Notes

The artwork that put the artist on the map and one of the most talked about works of the decade, Ed Young’s Bruce Gordon saw the artist designate the bar owner as an artwork for the annual Michaelis fund-raising auction where it was eventually sold for R52 000, the highest price for an artwork at the sale, knocked down to Marilyn Martin for the Gallery, after an epic bidding battle that saw Gordon’s wife step down after R200 and art activist Suzy Bell chase the bidding up before bowing out. She later declared that she would have bid higher but Bruce would have clashed with her Tretchikoff’s. Everyone knew that the National Gallery did not have the funds to pay that amount of work and some in the art world were genuinely angered by the course of events which were, of course, a very humorous ruse that involved co-operation between Martin, the auctioneer and later curator of the work Andrew Lamprecht, the artist and the Michaelis School of Fine Art, then under the directorship of Malcolm Payne. The event attracted unprecedented interest garnering front-page headlines and the rest, as they say, is history.