Walking through Peter Clemenger’s house is like visiting a gallery. “This was the first Whiteley we bought,” he says, pointing towards a deceptively simple work in black ink. “We didn’t know much about him and we were learning as we went along.”
In the short tour, we pass a small and bright Hockney, a work by John Olsen, a portrait of Sidney Nolan painted by Albert Tucker. As we pass the staircase, the philanthropist and former ad man indicates upstairs, where we can just glimpse a selection of works by John Brack.
The Wren by Brett Whiteley on display at Peter Clemenger’s house.
On one wall, however, a faint white rectangle is just visible – the ghost of where a painting once hung. The Clemenger collection is impressive, but smaller than it used to be.
Next week, in the third and final of a series of auctions, Peter Clemenger will sell some of the most significant paintings from the collection that he spent decades building together with his wife Joan.
“Why now?” he reflects. “Well, because I’m getting old,” he says with a small laugh. “And I need to leave my affairs in reasonable shape. I’m 96. My wife died two years ago. She was 90. And the paintings were not paintings that we could hand down to our children.”
Peter and Joan Clemenger built their art collection together over decades.
Before Joan died, she and Peter sat down and decided on the list of paintings to sell together. “We’ve got some other paintings that we’re not selling that the children will get. But the 11 paintings that we decided to sell were too big, in most cases, for them to have – and too important.”
The previous lots included works by Jeffrey Smart and Fred Williams, and collectively netted over $8 million. Under the hammer this time are three works, and arguably the best have been saved for last. There’s No More (1984) by John Brack, one of a series centred on letters balanced on colourful pencils (estimate $800,000-$1 million), The Splash (1956), one of John Perceval’s famed Williamstown series (estimate $400,000-$600,000), and The Wren (1978) by Brett Whiteley, bought by the couple the same year it was painted (estimate $2 million to $3 million).
In choosing which works to buy, the Clemengers’ approach was simple: “We either like the paintings or we don’t – and in most cases, our decisions were perfect for the two of us.” The pair also never disagreed on which works they were drawn to. “We didn’t ever have a problem of an argument or debate about whether to buy something or not,” he says with a laugh. “We were lucky.”
