BLAST #4

Welcome to BLAST Issue 4

December 2022

PERRY PICKING

Who said that the Royal Academy’s venerable summer exhibition was not the place to spot rising stars in the international market? At the 2018 exhibition curated by Grayson Perry a painting of a young black woman based on a police mug shot by fifty something year-old British artist Sarah Ball sold with a £12,000 asking price. Then this October, the same painting, (Untitled AC 16), reappeared at Christie’s with a £60/80,000 estimate. Ball had only had three works at auction before and none at this level. But she has been on the move since Stephen Friedman took her on with a sell-out exhibition this year in London when prices ranged from £50,000/£150,000. Collectors included Americans Beth Rudin de Woody and Howard Rachofsky. At Christie’s Untitled AC 16 realised a record of £94,500.

`SARAH BALL (B. 1965) Untitled (AC16), oil on linen, 100 x 100cm.`

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

Former Modern British art curator at Tate Britain and esteemed member of the British Art Fair vetting committee, Andrew Wilson, spent many years working on his PhD thesis on Patrick Heron. In his spare time, he pursued an unpredictable path, assembling a massive collection of punk memorabilia and artworks together with art dealer, Paul Stolper, an exhibitor at British Art Fair this year. But now they have dispersed it. The clothes were sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018 while the artworks were sold at Sotheby’s this autumn. Most of the 71 lots doubled their estimates or more. Jamie Reid’s promotional poster for God Save the Queen, owned by Sid Vicious, was estimated at £4,000 and sold for £44,000. The sale total was £354,000. “We were very pleasantly surprised,” Wilson, who is not given to hyperbole, told BLAST.

BLAST X BAERFAXT

`Marlow Moss (1889-1958), White and Black, oil on canvas, 53.5 x 53.5 cm.`

One of the best-read newsletters on the market is art dealer/advisor Josh Baer’s Baerfaxt which reports ringside on who is bidding on what. Its focus is on the international Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales – but is missing out on the Modern British. So BLAST went to Christie’s on October 19 to fill the gap.

2 Marlow Moss: White and Black, 1948, £300,000 record (£100/150,000). Buyer James Mayor.

3 Barbara Hepworth: Abstract c.1940 on paper. £130,000 (£70/100,000) buyer Clore Wyndham. Underbidder Pyms Gallery (now closed).

4 Ben Nicholson: 1968 (Delos 2). £430,000 (£400/600,000). Buyer Daniel Katz.

6 William Scott: Frying Pan Still Life – 1947. £600,000 (£300/500,000). Underbidder Alan Wheatley. (This painting last sold in May 1973 at Christie’s for 2,900 guineas)

7 Frank Auerbach: J.Y.M. Seated, 1986/7. £1 million (£600/900,000). Underbidder Pilar Ordovas

9 L.S. Lowry: Going to the Match, 1953. £6.6 million record (£5.8/8 million). Buyer the Lowry Centre, Salford with funds gifted by Andrew and Zoe Law. Sold by the FA’s Player’s Foundation which bought it in 1999 for £1.8 million.

12 L.S. Lowry: Unemployed 1937. £ 1 million (£1/1.5 million). Buyer Guy Morrison.

13 Patrick Heron: 3 Reds:1967. £80,000 (£80/10,000). Buyer Alan Wheatley.

14 Barbara Hepworth: Three Forms (Tokio), 1967. £580,000 (£300/500,000). Underbidder Pyms

15 Barbara Hepworth : Two Forms from Delos, 1970. £400,000 (£250/350,000). Underbidder Offer Waterman

17 William Scott: Three and One No 1, 1973. £230,000 (£150/250,000). Underbidders Alan Wheatley, Piano Nobile.

23 Barbara Hepworth Involute II, 1956. £239,400 (£120/180,000) Buyer Offer Waterman. This sculpture last sold in 2015 for £194,500.

25 Paul Nash The Bridge, Romney Marsh,1924. £280,000 (£80/120,000). Buyer Daniel Katz.

A CRICKET MATCH WITH LOWRY

`Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887- 1976) Going to the Match`

After the record £7.8 million for Lowry’s Going to the Match, Manchester collector Frank Cohen decided to offload his wonderful Lowry A Cricket Match, 1938, (street cricket in this case) which he bought at Christie’s in 2019 for £1.15 million, at Sotheby’s. There are not many artists you could re-offer three years after you bought it and expect to get your money back, but, with the help of a guarantee arranged by Sotheby’s, Cohen, described in the catalogue anonymously as ‘An Important Private British Collection’, clawed back most his outlay as Sotheby’s resold it for a £1.1 m hammer price.

