From May 12 to 17, Heffel Fine Art Auction House is transforming itself into an art gallery filled with paintings and sculptures by some of Canada's best loved and revered artists. There are paintings by every one of the original Group of Seven, as well as Jack Shadbolt, Christopher Pratt, Alex Colville and West Vancouver's Gordon Smith.
The two centrepieces are studies in opposites: Emily Carr's Eagle Totem is darkly mysterious, as if the rain forest had parted, momentarily, to catch a glimpse of the totem; Jean Paul Lemieux's La plage americaine is bright and colourful, with an underlying mystery about how the three figures relate to one another. Each of them is expected to sell for more than $600,000.
It's rare to have one of Emily Carr's First Nations paintings come up for auction, since most are part of the Emily Carr Trust collection at the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Art Gallery, says David Heffel, the president of the company, who will be leading the May 17 auction with his brother Robert. Eagle Totem was part of a family's collection from 1946 to 2001, when Heffel sold it to an American collector. A death in that family led to it being made available again.
The Lemieux has a frisson of excitement about it; last fall, Heffel sold the Quebec artist's Nineteen Ten Remembered for a record $2.34 million.
Altogether, the 185 lots are expected to garner up to $12 million, a "conservative" estimate. (The fall auction brought in almost $17 million in sales."
David Heffel has a way of making an $800,000 painting almost seem affordable. It's all about priorities, he says; an entry level house in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»starts at $800,000.
For 95 per cent of the bidders, "it's the passion that gets you there," he said in an interview at the auction house Friday morning. "The value is not the priority of collectors who put together a great collection There's the unpredictable but for the most part the people bidding have already dreamed of having it hang in their living room."
The live auction at the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Convention Centre on May 17 will be over in a relatively short time. Heffel says they try to do 60 lots in one hour that's a minute a painting.
Previews were previously held in Montreal and Toronto; the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»preview is at the Heffel Fine Art Auction House (2247 Granville at 7th) until the day of the auction. There is an online auction of 230 other works during the month of May.
It takes six months to put an auction of this magnitude together, says Heffel. "Robert and I [as auctioneers] are representing a whole team of people who made it happen. Post-auction is always fun but when you come back to work the next week the cupboards are bare [and you start all over again.]"
For more information, go to .
