BLAST #1
Welcome to BLAST Issue 1
BLAST #1
On the horizon: East meets West
‘Looking East: St Ives Artists and Buddhism’, is a fascinating exhibition of a previously unexplored aspect of post-war St Ives painting that will come to the 3812 Gallery in St James’s in July. It is currently on view at their base in Hong Kong, a location which the exhibition’s consultant, Philip Dodd, confirms has witnessed a new wave of interest in Modern and Contemporary British Art in recent years.
Alan Davie (1920-2014)
Transformation of the Serpent No. 3, circa 1970
Courtesy of 3812 GalleryThe theme was conceived by Dodd and former Tate curator Chris Stephens, now a director of the Holburne Museum in Bath. Although Bernard Leach, who was born and brought up in Asia, and Alan Davie, the Scottish Abstract Expressionist, are known for their interests in Buddhism, the mystical connections for sculptor Brian Wall and painters Trevor Bell, Terry Frost , Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter, have not been fully explored. The common influencer, says Dodd, was the Chinese philosopher, D T Suzuki, who stopped off in St Ives in the fifties en route to America. Suzuki was a significant figure in spreading enthusiasm for eastern philosophies in the West at this time.
Terry Frost (1915-2003)
Suspended Colour Collage, 1968-1970
Courtesy of 3812 GalleryIt is difficult to pin-point when Chinese interest in buying Modern British Art began. Robert Travers of Piano Nobile, for instance, remembers well the London Art Fair in 2017 when a Chinese art foundation representative visited his stand and was so impressed with the British figurative paintings there that he went to Travers’ Notting Hill gallery and bought several works by William Coldstream and Euan Uglow for prices in the excess of auction records in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.
But Dodd can rattle off a list of Chinese institutional shows in the last decade for British artists - from Sean Scully (2014) and John McLean (2016) to Gillian Ayres (2018), and Maggie Hambling (2019). Private sales at record price levels, he says, include a late Terry Frost triptych at £180,000, and John McLeans, never a star at auction, for up to £40,000. Amongst the Frost buyers at a 3812 exhibition in Hong Kong last year was Henry Tang, Chair of the West Kowloon Cultural District, the gallery confirmed. Works by Peter Lanyon, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Trevor Bell have also been sold already in the Hong Kong leg of the St Ives/Buddhism show.
For an aperitif, visit Masterpiece London at the end of June when the 3812 Gallery will include work by several St Ives painters and potters - Alfred Wallis, Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost.
LANDMARKS
Congratulations to Browse & Darby which celebrated its 45th anniversary in May. Of course, if Lillian Browse were still alive she could date her gallery back to 1945 when she joined forces with Henry Roland and Gustav Delbanco. William Darby, her business partner from 1977, would have been about three years old then, just as his son, who now runs the gallery, was about five when his father set up with Browse. Continuity and belief in long lasting values have been the hallmark of the gallery. Just as Darby picked up Browse’s baton with an impeccable taste for modern French (Degas, Rodin) and British art (from Sickert and William Nicholson to Gwen John, Prunella Clough and Euan Uglow), son Joshua has pursued a similar aesthetic without falling victim to fashion. The 45th anniversary exhibition, in the same Cork Street gallery that was founded 77 years ago, is like a rollcall of merit including most of the above mentioned. Works are generally either for sale or, like the Sickert view of Dieppe (pictured), were previously sold by the gallery.
Walter Richard Sickert, (1860-1942)
La Rue de la Boucherie, Dieppe, circa 1903
Courtesy of Browse & DarbyTRENDS: The new YBAs
For anyone thinking the boom for contemporary British art faded with the YBAs (Damien Hirst et al) it’s time to reconsider. The list of new young British record breakers hitting six and seven figures at auction and selling out in galleries has been getting longer by the month throughout the pandemic and includes (with representing galleries in brackets) Jadé Fadojutimi (Pippy Houldsworth), Michael Armitage (White Cube), Billy Childish (Lehmann Maupin), Issy Wood (Carlos/Ishikawa), Antonia Showering and Annie Morris (both Timothy Taylor) – with not a shark or an unmade bed in sight.
Dealers are not, however, getting swept away by auction results but keeping gallery prices low to accommodate museums. At Frieze in New York recently, US institutions were able to buy works by Flora Yukhnovich (Victoria Miro), who has sold for over £1 million at auction, for £180,000, and Rachel Jones (Thaddaeus Ropac), with an auction record of £910,000, for $75,000.
One of the latest stars to emerge, though not yet at auction, is transgender artist, Victoria Cantons, who experienced a sell-out show of self-portrait paintings People Trust People Who Look Like Them at Flowers Gallery in May, where they were priced at £30,000 each. The paintings chart a ten-year period of trauma and healing as the artist records her physical transformation through facial surgery.
