BC Business
Michael Audain | BCBusinessMichael Audain's esteemed collection is defined by his personal experiences and taste.
Art collecting comes of age in Vancouver as adrenaline-propelled auctions and a new-found appreciation of local subject matter drive prices skyward.
Michael Audain | BCBusinessMichael Audain’s esteemed collection is defined by his personal experiences and taste.
For the moment, Michael Audain, 75, the CEO of Polygon Homes Ltd. and one of Canada’s most prestigious art collectors, is crouched behind one of his office’s leather couches, his head barely visible. He cowers as he recalls an incident from many years ago involving incoming buckshot and his simultaneous attempt to restrain his over-zealous retriever, Janet, from getting blasted by angry duck hunters across a river. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!” exclaims Audain, flinching. Between the couch and the imagined hunters – and filling one entire wall of his office – is a humungous and moody Takao Tanabe landscape painting depicting the Pacific estuary of B.C.’s Jordan River, its distant bank once the real source of both the hunters’ buckshot and the vividly recalled threats to kill Audain’s dog, were it to steal any more of the men’s newly bagged ducks. “I was 10. I’d never heard such swearing! I thought they’d shoot me. So when I saw this painting at an Equinox Gallery opening 10 years ago, I asked Takao if it was the Jordan River. He said, ‘Yeah.’ I had to have it. It spoke to me.” And Audain, rising from his mimed storytelling, laughs aloud at the understatement. Outside Audain’s ninth-floor office windows overlooking False Creek, the Vancouver sky is as leaden as the grey Tanabe landscape. But a few blocks to the west, down at street level along south Granville Street, those involved with the province’s art business – people like art auction show-runners Robert and David Heffel – are not the least gloomy. They’ve watched the economic indicators gyrate wildly in recent years as clients’ investment portfolios took a major hit, condo sales slumped and dire financial news emanated from Europe. But it’s the observation from dealers along Granville Street that among those in B.C. who have deep pockets, the 2008-2009 recession and continuing economic uncertainty have not hurt the art market. On the contrary; judging by what’s being acquired, who’s doing the buying, which artists are being sought and what’s being paid, art is the new gold.
Climb the stairs of the Heffels’ Fine Art Auction House, one of 18 exhibition spaces on south Granville’s gallery row, and there sit Robert, 47, and his brother David, 49, who have been Vancouver-based art dealers for half their lives. Since 1995, when their live art auctions began, these two men have transformed the previously somnolent Canadian art world. As a result of their news-making, biannual auctions, the prices of the country’s top-end paintings have skyrocketed, with individual Emily Carrs or Lawren Harrises topping $1 million, and total Heffel sales topping $275 million. (They take 17 per cent of each artwork’s hammer price.)
Seated in Robert’s office between Gordon Smith’s massive snowscape entitled Whistler #2-J and a small Toronto streetscape by Lawren Harris titled In the Ward, the Heffel brothers explain how it is that the Canadian art market, and to an even greater extent the B.C. art market, have prospered. Says Robert: “In relation to other G8 countries, Canadian art has been seriously undervalued. That’s because of the youth of the country. There’s no lengthy tradition of art patronage. Serious buyers would go to New York or London to shop. So prices are low, even for major Canadian painters. You can buy . . .” he pauses to point over his shoulder before continuing, “a Lawren Harris for, say, $500,000. For a top European artist: $40 million. For a top American artist: $60 million. That means great Canadian art sells for 40 to 50 times less than comparable European or American art.”
But, he adds, with recent art auction prices doubling or tripling pre-auction estimates, those days are gradually disappearing. In recent sales, a Lawren Harris semi-abstract painting of Mount Robson, estimated to sell at auction for around $400,000, went for $1.8 million, and a Sybil Andrews print titled Speedway sold at auction in 1996 for $8,500, and resold a decade later for $52,000.
When the recession hit in 2008, unlike dealers in other international art markets B.C.’s art dealers barely noticed; there was a small slump then a quick recovery. Elsewhere, collectors sought liquidity by dumping their art, flooding the high-end art market and forcing dealers in places like New York to discount prices by 20 per cent. Some collectors sold privately for fear of precipitating a run on the artist’s valuation. Throughout most of the G8 countries, in fact, volatility in the art market still rules. However, in B.C. different forces have come into play in the past decade or so, not the least being the regular live and online auctions the Heffels have instituted, but also including an explosion of interest in relatively inexpensive, post-war contemporary art, the rise of West Coast regionalism and the fact that both Heffels now carry business cards printed in the province’s two major languages: English and Chinese. [pagebreak]
Where there’s writing on the wall about the prospects of the B.C. art business, it’s often being written in Chinese. At the Heffels’ gallery, the new receptionist speaks Cantonese, and a lot of the revenue from the Heffel brothers’ monthly online international auction comes, they report, from Hong Kong and mainland China. By most dealers’ accounts, it’s this money, located offshore and in the pockets of the province’s Asian immigrants, that’s currently helping propel B.C.’s art market upward.
