BLAST #26

June 2025

Gallery news

Agar

The Eileen Agar estate’s London representative base has moved a few feet down Cork Street from Redfern to Alison Jacques. But the short step has international implications. Since the boom in the British surrealist’s market (see BLAST #16) interest in Agar’s estate has seen a shift to galleries with international standing and toe holds in the contemporary as well as the modern markets. American interest was first sparked by the specialist surrealist Gallery Wendi Norris in 2022, but has now transferred to the more contemporary gallery Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York. In London Jacques has already proved to be an effective agent for the estate of the surrealist Dorothea Tanning and is a regular exhibitor at major international fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze, so able to take her work to a global market.

Pasmore

One of the numerous threads of engagement that were left dangling by the closure of the Marlborough Gallery became disentangled this month with the announcement that the Victor Pasmore estate, that has been with Marlborough since the artist’s death in 1998, and was celebrated by the gallery with an exhibition in 2017, transferred to Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, the group that consists of three former senior directors of Marlborough, Rossi, John Erle-Drax and Geoffrey Parton, and works out of the same building as HHH in St James’s. According to New York’s The Baer Faxt newsletter, Pasmore prices from the estate range from $40,000-$200,000, though the auction record is much higher. In 2017, Christie’s sold a five-foot square abstract relief Linear Motif in Black and White, 1960-61, for £329,000 ($420,000) when it was underbid by Jenna Burlingham, now a BAF advisory committee member.

Trevelyan

With the opening of an exhibition of previously unseen paintings and prints from the estate of Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988) Jenna Burlingham confirms that she has taken over the role previously played by the Bohun Gallery in Henley of managing the printed work from the Trevelyan estate. The exhibition, Tides and Travel, which runs at her gallery until 12th July covers Trevelyan’s life’s work from the 1930s to the 1980s, which is priced from £950 for the cheapest prints, to between £14,000 and £35,000 for the paintings. Further paintings from the estate are expected to be offered in the near future by Dreweatts auctioneers. Proceeds from the sales will go towards establishing a long-term, not-for profit artist’s residency program at Durham Wharf, the artist’s studio by the Thames in Hammersmith which he shared with his wife, Mary Fedden ensuring that this special place remains a haven for a new generation of artists.

Hockney

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, meanwhile, has produced a display of early work by David Hockney that rivals the efforts of the Fondation Louis Vuitton to represent the early work in its sprawling show now on in Paris. At the opening, where pop artist Allen Jones was in attendance, art dealer Ivor Braka explained to me how brave it was for Hockney to paint gay subject matter in the days when the law prohibited same sex interaction. At least two of the exhibits had passed through his hands. Not much was for sale, but the prints seem very reasonable for sale at £1,000. Confidence in the Hockney market seems to be standing up to general art market anxiety pressures and in Art Basel (17-22 June), Annely Juda recorded one of the top sales on the week selling Hockney’s diptych Mid November Tunnel (2006) for between $13 and 17 million, while on London gallery Soft Opening’s stand, young Caribbean diaspora artist, Rhea Dillon proved a hot commodity selling all seven of her boxed sculptures referring to the colonial past for between £14,000 and £15,000 each.

Women artists

Jenny Savile, Mirror, 2011. Charcoal on paper. Sold at Sotheby's for £2.1 million

Marlow Moss, White, Black, Blue and Red, 1944. Sold for £609,600

Sotheby’s was not boasting the most valuable of the London summer season modern and contemporary art sales, possibly because it was still estimated at a lot less than previous Sotheby’s summer season sale seasons. They did however play on what they thought would be a positive outcome from their sales – results by women artists – and promoted their latest Insight report, produced in partnership with number crunchers, ArtTactic, focussing on the burgeoning market for women artists. Their list of the top 50 women artists by sales value at auction include an impressive 10 British artists, namely: Cecily Brown, Barbara Hepworth, Bridget Riley, Leonora Carrington, Jenny Saville, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Jadé Fadojutimi, Flora Yukhnovich, Tracey Emin and Caroline Walker

At the sale the only records to break were for British women. A large charcoal drawing, Mirror, 2011, by Saville sold above estimate for a drawing record £2.1 million – “a fair price” said Stefan Ratibor of the Gagosian Gallery which represents her. Moments later Marlow Moss’s Mondrian inspired White, Black, Blur and Red, 1944, sold for a triple estimate £609,600. According to trade source, several third parties vied to guarantee the painting which had a soft £200,000 low estimate, whereas privately her work has sold for as much as Euros 850,000.

