Barry Humphries’ art collection up for auction

“They sort of unite Dad’s two selves and are clearly by someone who is both a comic and an artist. They are spot on, sharp and funny. They are Edna one-liners in visual form.”

Humphries began painting with “conscious intent from age eight”, signing his work “Barry Humphries” and not John, his given name. By age 11 he had begun saving up to buy art and second-hand books.

Clifton Pugh’s study of Barry Humphries aged 25 is among the auction’s most expensive lots. It was completed in 1959, four years after the character of Dame Edna was conceived, and about the same year as Humphries took a steamer to Europe to tour his one-man show.

A related portrait was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery as its first acquisition.

Pugh is credited with reviving Humphries’ childhood interest in art and helped him mount an exhibition of his works in the gallery of the Victorian Artists’ Society, believed to be Humphries’ first show after university.

The Humphries family, including widow Lizzie Spender and Oscar’s three siblings, hopes it will be sold to a museum.

The earliest of the 47 works by Humphries, from 1966, was exhibited as part of the exhibition Big: Barry Humphries: Dada Artist at the National Gallery of Australia in 1993. It’s one of the few remaining early works of Humphries, says Leonard Joel’s head of decorative arts and art, Madeleine Mackenzie.

A more recent work, The Corporate Smile 2019, is the most ambitious painting Humphries produced in terms of scale, and is created in the style of Andy Warhol, depicting an anonymous patriarchal figure.

Humphries’ landscape paintings – represented by several watercolours including scenes from Paris – were more serious studies.

The auction items, though eclectic, are not what Humphries the younger – a fine art dealer – calls memorabilia.

“It’s more elevated than that,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to have something that was precious to Dad.”

Estimates start at $250 for Humphries’ works on paper and have been priced to be accessible to fans. “The auction is so special as it offers an opportunity to highlight these two aspects to Barry’s character, the artist and the collector,” Mackenzie says.

The Humphries family is also selling sculptures and drawings collected by their father by early 20th-century French artists, including George Barbier and Alfred Auguste Janniot.

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Photographs from this century and last feature Marlene Dietrich, Kylie Minogue, Pattie Boyd and Joanna Lumley. Kylie signed her nude image: “Dear Barry, Bottoms Up! Kisses Kylie x”.

The Australian sale follows Christie’s auction in London in February, which netted nearly $10 million, including buyer’s premiums, vastly exceeding sale expectations.

“Collectors are a bit like addicts,” Oscar says of his father. “They are always buying things, so their loved ones have this strange binary relationship with these things. They buy things secretly and there is no form of collecting more selfish than a book collector. The decision you must come to is, do you want to live in a museum or do you want to be freer and share the spirit?”

Barry Humphries: Artist and Collector auction will be held in the Woollahra offices of Leonard Joel on June 3.

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