As the Vancouver Art Gallery’s senior curator of historic art and the author of 15 books, Ian Thom has been an important figure in the province’s cultural life since 1988, and has watched as the province struggled to escape its resource-based, landscape-infused destiny. He quotes former Globe and Mail editor William Thorsell’s contemptuous description of B.C. – “All beauty and no brains” – to suggest how the province, far removed from the critical ferment of New York or London, until recently was known to have a parochial arts scene. Prettiness has often ruled, Thom says; for many, if a painting wasn’t decorative – if it didn’t, say, have trees – it wasn’t considered real art.
But, according to Thom, that began changing when, amid the excitement of the Heffels’ adrenaline-propelled auctions, Ontario-based Group of Seven paintings began selling for $1 million and more. Wealthy, younger-generation B.C. collectors, realizing that the diminishing supply of pre-war art was forcing prices skyward, sought less stratospheric ways to decorate their homes and offices. These art buyers began turning away from Canadian landscapes toward less expensive and more intellectually challenging post-war abstraction. A great Jack Shadbolt or Gordon Smith could be had for a fraction of the price of an A.Y. Jackson. What’s more, the work often reflected this region, its vitality and aesthetics, and not Ontario. “Younger people,” says Thom, “started buying from their youth, from their own West Coast experiences, not from their fathers’ youth and experiences.”
Another critical factor propelling the B.C. art market is the increased use of the Internet, both as an educational and as a marketing and sales tool. At Vancouver’s 47-year-old Bau-Xi Gallery, owner Xisa Huang sits amid a roomful of vaguely figurative, mixed-media, photo-painted, pixelated and conceptual art. It’s an explosion of abstracted shapes and Crayola colours. “Landscapes still figure strongly in our psyche,” says Huang of British Columbians. “That will continue. But you live in a big city, you allow yourself to be educated in modern art trends and contemporary artists’ work, and you acquire a more cerebral, more abstracted view. That’s what’s happening now.” What’s really different these days, Huang reports, is that younger, hipper, media-savvy clients are using Bau-Xi’s online gallery to bookmark an artist they find there, then receive an e-vite to follow the artist online, then an invitation to his or her next in-gallery opening. Fifty per cent of her clients now shop this way. (Other gallery owners report similar patterns. In fact, Diane Farris’s celebrated south Granville gallery is now closed and exists only online.)
Across town amid the jumble of rip-rap, fireweed and deserted industrial buildings that cover Vancouver’s False Creek flats, Andy Sylvester, owner and director of Granville Street’s 40-year-old Equinox Gallery, occupies the makeshift office of his brand new baby, the 12,000-square-foot Equinox Project Space. Sylvester has converted an old Finning tractor plant into a vast gallery, and awaits confirmation that Emily Carr University of Art and Design is abandoning its tight Granville Island location for a new campus site next door. Like other leading figures in the province’s art world, Sylvester sees a curious trend in art consumption these days. “Like timber, like art,” he says of B.C., “we’re in a period of global change. After the recession, our U.S. art business went down dramatically. But our business with China and with recent immigrants from China is way up. It’s a paradigm of the way the world’s going.”
Outside the door as he talks, dozens of visitors, many of them Asian, pause to inspect the Fred Herzog photographs on the new gallery’s walls. They linger long in animated Cantonese discussion at Herzog’s many ’50s and ’60s images of Vancouver’s Chinatown and its residents. It’s Sylvester’s observation that these new buyers, both educated and moneyed, are seeking, in part, to establish a cultural foothold in B.C., and that a $4,000 photo by Herzog or a $35,000 canvas by Shadbolt provides them with the sense of having arrived, in both meanings of the word.