June Auctions

Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury staged a sale of Modern British & 20th Century Art on 4th June in which they managed to sell nearly 300 out of 350 lots for £609,000 – not bad for the lower end of the market. Mind you, estimates were temptingly low throughout the sale resulting in some multi estimate prices for the more interesting works, A squared up drawing of a woman in a cowboy hat by Walter Sickert, was inscribed ‘Gilman’, suggesting a close link somewhere between the two Camden Town Group painters, was estimated at just £250, suggesting some doubt over the attribution, but sold for £4,032. BLAST has noted the improved market for John Nash before and Woolley & Wallis had a 1935 oil landscape of Hampden House Park that had sold back in 1999 within estimate for £4,830. The buyer was rewarded with a handsome double estimate £56,700 return. Other artists to see healthy returns on works bought thirty years previously were the 1930s townscapes of New English Arts Club member Harold Workman, and Modern British women Doris Zinkeisen and Joan Eardley. Special mention should also be made of the wood engravings of Monica Poole (1921-2003). A shy and retiring artist by all accounts, she produced consistently arresting, surrealistic images of plants. Recently Abbott and Holder offered a collection of 18 examples and sold them all. One of them, Teasels, was priced at £975. At Woolley & Wallis, another edition of Teasels was estimated at £600, but sold for an artist’s record £8,568.

Katz Gallery sale

A focus for the Modern British market in June was the sale of selected items from the Daniel Katz Gallery at Sotheby’s on the 10th. Katz has never been afraid to bid high for something unusual if it appeals to him though it does not always pay dividends. Lynn Chadwick’s fearsome welded iron Second Version of Snapping Turtle 1954, for example, is not what most people want from a Chadwick these days (elegantly seated or walking figures with triangular heads are most popular) but in 2022 Katz paid an above estimate £264,000 for it. At Sotheby’s it was estimated higher than before at £180,000-250,000 but had no bid at £170,000 and was not sold. The terrifying turtle is currently on Artsy with Piano Nobile as Price on request.

Sometimes Katz got more carried away when he was bidding. In 2006 he paid a ten times estimate record £66,000 for Joe Tilson’s Wood Relief no. 21 Bocca, 1961, a great early example of the work of an artist whose career was enjoying a new lease of life in his eighties. But since Tilson’s gallery, Marlborough imploded, demand seems to have softened, and this month estimated at £20,000, the relief went unsold at £9,500.

The major unsold lot was a full-length charcoal drawing, Seated Figure Charcoal, 1955, by Frank Auerbach, estimated at £100,000. As the recent Courtauld exhibition demonstrated (see BLAST #13) the head studies are what wealthy collectors want and the seated figure was adjudged unsold when the bidding stopped at £85,000.

There was more competition for Kenneth Armitage’s 32-inch Seated Group bronze, 1952-4, which Katz bought in 2005 for a triple estimate £78,000 when it was being sold at Sotheby’s by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Taking advantage of the softer market this time round, Osborne Samuel bought it within estimate for £49,530.

Lot 66, Robert Adams, Two Rectangles & Bar. Sold for £,398

The greatest bulk of the sale was made up of ten large, gloriously romantic but gloomy paintings of ruins by James Pryde which Katz had spotted in a storage facility used for the contents Dunecht House in Aberdeenshire which the Cowdray family was selling. Katz bought them and then offered them in his gallery for around £50,000 each. At Sotheby’s, nine sold, all just within estimates of £20,000-30,000 for an accumulative £330,000. One paddle number appears to have bought most of them on the phone, so the group, which Wendy Baron rated as “One of the most coherent decorative schemes created in Britain during the early 20th century” may stay together.

Of course there were also examples of gains. Resurgence, a depiction of personified medieval military virtues during World War II by Eric Kennington, had been bought for a triple estimate £6,200 in Crewkerne in 2018, and just bettered that selling for £9,525. Similarly, a gilt abstract sculpture by Robert Adams, Two Rectangles & Bar, 1963, which he picked up at auction in Houston in 2022 for $3,250 sold in London for £9,398 ($12,700).

But the most triumphant moment of the sale came halfway through when a view of The Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, 1901, by Walter Richard Sickert came up with a £150,000 estimate. It would have been understandable if there had been reluctance to give Katz a big profit for something he had paid just £55,700 for four years earlier at auction in Geneva. But on that occasion, he had seized a bargain – a superb atmospheric painting with ravishing tonal qualities that this time excited the enthusiasm of at least two bidders who ran the price up to a new £520,700 record.

BLAST #25 | British Art Thrives in New York Fairs