It may seem odd to record the death of Terry Ingram the long-term Saleroom correspondent of the Australian Financial Review, for whom First Nations art was of comparatively secondary importance. But I have to record that the man who must hold a record that will never be superseded for keeping his job for 50 years from 1963, also played one significant role in Aboriginal art.
For it was he, in the AFR, who noted the oddity of an art gallery in Alice Springs sending Aboriginal artworks still damp from their painting directly to auction. The paintings were by the late great Tommy Yanima Watson, who’d had amazingly early success with his new art career at 80, had fallen out with the humbugging in his Irrunytju community, and had fallen in with the Red Sand Art Gallery in Alice.
As Ingram investigated, it emerged that Red Sand wanted to establish the retail price for Watson’s works at auction – for they had only recently moved over from furniture to the town’s burgeoning Aboriginal art market. Ingram took it no further than raising the question – though he did point out that Watson had already been the star in an Irrunytju auction undertaken to fund the community’s new art centre.
But he’d raised the eyebrows of the late Alison Harper, editor and publisher of the Australian Art Market Report – the sort of specialist magazine that could only have been founded at the turn of this century on Terry’s pioneering back.
For there was certainly no one else in the 1960s and 70s who took such an interest in the Australian art market. He even write an encouraging book, A Matter of Taste : Investing in Australian Art in 1976. Dealers loved him for that – though some would fall out as he set out to ‘drain the swamp’ of that free-wheeling business. As Michael Reed – now a dealer, but once an analyst like Ingram – has commented in his obituary: “With Terry, the colourful racing identities that inhabit and continue to dwell within the unregulated art market met a fearless, quiet, tenacious detective, Columbo-style probing”.
Harper turned to me to ask about the role of dealers like Red Sand in a town like Alice, far from the white walls of Paddington and Armadale. She actually used the word “carpet-baggers”, and I investigated both how Tommy Watson had been dealt with, and talked to other individuals who dealt directly with the remote artists and their families, supplying cars when neded or outfits for a funeral – a practice called carpet-bagging in the cities.
A balanced article, I thought.
Thanks Terry for starting this process, which ended up in court when Red Sand took objection to being associated with idea of carpet-bagging. Mind you, we did find out that Red Sand had contracts which suggested that whatever price they obtained for Watson’s canvases, they only intended to pay him 10%, less their costs. Perhaps this encouraged the court to end the defamation case in a mediation but order Red Sand to return to Watson, who’d come to court with his new dealer John Ioannou, half of the artworks that remained unsold.
A significant win in consumer law for an artist, deeply imbibed with his Pitjanjatjara lore, but entirely ignorant of English-language legal matters.
Perhaps Terry Ingram’s greatest win was his revelation in 1973 that the National Art Gallery was intending to spend an outrageous $1.4m on a drip painting by a drunken New Yorker – Jackson Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’. A national storm broke – but Ingram reportedly went to his grave without revealing the source of this exclusive story.
