locked-out for the last 18 weeks. Clients for the auction also had to receive a ticket and register before being permitted into ROM's Currelly Hall. No disruptions occurred during the auction.