Affairs of the Art by Katrina Strickland

Author:Katrina Strickland
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2013-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Gold Standard

The death of a friend, yes. The death of a relative, yes. But above all, the death of an artist. That is different in a particular way from the death of others, because while he lives, he is his work, and when he dies, he stays behind.

John Brack1

Lyn Williams is the gold standard for how to handle an artist’s estate. So says former NGV director Patrick McCaughey. ‘Chair of the artists’ widows in my time’ is how art dealer Stuart Purves describes her. Observes Paul Sumner, owner of Mossgreen Auctions: ‘She’s never been greedy for income. Our business is supply and demand. Lyn Williams knows that and has controlled the supply. As a result Fred has probably had the most consistent price growth of any artist, without an actual boom.’

This being the visual arts, a hot-bed of nastiness if ever there was one, not everyone is laudatory. ‘She’s extremely controlling,’ says more than one art expert. Another calls her ‘Lyn Millions’, referencing the fact that the best of her husband’s paintings can now sell for more than $1 million, many others for hundreds of thousands of dollars. When Melbourne art dealer Lauraine Diggins is asked whether Lyn finds the handling of the estate a burden, she says she doubts it: ‘I don’t think there’s any love–hate with Lyn. It’s given her a life, a job.’ McCaughey goes a step further: ‘It’s been the making of her.’

Lyn did not want to participate in this book. She felt that she had said all there was to say about her role as guardian of Fred’s estate in various newspaper and magazine interviews she had given over the three decades since his death, including with me for a 2009 magazine article. Fred was a very private person, she says, and so is she. She eventually agreed, no doubt on the basis that if the book is going to happen anyway, the information in it should be correct. ‘It just becomes something, takes on a life of its own,’ she says. ‘I will always be more Fred’s widow than anything else I do, in a public sense I guess.’ Lyn told a journalist in 1991 that she thought it ‘important not to live all of my life as Fred’s widow’.2 This concern seems to have dissipated over the years; in 2000 she told another journalist that she was less worried about lacking her own separate identity than she had been in the immediate aftermath of Fred’s death. ‘I didn’t want to be too immersed in it. It was just too hard; it’s like living your life in the past altogether,’ she said. ‘It’s different now, and I realise I probably know a lot about the work. It’s not an emotional thing like it used to be.’3 When asked if it is annoying now, her answer suggests that she’s so far from worrying about it that she’s forgotten she ever did. ‘I don’t think about it too much like that,’ she says, going

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