A Decadent Farewell: Behind the Velvet Curtain of Barry Humphries' Collecting
A private collection can tell us much about the collector, an encapsulation of their interests and personality, and there is a certain poignant regret when one goes up for sale to be broken up and scattered to the four winds. Such is the case with the late Barrie Humphries’ estate, which Christies brought to auction in London in February.
Image credit: One of the five auctioneers for this sale/ Piers Boothman, Director of Estates and Valuations, Christies London. Courtesy of Christie’s London
Alas, I can only salivate over the glossy catalogue pages and dream. The auction, which took place in the UK on 13 February (Valentine’s Day, 14 February, in this hemisphere), netted an incredible 4.5 million British Pounds Stirling. That’s astonishing given the relatively conservative valuations supplied.
Humphries was undoubtedly a complicated man, a social and political conservative, a comedic genius, at times reduced almost to a vermiform appendix of that drag kaiju of female impersonation, the mauve-maned maven Dame Edna Everage. Played somewhat straight, like Hinge and Bracket, Edna, with all her mythopoetic expanded universe and atomic charisma, mostly overwhelmed Humphries’ other characters like the revenant geriatric, Sandy Stone, and cliché of Aussie masculinity, Barry McKenzie. Only bibulous and satyromaniacal cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson survived the cull, and he probably would have made a better arts minister than many in the years since Barry Cohen. Yet if there was a Humphries character that genuinely reflected his artistic sensibilities, it was probably the little-remembered Dr Aaron Azimuth, a dandy, mascaraed Dadaist in black cloak and homburg much like Humphries in his Melbourne youth.
Image credit: Anglo American Eyewear, Pair of yellow-lacquered ‘Possum’ spectacles, late 19th Century. Courtesy of Christie’s London
Yes, Edna is there in the catalogue, some of the iconic frocks, designed by Stephen Adnett rather than the fictional Kenny, and the equally iconic, bedazzled and triffid-like cat’s eye “face furniture”. But what the lots reveal is that other, lesser-known side of Humphries, the aesthete and connoisseur of the fin de siècle, the decadent milieu of the 1890s and its aftermath into the Symbolists and even some Bloomsbury. Humphries was sort of the Fighting Temeraire of an age he had been born too late for, being towed by a plucky steam tug back to dock for decommissioning. Hannah Gadsby might have thought he was “an irrelevant, inhumane dick biscuit of the highest order,” but what man of privilege in his 80s isn’t? And Humphries has since ascended through the stars to eternal fame on gales on public laughter, while briefly trendy Gadsby… Something, something? Picasso was a misogynist womaniser, something?
If Humphries’ collecting had a theme, it was aesthetic decadence, a concept that originated in the eighteenth century with Montesquieu, who attributed the decline of the Roman Empire to moral decay and loss of cultural standards. Désiré Nisard later applied this idea to French literature, comparing Victor Hugo and Romanticism to Roman decadence, thus aestheticising it, noting the romantic preference for the extravagant and the rejection of classical rules. Much like Humphries himself. A kind of lifelong rebellion against his nice, tidy, middle-class suburban Mornington upbringing, perhaps, the way Edna lampooned Moonee Ponds? In its way, this rebellion laid the groundwork for an Australia, or at least a Melbourne, that could laugh at itself (I’m looking at you, Kath and Kim of Fountain Lakes).
Image credit: Charles Conder, Sand dunes, Ambleteuse, 1901, oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Christie’s London
Humphries’ collection of aethereal Charles Conder paintings, the artist at his most romantically rococo, no doubt had Australia’s state and national galleries frantically digging around under the couch cushions for some extra change. The Conder designs for fans alone would make a grown curator weep. Humphries saw in these the emergence of something distinctly antipodean, but a bridge to European refinement, and Conder’s circle, which included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. These paintings shared space with museum-quality paintings and drawings by other early Australian painters like Theodore Boyd, Albert Fullwood, and William Rothenstein. There are also several portraits of Arthur Symons, including a marvellous museum-worthy Augustus John.
Image credit: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1899, First edition, 1 of 12. Courtesy of Christie’s London
There are also the myriad rubber-faced caricatures, either as Edna or himself. Perhaps he regretted not being a contemporary of Max Beerbohm for that English master of the form to limn the Humphresian physog, as the performer assiduously collected Beerbohm’s cartoonery, including an extraordinary one of Oscar Wilde. It is easy to become overwhelmed by a tsunami of names: Jan Toorop, Max Klinger, Austin Osman Spare, Gustave Doré, Franz von Stuck, Fernand Khnopff, and saucy Félicien Rops. It is curious, then, that unless I missed it, there is nothing by Humpries’ countryman and notable decadent, Norman Lindsay. Was Lindsay simply too brazen, too vulgar?
There are sketches, notes, books designed by, and even a splendid painted self-portrait in the manner of Beerbohm by Aubrey Beardsley (tip for the novice, it’s pronounced “Aahbry”). Now I consider myself a bit of an anorak when it comes to Beardsley’s followers and imitators. There are some excellent examples of the work of Franz von Baryos and Alastair in the collection (no Harry Clarke, which amazes me). Still, to my utter shame I must confess to not knowing the work of René Gockinga, who is like Beardsley with the safety catch off. Gockinga, like Toorop, was an Indo-Dutch, and historically, they have been some of the most interesting and neglected artists.
The books! The first editions! Sigh. Surprisingly, there are quite a few volumes by Aleister Crowley, the poetry and novels rather than the occult esoterica. While Humphries wasn’t a Thelemite, he certainly was in possession of the kind of formidable will to shape reality comparable to that of The Great Beast. Even more surprisingly for such an ardent heterosexual, many of the books and letters carry a predominantly effete tone: Wilde; the archetypal demon twink Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas; Lionel Johnston of “Dark Angel” fame; Paul Verlaine; Frederick Rolfe; and autographed manuscripts by Ronald Firbank that left me absolutely seething with envy. Some of these items are as hard to find as a relatable Kardashian. Bosie must have sparked a completist impulse in Humphries – the talentless little shit only had his relationship with Wilde and that line about “the love that dare not speak its name” to recommend him.
I suppose the effect is a little like wandering into the fictional Sebastian Flyte’s rooms at Oxford, the intersection of ready money and a recherché, slightly adolescent (if said adolescent was a 1920s exquisite) desire to shock, and perhaps the wish to reject all but a very specific type of modernity grounded in humanism and barely sublimated sensuality. That’s not a criticism, it’s what I’d do myself, though the theory only holds until one gets to the paintings by Bengali expressionist Jamini Roy, gifted to Humphries by Stephen Spender’s widow, or paintings by Ceri Richards, Francis Souza and Nicolas Ghika, showing that Humphries’ tastes did indeed continue to evolve. However, how we interpret this in the context of Humphries’ social and political conservatism is up for debate. Then again, compared to the Dadaist pranks of his student days, maybe it is a kind of conservatism. Consider the similar paradox in Humphries’ close friend, the poet and broadcaster John Betjeman, who on the one hand championed Victorian architecture, traditional Anglicanism and the “Deep England” of the Home Counties, while on the other had been a pen pal of Bosie and was a quasi-closeted bisexual.
Then there are Humphries’ own daubings, showing the influence of his friends Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd, heading in a late Hockney direction and strongly suggesting that had he pursued painting rather than the stage, he could have been a distinct contender. He often said that he was a professional actor and an amateur artist and that he “wished it were the other way around.” But then we probably wouldn’t have had this wonderful collection and the Edna who paid for most of it.
