McCahon set for second record

Colin McCahon

Colin McCahon's Let be, let be painting is to be resold.

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The most expensive Colin McCahon painting sold at auction is to be resold, after 10 years in a private collection.

Let be, let be sold for $704,000 in 1996 and the auction house responsible for the latest sale has put an estimate on it of between $992,000 and $1.5 million.

Te Papa refused to say last night whether it would bid for the 1959 work. It bought the last McCahon painting up for sale, Mondrian's Last Chrysanthemum: Scared, for $350,000 in November.

It earlier paid $600,000 for Scared (I am Scared, I stand up) from the same series of five paintings. In 2004, Te Papa paid $3.1m for McCahon's 1973 work Walk (Series C), a 12-metre-long series of panels depicting a walk along Auckland's Muriwai Beach.

Merryn Schreiver of Deutscher and Hackett, the auction house conducting the sale, said a recovering art market overseas had given it confidence the auction, on August 26, would be successful.

Also for sale are other McCahon works, The First Bellini Madonna, valued between $372,595 and $496,727, Gate (1962), and French Bay (1957). All four have been in a private collection in Australia for the past 10 years.

Emma Fox, of Webb's auction house, said the sale would generate enormous interest. "I wouldn't be surprised if it went for anything over a million, maybe up to $1.5m if it's a good day.

"It's an extremely important painting, [a] brilliant period and that low estimate on it is going to cause quite an excitement because a lot of people will think they've got a chance at it."

She said McCahon's text works, of which this was one, were among the most highly sought-after. Many were in private and public collections or trusts and might never come up for sale. The opportunity to bid for one on the open market was "pretty amazing".

Martin Browne, who co-wrote a book on McCahon titled A Question of Faith, bought Let be, let be from Webb's in 1996 and sold it to an Australian collector a few years later.

He said yesterday: "The works with text on are the kinds of works that McCahon is renowned for beyond New Zealand. Internationally, that's where his importance lies."

He put the painting's value today at about $1.8m. "So it has got a very conservative estimate, I'm sure it will be keenly sought after."

- © Fairfax NZ News