Victoria Cantons (B. 1969)
T̶r̶a̶n̶s̶g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ Woman No.5, 2021
Courtesy of Flowers GalleryChristie’s hunting in the primary market again
Successes in the very contemporary end of the market are seeing auctioneers get closer again to the primary market. Memories of Christie’s ill-fated experiment with the Haunch of Venison gallery, which Christie’s bought in 1997 and closed down in 2013, came to mind last week when I learned the latest development for Caribbean born UK resident Winston Branch, a long term regular at the Chelsea Arts Club now in his 70’s, who has never had a gallery of note. Branch has been watching the boom in African American, and African-descent British artists (e.g. Frank Bowling) from the sidelines. But in 2019 one of his paintings was acquired by Tate Britain which compared it to a Monet – an honour indeed. Branch subsequently came to an arrangement with Greek art advisor/gallerist Varvarova Roza, to represent him and show his work in Greece. At auction nothing of his had sold at auction for more than £12,000 before, but this March, a painting by Branch was put up for sale at Christie’s with an unprecedented £40/60,000 estimate and it sold to a private collector for £126,000. The British Art Fair then approached Roza to take a stand at the Saatchi Gallery. But Christie’s got there first, and is planning to mount an exhibition for Branch together with Bowling and Peter Doig, who has a studio in Trinidad, throughout September.
Winston Branch (B. 1947)
When I need my Father's Eyes, 1998
Courtesy of Christie’sAUCTION REPORT
A rare chance to see the collection of the late Sir Nicholas Goodison, former chairman of the London Stock Exchange and of the National Art Collections Fund, who died last year, occurred at Christie’s in London in the lead up to an auction on May 25. Clearly Goodison was obsessed with time keeping – judging by the number of beautiful clocks and watches in the sale – but more so with Modern British art. 101 examples were on offer, acquired between over a 20-year period (1987 – 2007) – all by recognised artists and showing a particular penchant for the neo-romantics, Keith Vaughan, John Minton, John Piper and Alan Reynolds. Although he did buy at auction, the majority of works were acquired from dealers - his favourite port of call being Thomas Agnew & Son (since sold and now known as Agnew’s), Austin Desmond, Beaux Arts (now closed in London), Bernard Jacobson, The Fine Art Society (no longer in its historic Old Bond Street premises), Colin Phipps (the late chairman of the 20th Century British Art Fair advisory committee) and Waddington Galleries (now Waddington Custot).
Sold for a record £705,600
Christie’s 25/5/22 Collection of the late Sir Nicholas GoodisonThe gallery scene may have changed since Goodison was buying, but the enthusiasm for quality Modern British art has not. At the sale, even though staged in a small side gallery and not the usual ‘Great Room’, all 101 lots of Modern British art sold for £6.2 million against a pre-sale estimate of £1.9/2.8 million.
Star of the show was undoubtedly Keith Vaughan (1912-1977), a neo-romantic who shifted towards abstraction mid-career. Vaughan’s centenary was celebrated with a fine exhibition at Pallant House in 2012, about which the Independent commented ‘a fine painter – whose pictures, despite their bulk, show humanity at its frailest in an overwhelming landscape.’
One of Goodison’s first Modern British acquisitions was in 1988 (the year the 20th Century British Art Fair was born), when William Joll of Thomas Agnew & Sons bought Vaughan’s The Lake with Bathers, 1949, for him at Sotheby’s for £3,000 hammer (not including the buyer’s premium). At Christie’s it sold again for £107,100 including the buyer’s premium. In 1991, Joll acquired Vaughan’s Horizontal Figure 1968 for him, also at Sotheby’s, at £6,500. That now sold for £352,800. Top price of the sale was Vaughan’s The Sixth Assembly of Figures, 1962, which sold for a record £705,600, six times the estimate. Vaughan’s previous record was £313,250 in 2009 for a painting from the Richard Attenborough collection. Joll had bought the Sixth Assembly painting for Goodison in 1992 out of the fabled Sebastian Walker collection at Sotheby’s for £17,000 hammer. The annual compound interest return rates for these paintings works out at between 12% and 14% over 30 years, and should tickle the interest of any stockbroker.
Lot 45 - Ancestral Totem
a unique bronze by William Turnbull, conceived between 1956-58
(estimate £200,000-300,000) Sold for £554,400
Courtesy of Christie’s
Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)
Trophy (flight)
numbered 2⁄2' (on the underside), polished bronze on a hardwood base, 17 in. (43.2 cm.) high, excluding base
Conceived in 1965
Courtesy of Christie’sElsewhere, a 1962 oil on paper ‘Composition’ by Peter Lanyon, bought in 1993 for £8,300 hammer, sold for a quadruple estimate £138,600, to art advisor Nick Holmes, who also bought a 1952 Standing Mother and Child by Bernard Meadows above estimate for £32,760.
The top sculpture sale was an over 6-foot, mid 1950s bronze Ancestral Totem by William Turnbull that was underbid by Offer Waterman’s gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, before selling, it is believed , to an agent for collector Lord Graham Kirkham for a double estimate £554,400.
The bargain of the sale? “I got that,” claims dealer Alan Wheatley referring to Barbara Hepworth’s 1965 polished bronze Trophy which he bought for a double estimate £176,400.
Colin Gleadell is the art market columnist for The Daily Telegraph and a regular contributor to Artnet News, Art Monthly, and Artsy. Prior to The Telegraph, he worked for the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art as a researcher, the Crane Kalman Gallery as a gallery manager, and Bonhams auctioneers as Head of Modern Pictures. He worked for ten years (1986 – 1997) as the features editor of Galleries Magazine, whilst also contributing to leading art market publications such as Art & Auction and Art News where he was the London correspondent of the Artnewsletter. He Introduced Sister Wendy Beckett to the BBC for whom he worked as a consultant on market programmes such as the Relative Values series (1991). He also worked as an art market consultant for Channel 4 News.
Gleadell was on the original advisory committee for the 20th Century British Art Fair in 1988, where he has served ever since as it changed its name to the 20/21 British Art Fair, and now the British Art Fair.