If Charles Dickens were to imagine a pair of art collectors – who, having amassed a serious trove of Australian modernist works, suddenly chuck it in for a love of street art – he may have conjured something like Andrew King and Sandra Powell. King’s bushy but carefully curated moustache is certainly straight out of the Victorian era, and Powell’s enigmatic smile wouldn’t look out of place on A Tale of Two Cities’ Madame Defarge, knitting her way through the revolution. Speaking to them in their gorgeously rambling St Kilda mansion, you get the sense it’s an association with which they’d be rather chuffed.
“Of the artists we used to collect,” King says, which included major figures like Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Brett Whitely and Joy Hester, “most of them were dead, and if they weren’t, well, they looked dead.”