A NEW HEAD OF MODERN BRITISH ART AT SOTHEBY’S

`Duncan Grant (B. 1885-1978),Vanessa Bell in a Yellow Shawl , 72.7 x 51.5 cm`

Not discussed in public at the sale, because it is still officially a secret, is the impending appointment of a new head of Modern British Art at Sotheby’s. The department has recently lost some valuable members of its team – Lydia Wingfield Digby to Jenna Burlingham, and Simon Hucker to Lyon & Turnbull. The surprise announcement will be that current head of department, Frances Christie, is to take more of a back seat, and will be replaced by Andre Zlattinger, who will move across from Christie’s contemporary department. Not long ago, Zlattinger was a provincial business getter for Phillips specialising in Victorian art but found his way to Sotheby’s Modern British department where he took responsibility for their Scottish sales. He then moved to Christie’s where he was given a more senior role in their Modern British department, but then took a chance in the more lucrative contemporary department, which is where his career rise at Christie’s came to an end. We won’t see him at Sotheby’s for a while though as Christie’s has handed him an unusually lengthy one-year gardening leave - a measure of the threat he poses to them in opposition.

ON TREND: THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP, BRITISH SURREALISM AND BERYL COOK

Outperforming the rest of the modern British market appears to be theBloomsbury group. Early works by these artists have always been sought after, and at Bonhams a 1911/12 Duncan Grant portrait of Vanessa Bell, painted in fashionable divisionist style and looking like the Queen of Sheba, soared over a £50,000 estimate to sell to an online bidder for £327,900, doubling the previous record for the artist and equalling the record for a Bloomsbury painting set by Roger Fry’s c 1911/20 portrait of E.M.Forster in 2020. The online bidder, we learn at BLAST, is a generous benefactor who will donate the painting to Charleston for all to admire. Less predictable has been the progress of later, more pedestrian work by the ‘Bloomsberries’, when they had abandoned pretensions to modernism. The market for these works had long been a backwater of the Modern British sales, but some new moneyed collectors, absorbed with the history and aesthetics of Bloomsbury and Charleston, are paying handsomely for anything with strong associations.

At Sotheby’s, for example, a dull 1973 still life by Duncan Grant that was bought in 1985 for £1,900 sold for £13,900. A 1954 still life of flowers in a faience jar at Charleston by Grant, bought in 1995 for £4,500, sold for £25,200.

Another strong performer is surrealism, and at a Bonhams Knightsbridge sale in the same week, a mysterious still life, Anthoreum, 1936, by the female surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, eclipsed her previous £53,220 record set only in September by selling for £258,600.

In the same sale another re-emerging female artist to perform was the evergreen chuckle inducer, Beryl Cook, whose Breakfast at Elvira’s1996, surpassed her previous record of £69,600 set the year she died (2008) selling for £82,500 (see more on this and Cook’s first show in America in my December 6 Daily Telegraph column)

`EILEEN AGAR (1899-1991), Self Portrait, 1952, oil on board, 40.6 x 30.5 cm`

More action on the British surrealist front is taking place for Eileen Agar (1899 – 1991), whose estate has long been represented by London’s Redfern Gallery, a duty which is now to be spread across the Atlantic, shared with California’s Wendi Norris Gallery. Norris has been an important player in the surrealist market exhibiting the works of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Alice Rahon over the last 20 years. She only came across Agar relatively recently after her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and inclusion in the Venice Biennale, and was captivated by ‘her approach to nature and sense of discovery’. Agar’s prices have been on an upturn recently, the price curve being most pronounced this year when her record £27,000, set in 2006 at the Peter Nahum sale, has been surpassed 7 times reaching £81,900 for her 1971 painting ‘Rite of Spring.’ Norris only bought one of these, she tells BLAST, a 1952 Self Portrait at Christie’s in July that made a triple estimate £32,768. Now she plans to expand Agar’s audience globally and give the artist her first exhibition in the USA in 2023.

WINSTON BRANCH

After a lot of toing and froing, the septuagenarian Caribbean born British artist Winston Branch, who has spent decades in the wilderness without representation, has finally landed on his feet. Branch emerged from the shadows when a painting of his sold for a record £126,000 at a Christie’s auction in March. His agent, Varvara Rosa who specialises in Greek art, told BLAST that she could not exhibit his work at the British Art Fair this year because Christie’s was going to show his work in a selling exhibition with Peter Doig and other prominent artists with Caribbean links. But other forces were at work and that never happened. The powerful Pace Gallery was making overtures, and, it transpires, Branch struck gold with London and Hong Kong’s Simon Lee Gallery which now represents him. His first exhibition there, Jasmines Blowing in the Wind, a title reminiscent of a line in the Seals and Crofts 1972 pop classic ‘Summer Breeze’, has just opened in London and several works have been sold in the £90,000 to £350,000 range. Lee is also showing his work at Art Basel Miami Beach.

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 British Art Fa