VANCOUVER — In 1940 the Alma Mater Society at the University of British Columbia started collecting 15 cents per student to put together an art collection.
In 1948, the non-profit student organization purchased its first artwork, the E.J. Hughes painting Abandoned Village, Rivers Inlet, for $150.
Seventy-five years later, it’s going up for sale at Heffel’s May 25 auction of postwar and contemporary art. The pre-auction estimate is $1.25 million to $1.75 million.
Abandoned Village, Rivers Inlet was painted in 1946-47, just after Hughes was demobilized from the Canadian Army, where he had been a war artist.
Hughes was never that prolific, but works from the late 1940s are quite rare, because he typically finished only one or two paintings per year. Many consider this his best period, and his 1946 painting, Fishboats, Rivers Inlet, sold for a record $2,041,250 at a Heffel auction in 2018.
Abandoned Village, Rivers Inlet is a haunting work showing a row of decaying fisherman’s cottages along a turbulent waterfront. A forest of arbutus and fir trees loom behind, twisted piles of driftwood lie in front, along with a dock that is falling into the water.
It is so stark and simplified, it almost seems like a woodcut or engraving.
“The buildings are so powerful, the way they recede in the distance,” said Robert Heffel, who runs the auction house with his brother David. “There’s areas of light and dark, it gives this drama, there’s an energy to the painting.”
Hughes knew Rivers Inlet well, because he had worked there as a gillnet fisherman in the late 1930s.
“In 1938 he was up with a fellow artist, Paul Goranson, in Rivers Inlet, working as a commercial fisherman,” said Heffel. “So the source material for this painting comes from drawings he did in 1938. Goranson’s family I think was in the commercial fishing business, that’s why they were up there working.”
The Hughes painting is on display at the Heffel Gallery, 2247 Granville at 7th through Monday. The auction will be in Toronto and will have a live audience, but will also be beamed live through the Heffel “digital showroom” on the Heffel website.
There are 78 artworks in the sale, which has a total pre-auction estimate of $10 million to $15 million.
The big-ticket items are by Canadian artists, including Hughes, Emily Carr and Alex Colville.
Carr’s Sitka Totem Pole is an incredibly colourful painting, executed on a long, narrow canvas.
“She went to France to study modern art, and this is the result,” said Heffel. “This is 1912, right after she came back from France. It reminds me of Gauguin and the Fauves.”
“It’s avant-garde,” said David Heffel. “Only two Canadian painters were painting in a modernist style (at the time), David Milne and Emily Carr.”
Sitka Totem Pole is estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million. The highest estimate for the auction is Colville’s 1963 painting June Noon, which is estimated at $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
It was consigned to the auction from Germany, where it’s been part of a private museum foundation called the Langden Foundation collection. It was shown at the 1966 Venice Biennale.
The painting is of Colville’s wife Rhoda, who is nude, drying herself off in a tent at the beach. Colville is outside, peering into the distance through a pair of binoculars.
“It’s a very personal, intimate scene,” said David Heffel. “She’s modest, turning to where people couldn’t get a peek. But because it’s so ordinary, it’s universal as well. I think it’s brilliant, right down to where he painted the mosquito net.”
The auction also includes two Andy Warhol prints, including another version of his Queen Elizabeth “Reigning Queens” series.
In the last Heffel auction, a “diamond dust” edition of the same image sold for $1,141,250, a record for a Warhol print. This one is from another edition of 40 and is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000.
A second AMS Society painting is for sale as well, the 1952 Lawren Harris abstract Northern Image.
“They acquired it in 1955 from Lawren Harris, with funds donated from Lawren Harris,” Robert Heffel said with a chuckle.
“Alec Blair’s [catalogue] essay is amazing. I hadn’t realized it’s an abstracted landscape. He pointed out it’s an abstracted version of Harris’s view, who lived on Belmont [Avenue]. It’s the North Shore mountains.”
