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A Mystery Buyer Has Bought New Zealand's Most Expensive Painting at Auction

Colin McCahon's painting The Canoe Tainui has sold for $1.35 million.
Colin McCahon's "The Canoe Tainui." Image courtesy of Art + Object

A painting by Colin McCahon has broken the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in New Zealand. The Canoe Tainui went under the hammer for $1.35 million at Art + Object in Auckland on Wednesday. McCahon painted the eight-panel work in 1969, depicting the Tainui whakapapa (genealogy) of his grandson.

Much to McCahon’s surprise, the painting —which he considered “unsaleable”—sold on opening night of its first show to art collectors Tim and Sherrah Francis for $500. It remained in the couple’s collection until their deaths earlier this year.

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Paintings of this calibre rarely come up for public auction and pre-auction expectations were high that it would smash the record. The previous highest price paid for a painting at New Zealand auction was was set in April, when a 1941 oil portrait by colonial artist Charles Frederick Goldie sold for $1.175 million, before buyer’s premium and fees.

So who made the purchase? it was art dealer John Gow who made the highest bid on the night—on behalf of an anonymous buyer. The painting will remain in private collection, but Gow told RNZ the public could expect to be able to view it soon. The auction catalogue notes the painting has been requested for an exhibition of McCahon’s Maori work from the 1960s and 1970s, opening at Wellington’s City Gallery in April next year.

In an essay for Art + Object writer and curator Peter Simpson called the painting “McCahon’s most profound act of imaginative identification with Maoritanga, arguably the most profound ever achieved by a Pakeha. This great painting is a priceless taonga for a bicultural nation, Aotearoa/New Zealand.”

Professor Laurence Simmons, an arts academic at the University of Auckland, told The Creators Project that The Canoe Tainui was one of the few major McCahon works left in private collection. “You’d hope that these works go into public collection, but galleries now don’t have the money,” said Simmons.

“I thought if anyone was going to but it, it might be an Australian public gallery. I imagine it’s been sold for speculative purposes and it will come up for sale in a few years.”

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