Leonard Joel auction – Women Artists 2024

On Friday 20th September we drove over to Hawthorn (Melbourne) to view the Leonard Joel Auction’s exhibition of  women’s art that was open for viewing that weekend. An excellent experience. It was so good, we returned on Saturday for another look around.

These auction house exhibitions (usually three days) are a unique opportunity to see art that comes out from private collections and then most likely disappears back into other private collections. It is unlikely that much of this ends up in a public collection.

We spoke to Hannah Ryan, the auction house art specialist, about the initiative to specialise in the work of women’s artists. She told us  that following the success of the first of these ‘Women Artists’ auctions in 2017, Leonard Joel now holds an annual auction of  women artists.

There has been a strong interest in this era of Australian women’s art and it is growing. This was later proven by the strong bids on the night of the auction (23rd September) and that many works sold above the expected values.

There’s a statement online about the 2019 auction – click here.

There’s much more to say about how and why many of these artists are not on the lists being collected by the public collections and yet here they are in great numbers being purchased by the public. One ponders whether the history of Australian painting is much more than what has been collected by and written about by Australia’s  public institutions.

After visiting this exhibition and doing some initial research on a couple of the women artists, we are now doing more research on two of them – with visits to libraries and archives now planned. Watch this space.