BLAST #28
August 2025
Performance related art sparkles at Edinburgh Festival sale.
Jack Vettriano O.B.E.(1951- 2025), A Marvellous Night for a Moondance, 1990. Sold for £40,320
The Edinburgh Festival has had a chequered relationship with Scottish art auctions over the years. Christies based their department in Glasgow, and when they held sales in Edinburgh they were in October, not August, before redirecting them all to London. Sotheby’s pitched its sales in August, but an hour away from Edinburgh in Gleneagles. In 2007 their forty-year run there came to an end and the Scottish sales followed Christie’s to London, which left the field north of the border open to Bonhams. But while still operational in the Scottish capital, Bonhams decided festival goers were not big auction buyers so shifted their Scottish sales to October. Which in turn left the stage to Lyon & Turnbull, which had it all to themselves for a modern and contemporary sale of mostly Sottish art in mid-August.
There were no particularly rich pickings, but the sale totalled decent £546,000 against an estimate £422,000 with highlights tending to have a theatrical dimension in tune with the character of the festival. There were signs of a comeback for Jack Vettriano whose market had slumped prior to his death this year. Here his rousing composition, Marvellous Night for a Moondance, inspired by the first line of van Morrison’s 1970s hit, Moondance, doubled estimates to sell for £40,320.
There was also a record for the self-professed ‘high priestess of the grotesque’, professional dancer turned painter, Pat Douthwaite, as a bizarre untitled portrait dated 1979 sold for £13,860. Admirers of the work of the playwright/artist John Byrne whose market began to accelerate late in life (he died in 2023) were given plenty of choice with seven works, some from a former associate in Byrne’s play, The Slab Boys, which premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1978, all selling for an accumulative £46,000. The best in relation to estimate was an ink drawing of George Orwell that trebled estimates to sell for £3,780.
Patricia Douthwaite (1939-2002), Untitled, 1979. Sold for £13,860
John Byrne (1940-2023), Portrait of George Orwell. Sold for £3,780
John Kirby (1949-2025), Man with Peal Necklace. Sold for £11,340
The odd one out in the sale, because the artist was not Scottish, was the late John Kirby, an unsettling figurative painter of ambiguous gender subjects who died this year. Kirby’s fan club of celebrity collectors includes Madonna, actress Whoopi Goldberg, artist David Hockney, Pet Shop Boys co-founder, Neil Tennant, the fashion designer Thom Browne, and the sculptor, dancer and performance artist Nick Cave. Few works by Kirby had previously been sold at auction, the highest price on Artnet being £16,200 in 2006, though gallery prices for Kirby at his gallery, Flowers, can range from £5,000 to £150,000 depending on size.
At Lyon & Turnbull there were five Kirby paintings from the collection of the actor Stephen Jenn, Kirby’s partner and muse who died in 2012. With a combined estimate of £8,000, all sold for a total £30,000. Highest price was £11,340 for Man with a Pearl Necklace, which had been estimated at £2,000-£3,000, the best price for Kirby at auction since 2006. Matthew Flowers will hold a memorial exhibition for him at his Cork Street Gallery in November.
Encouraging feedback from statistical and financial analysts during August have been
1. Art Dai’s analysis of overall hammer ratios (i.e., how the hammer price for international artists compares to their pre-sale mid estimates) during the first six months of 2025 include Modern British artists . Among top fifty artists to exceed estimates were William Nicholson, Walter Richard Sickert and Edward Burra.
2. According to Schroders investment analysis, US investors have pumped more than $15 billion into UK stocks this year – more than into other markets. The consensus appears to be that the UK appears to be a safe haven, offering relative value. So if stocks, why not British art?
Gallery shows opening in September
Pangolin London: Geoffrey Clarke Extension (10 September – 1 November) will feature hitherto unknown paintings by the sculptor who made his name as one of the ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists (Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler) who made such an impression at the 1952 Venice Biennale. Until now, art historians did not know he painted at all. The paintings in the exhibition, hovering between abstraction and figuration, date from the 1980s and 1990’s when he discovered brightly coloured acrylics while staying in the Costa del Sol. Also on view will be infrequently seen late sculptures in aluminium, stained glass, surreal assemblages and jewellery all denoting his restless skill and imagination to explore every media available to him. Prices: from £175 for a print to £65,000 for the largest sculpture.
Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014), A Glint of Rousseau, 1990, Acrylic on canvas, 118 x 82.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of Steve Russell Studios.
Barry Flanagan (1941–2009), Left-and Right-Handed Nijinski on Anvil Point, 1999, Bronze. Image courtesy Waddington Custot.
Waddington Custot: Barry Flanagan Two by Two (18 September – 29 October). The estate of the late artist who moved from playful conceptualism with soft materials to playful figurations of animals in hard bronze – most famously his leaping/boxing/drumming hares – is managed by the Waddington Custot gallery. For this show they refer back to Flanagan’s sculpture, Noah’s Ark, 2004, and to the biblical story, by assembling a menagerie of bronze creatures hares, horses, dogs, elephants and unicorns, dating back to his earliest bronzes in the 1980s, turning the Cork Street gallery into a virtual refuge from the inclement storms and floods that threaten to engulf the planet. Several large sculptures by Flanagan, mostly eight or nine-foot bronze hares, have sold at auction for between £1 million and £1.5 million.
Brooke-Walder Fine Art: Rhythmic Lines, Paintings and Works on Paper by Jacob Kramer (11 September – 24 October). It’s been a while since we have seen a one-man show for the Russian/ Ukrainian born British artist Jacob Kramer (1892-1962). Dealers Vincent Kosman and Irving Grose (Belgrave Gallery) and the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum have been the leading proponents. Now it is time for the youthful Oliver Brooke-Walder to step in with an exhibition of 32 works for sale from three private collections.
The Philosopher, 1922, lithograph £8,500. Courtesy Brooke - Walder Fine Art
“I have long been fascinated with the great David Bomberg,” says Brooke- Walder “which has led me to explore the Whitechapel Boys and the great exhibition that they had at the Whitechapel in 1914. After putting on a Borough group show, a Lilian Holt retrospective and then a Keith Vaughan exhibition, Kramer seem to be the logical next step.
Like many of the Jewish emigrants of the period, Kramer brought with him new and exciting perspectives in art. Of particular note is an etching of a rabbi and an oil painting titled ‘Study of a Gypsy’. Both of which were in his 1962 retrospective in the Leeds City Art Gallery.”
Appropriate to this publication is that Kramer was commissioned by Wyndham Lewis to illustrate the second and final issue of BLAST magazine in 1915.
Works on view date from a 1915 portrait sketch of Augustus John to still lives of the 1940s. Other identified sitters, apart from a self-portrait, include Jacob Epstein, the jazz trumpeter Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong, the dancer, Anna Pavlova, the politician Ernest Bevin, and the composer Frederick Delius.
Price range: £1,200 for the artist’s palette to £16,000 for a painting of Oriental Poppies from 1943
Walter Sickert, Ennui, 1913-14, Courtesy of Piano Nobile, London
Piano Nobile: Walter Richard Sickert Love Death & Ennui (26th September – 19th December) is an exhibition of eighty works by the Modern British master, from the collection of recently deceased American collectors, Herbert and Anne Lucas. Among the highlights is an example from his series of studies of domestic boredom, Ennui (1913-14), a larger version of which is in Tate Britain’s collection. In July 1973 this smaller painting was sold at Sotheby’s London as part of the collection of gangster film star Edward G Robinson’s collection for £14,000. The Sickert market received a boost in June when his view of The Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, 1901, that cost dealer Daniel Katz £55,700 in 2021, sold for a record £520,700 (see BLAST#26). Prices at Piano Nobile will range from £1,200 for an etching to £850,000 for Ennui. The gallery has planned its private view for 25th September, the same day as the British Art Fair opening where Sickerts will also be on view and for sale with Browse & Darby, Harry Moore-Gwyn and other galleries.