The Australian art world is in shock after the body of art dealer and Sotheby’s Aboriginal art consultant Tim Klingender was discovered in the sea off the Sydney Heads peninsula. Marine police recovered Klingender’s body on July 20 after an apparent boating accident in which another person remains missing.
Klingender, who was 59, was a senior Australian art consultant at Sotheby’s. He was in New York in May to oversee the auction house’s fourth stand-alone Aboriginal art auction. Upon returning to Sydney, he immediately indulged his love of deep sea fishing and whale watching along the Sydney coast.
Its loss will leave a void in Sotheby’s international hierarchy and market knowledge base, according to Robert Bleakley, the founder of Sotheby’s former base in Australia. (Sotheby’s no longer operates in Australia.) “I don’t think there’s anyone who can step into the breach there,” Bleakley said. The arts journal.
In the 1980s, Klingender, a recent graduate from the University of Melbourne, was hired by Sotheby’s and was ultimately instrumental in creating a secondary market for Aboriginal art, Bleakley says. “He had a genuine love for art and a connection to Indigenous Australians. He was there and deeply worried,” he adds.
Klingender became a leading force in the Aboriginal art market. John Albrecht, chairman of Australian auction house Leonard Joel, says Klingender “literally engineered and engineered the ethical secondary market for Indigenous art in Australia”.
Sources say The arts journal that Klingender was renowned for his ethical stance, dedication to research, and emphasis on strong provenance. Luke Scholes, who worked for the Papunya Tula Artists organization when he met Klingender 20 years ago, says Klingender was “steadfast” in his ethics. “He set the standard very high and it’s up to everyone else to maintain it now,” says Scholes, who is now a research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne. “He is irreplaceable. No one has the energy, the passion, the knowledge and the optimism to continue to advocate internationally.
According to Sydney art consultant Annette Larkin, Klingender’s knowledge of indigenous art and its market was second to none. “It wasn’t just about canvas, he knew a lot about barks and planks,” Larkin explains. “The boards of the 1970s, he really developed that market and he really understood it.”
Klingender founded the Aboriginal art department at Sotheby’s in 1996 and began touring the highlights of its sales internationally in New York, London and Paris ahead of auctions in Australia. He established Tim Klingender Fine Art in 2009. Between 2011 and 2013 he was senior consultant at Bonhams. In this role, he led the landmark sale of the Laverty Collection of Contemporary Australian Art, which toured London and New York ahead of the auction.
His sale in New York over for another year, Klingender posted on Instagram on May 31: “Such great art, energy, old friends and new friends every time…and now 26 years of having the responsibility and privilege to show some of Australia’s best indigenous art in a city like no other. I can’t wait to get home and take to the sea.”
He is survived by his wife Skye McCardle and their two teenage daughters.