Like many major B.C. art collectors, Raymond Heung, a 65-year-old Hong Kong immigrant and Vancouver property developer, has left behind what he dismissively calls “the meat and potatoes” of traditional landscape painting for the more exotic world of post-war abstraction. Standing in his Kitsilano office’s lobby, Heung talks about the three paintings that visitors confront and explains the symbolism of what they see. On the right is a stylized landscape of eastern Canada by Gordon Smith. On the left is a stylized landscape of western Canada, also by Smith. In between is the magnificent Jack Shadbolt ’60s abstraction, Northern Emblem. Says Heung, pointing: “Eastern Canada. Western Canada. And Shadbolt’s proposal for Canada’s then much-discussed new flag.” It’s a crumpled, crimson explosion, painted as if the poor maple leaf has been trampled by a stampede of bureaucrats. “I look at these every day when I arrive at the office,” he adds. “Abstraction transcends reality. I always see something new.” [pagebreak]
Throughout his large office, just as in Audain’s office, every wall holds a painting, a fine art photograph or an original print. In his boardroom hangs a huge blobby canvas, titled Downsweep, by famed Ontario abstractionist, Jack Bush. Heung regularly attends Heffel auctions (his paddle number is 007). Having decided which artists he’ll collect and what his budget can afford, he buys at the top end, whether at the Heffels’ or Equinox or Bau-Xi. “Art dealers always say, ‘Buy what you love,’” says Heung. “It’s not like stocks and bonds. Art’s not a commodity. I look at my collection like I look at my children. I’d never sell this,” he says, waving toward the Jack Bush painting, and then elsewhere at other artwork along the hall. “I’d never sell any of these. It’s pure joy.”
Last year, the Heffels’ online auction sales totalled $6 million. Far more impressive, however, their biannual – May and November – live auction sales in 2011 totalled $31 million, a figure almost evenly split between works of pre-war and post-war contemporary art. Six paintings sold for over $1 million each last year at the Heffel auctions, including a coastal B.C. scene by E.J. Hughes and a Jean-Paul Riopelle abstraction. Sixty-two artworks sold for over $100,000 apiece. The top price paid for a Canadian artwork last year was the Heffel sale of Jean Paul Lemieux’s moody, semi-abstract 1962 painting titled Nineteen Ten Remembered. It went for $2.34 million – one of the highest prices ever for post-war Canadian art.
The nexus of all this activity lies upstairs above the Heffels’ public gallery where, amid $100,000-worth of computers and a half-dozen auction coordinators, the walls are jammed with paintings and the floors are piled deep with consigned, manila-paper-wrapped artwork. These await processing for the spring auction catalogues, and the two impending Vancouver shows. Robert Heffel, navigating amid the millions of dollars’ worth of stacked art, says dryly, “We need more storage space.” In the computer room, air-conditioners whirr and a clock ticks down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds to the closing of the latest monthly online auction. In the photo lab, a $35,000 Hasselblad camera is positioned to turn a Lawren Harris landscape into its digital clone, ready for inclusion in the live-auction catalogue. This is what the Heffels’ success has wrought.
Says Robert: “There’s a worldwide transition going on. The art gallery downstairs is only for promotion, only for previews. It’s a platform for the auctions. Vendors come to us because we often get double or triple the pre-sales estimates on a piece at auction. Buyers come because it’s exciting. Some contemporary artists are, in fact, going directly to auction, bypassing galleries completely. The business of retail art is really changing.”
It has been a long time since Michael Audain made his first purchase of an original artwork, a $50 painting by Vancouver’s Michael Morris. A lot has changed since then, when Emily Carr was virtually unknown and Lawren Harris lived in Vancouver. A few years later, Audain upped the ante, negotiating with an art dealer to buy a $1,300 William Kurelek painting, paid for in $50 monthly instalments over the next two years. Audain admits that then, as now, he has never seen himself as an art collector because he doesn’t base his decisions on aesthetic theory or market trends. He has never taken a course in art history. “I’ve just wanted to have things on my walls,” he says with a shrug.
Seated in his office below an Andy Warhol photo mash-up of Queen Elizabeth – “Good old Liz,” he calls her – Audain reflects on the changes in the B.C. art world that have propelled him far beyond the $50 increments that marked his earliest efforts to put things on his walls. “The Heffels clung for many years to scenes of trees and lakes,” Audain says. “That’s what we learned in school when we were kids. But there’s been a big shift toward abstraction in recent years. Even B.C. aboriginal art’s moving there. What’s more, Vancouver has become a centre for photo-conceptual art, video art, new media. People like Stan Douglas and Jeff Wall. They’re so big they don’t have dealers here.” (On May 15, Wall’s Dead Troops Talk large-scale photograph sold at a Christie’s auction in New York for $3.6 million – $1.6 million over the auction’s estimated valuation.)
Ever eclectic, Audain, like many others propelling B.C.’s art boom, keeps on buying, even as prices rise and the medium and the messages change. He admits he and his wife, Yoshi Karasawa, have had to extend their home twice to accommodate their ever-growing collection. But money’s no longer an issue. “It’s not often that our choices are circumscribed by financial consideration. We see something we want, and bang! Bang!” he says, and laughs again at the understatement, reprising his excitement at facing the Jordan River duck hunters. “All great art’s magical. That’s what attracts and fascinates. Some people hear music in their heads. Some see films. For me, for Yoshi, it’s art that speaks to us.”