Allen Treibitz never expected to retire off the proceeds of an auction for a painting by celebrated Canadian artist Emily Carr that he found in a barn and purchased for $50 this summer.
But in an interview with the National Post, the New York-based dealer admits he was hoping Carr’s 1912 painting “Masset, Q.C.I., Oil on canvas,” would fetch more than the $290,000 Canadian it sold for during Heffel Fine Art Auction House’s fall sale Wednesday night in Toronto.
“I had slightly higher expectations, but it definitely did better than their estimate,” he said of pre-auction predictions of between $100,000 and $200,000.
“It’s an amazing result. Just, with all the hype, I thought it might have done a little bit more.”
He paid $50 for a painting by famed Canadian. The artwork ‘lost to time’ in a barn could fetch over $200K
According to Heffel, the image of a carved grizzly bear atop a memorial totem was likely a gift from Carr to her friend Nell Cozier, who lived in Victoria before moving to Long Island. Treibitz and his business partner snagged it in a lot of 25 other items from a barn sale in the Hamptons and noticed the “once in a lifetime” discovery after the fact.
Triebitz is quick to point out that Heffel, who has sold more than 300 of Carr’s pieces for a combined sum of more than $73 million, did everything in their power to promote the auction and the piece. A vast amount of media attention also helped draw attention, but “press doesn’t equate to money or auction value.”
The total price, including a commission paid to Heffel, rang in for $349,250.
“It’s gonna pad my bottom line, but it’s not gonna retire me and it’s not gonna stop me from continuing to go out and try to find these kinds of things.”
Do I hear $300,000?
Treibitz toyed with the idea of attending the Toronto auction with business associates. In hindsight, he’s glad he stayed home.
“I might have been disappointed being in the room and it selling for what it did,” he said. “and it might have been a trip that was great, but it might not have been as satisfying.”
He did, however, watch online and said Heffel’s Yorkville Avenue saleroom was “packed,” there was a bank of 15 phones, not to mention an untold number of bidders watching online.
When it began, Treibitz said auctioneer David Heffel ran the price up very quickly from its $100,000 starting point, quickly hitting the $200,000 range. Without knowing for sure, he figures this was due to a number of left bids, also called proxy bids.
In this method, a buyer sets a maximum bid amount and gives the auction house the right to bid on their behalf without having to be in the room or on the phone. They win the item if the price never hits the left bid maximum but exceeds other underbids.
“It seemed that he had four or five people that had left bids up to about a quarter of a million dollars,” Treibitz estimated, adding in his experience phone bidders tend to wait for left bids and internet bids to “level off.”
At that point, he said the auctioneer appeared to be trying to get a phone bidder to the $300,000 mark, but couldn’t and “hammered it at $290,000” for either an internet bidder or a left bid.
“Either way, it wasn’t in the room.”
As for who’ll be hanging the 112-year-old piece of art on their wall, Treibitz said unless it ended up in the hands of a public entity museum or public collector showing off their collection, we might never know for certain.
For his part, he wonders if it may have been scooped up by the owners of a companion piece Carr painted in 1937 showing the same bear totem from a different angle. That painting belongs to the B.C. Archives.
Heffel told the National Post the buyer has chosen to remain anonymous.
‘Never save never’
The sale brings an end to a “whirlwind” experience for Treibitz, one he says he’s better for.
On top of notoriety and recognition for his Heritage Gallery Auctions business, research into Carr and the Group of Seven, a famed cohort of Canadian modern landscape artists with whom Carr was associated, has added to his “encyclopedic knowledge of the art world.”
More importantly, while the sale price may have fallen slightly short of his expectations, Treibitz is grateful to have made the discovery so he could be part of a uniquely Canadian story.
“It wasn’t a million-dollar painting, but it was a significant piece of Canadian history that was lost. If I found a (George) Orwell in a barn and sold for half a million at Sotheby’s, nobody would care. It would just be another just be another story to tell.”
“I’ll never say never, but for almost almost certain I’ll never find anything that went viral like this did.”
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