The Collector as Connector: The John and Sheana Gellert Collection

Since founding the business in 2007, Art+Object has undergone several shifts and changes. One constant has been our focus on finely provenanced private collections of Aotearoa-New Zealand art.

Through the last near-twenty years we’ve been truly blessed in presenting many of the country’s most significant and interesting private art collections. Each of these collections are unique and they all bring with them both rewards and complexities for us in unveiling them to the public and attempting to maximize both the cultural and economic value for our vendors and the collector’s legacy.

Every collector is also unique, and their collection reflects everything from their world view, philosophies, relationships, means and, of course, their tastes.

We are delighted to be offering the collection of John and Sheana Gellert in this catalogue. Whilst much of the collection has been unseen to the overwhelming majority of you, a great deal of it has been visible before through John Gellert’s law practice, latterly Gellert Ivanson in St Heliers, and through recent high-profile museum exhibitions.

The collection has its genesis in the late 1970s and the formation of the Prospect Group collection, the country’s first art buying collective. Whilst art buying groups are fairly ubiquitous today, it is arguable that the Prospect Group remains the most interesting and ground-breaking buying group formed in this country. Alongside the Gellert’s, members included the inimitable Peter Webb and Warwick Brown, John Gellert’s brother-in-law. The Prospect Group included 22 members, each of whom paid an initial $500 and then $250 annually thereafter.

Highlights from this collection included a major Gordon Walters ‘Koru’ painting and one of Colin McCahon’s ‘Visible Mysteries’ paintings.

The maxim that art buying groups are a great way to introduce potential collectors to the joys of art collecting could not be truer in this instance and soon after John Gellert was regularly ducking downstairs from his law practice in the CBD to Petar/James and New Vision galleries where he acquired major works by Gordon Walters, Milan Mrkusich, Ian Scott, Richard Killeen, Stephen Bambury and others. If the Prospect Group precipitated the arrival of the collecting bug, then Petar Vuletic ensured its bite would be felt for decades to come.

Unlike many of the provenanced private collections we’ve been privileged to be involved with in recent times, the John and Sheana Gellert collection is a definitively ‘Auckland’ collection. Its beating heart is in their holdings of Auckland painters like Ian Scott, Richard Killeen, Geoff Thornley, Mervyn Williams, Stephen Bambury and Milan Mrkusich. The Gellert’s collected and connected. In the family archives, there’s a lovely story of the Gellert’s celebrating the acquisition of a Gordon Walters painting with him and Petar Vuletic. Clearly sales and ‘believers’ were in short supply for the artist at this point.

If John was the driving force in the early stages of the Gellert collection, then in more recent times it has been Sheana who has dutifully maintained and cared for it and kept the collecting flame burning bright. After John passed, Sheana downsized, filling every available wall and space of her new townhouse in Ōrākei with their treasures and always making time for fortunate visitors, such as myself, for a tour of the collection.

Finally, just as the life of the art object outlives us all, it seems fitting to note that the Gellert collecting gene has now been passed onto the next generation. As well as being an ‘Auckland’ collection, The John and Sheana Gellert collection is also very much a family collection.