Modern British Highlights
Anthony Hill (1930-2020), Untitled, circa 1950. Collage, crayon, gouache and pencil on paper, 52 x 40.5 cm. £5,750+ ARR
Best known as a member of the avant-garde postwar Constructionist Group, Anthony Hill made this collage in 1950 whilst still a student at London’s Central School of Arts. While it looks back at art history, to Cubism and Dada, it also looks forward to his mathematical constructivist relief works. An important transitory work, it combines both collage and found objects with drawn shapes. In it, Hill was seeking to challenge traditional art methods, identifying a link between his own practice and the work of Marcel Duchamp and exploring the balance and composition of geometry in a playful and experimental manner. Hill was granted a retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1983 and died, aged 90, in 2020.
Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), Jake in Paris, c.1936-7. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 49.5 cm. Price on application
A group of works by Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) comes to the market with Patrick Bourne & Co for the first time in their history, coinciding with Dreams of the Everyday - the current exhibition curated by Jonathan Anderson which brings together the paintings of Winifred Nicholson and Andrew Cranston (b. 1969) and opens at The Holburne Museum in Bath in October. The collection includes still lifes and portraits of two of her children, Jake Nicholson and Kate Nicholson painted in locations including Cumbria, the Isle of Wight, Paris and Greece. In this one, Jake carries a dove on his head. Doves were pets that Jake could legally take with him as Winifred and her children moved to and fro, spending part of the year in Cumberland, part in Paris.
Peter Sedgley (1930-2025), Red, Blue & Green Target, 1964. Acrylic on Wood, diameter 149.86 cm. £48,000
Peter Sedgley was self-taught as an artist. Having studied architecture and worked as an architect’s assistant, he took up painting in the early 1960’s after he met Bridget Riley. The two provided Britian’s leading examples of Op art in the groundbreaking The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. Red, Blue & Green Target, 1964, is a rare example of his early work which, influenced by Jasper Johns’ target paintings can be seen as a precursor of the kinetic art of which he was a prime exponent. In it, Sedgley used the circle or target as a means of investigating colour in motion in that the painting appears to rotate, pulsating with colour. A work from the same date holds the artist’s auction record of £65,000 (hammer), whilst the largest and earliest kinetic works at his last retrospective at the Redfern Gallery were priced up to £75,000.
Bridget Riley (b.1931), Rose Rose 12, 2011.
Oil on linen, 37.3 x 25 cm. £350,000
Bridget Riley is best known for her dynamic black and white geometric paintings of the 1960s. Exploiting optical phenomena to evoke compelling sensations of movement and three- dimensionality, she interrogated not only how we see, but the phenomenological experience of seeing. In 1985 Riley visited Egypt and it transformed her work as she explored new ranges of colour consistently using four or five colours: brick red, yellow ochre, blue, turquoise and green in an ongoing series of horizontal and vertical stripe paintings. She also began to use oil instead of acrylic paint for its more saturated quality. “If I wanted to make colour a central issue,” she said “I had to give up the complexities of form with which I had been working. In the straight line I had one of the most fundamental forms”.
The lines are uniform: of equal density and at regular intervals. Riley has suggested that these vertically striped works should be read from left to right to best appreciate the variations in colour between warmer and cooler hues. Whilst these arrangements of form and colour change over the following years they return from around 2009 in a warmer more sensuous way and are clearly in evidence in 2011 when she painted Rose, Rose which comes to the open market for the first time since it was acquired privately through Christie’s in 2020.
Kathleen Temple-Bird (1879-1962), Gandhi sitting cross legged spinning yarn, c. 1940. Oil on panel, 29.5 x 25 cm. Price on application
Artists clamoured for access to Mahatma Gandhi during his visit to London for a round table conference on Indian Independence in 1931. As James D Hunt recounts in his book, Gandhi in London: “... the early mornings when Mr. Gandhi arrived, and you felt as though a torchlike “something” had come into the house. He would spring out of his car and be up in his room sitting by the fire spinning, in a flash. In every corner of the room there were famous sculptors and artists trying to get a model or a picture of this elusive man ...”
One of these was Suffragette artist, Kathleen Temple-Bird (1879-1962), who made a drawing, signed in approval by Gandhi, and two paintings. One was bought by the French government and resides at the Centre Pompidou, the other, Gandhi sitting cross legged spinning yarn, was kept by the artist and passed down through her family until it was acquired by Florence Evans Fine Art who will exhibit it at the fair.
Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014), Extension (Observer) c.1989-91. Acrylic on canvas 64 x 49 x 3 cm. £10,000 + VAT
It’s not often that a gallery which has represented an artist’s estate for over a decade earlier unveils a tranche of paintings which even the experts were unaware of – especially if the artist is better known as a sculptor. Such is the case with Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014) and Pangolin London who will be showing Extension (Observer) c.1989, one of the semi-abstracted, three-dimensional paintings which Clarke made in private during the latter stages of his life in Spain and are currently on view at their gallery in King’s Cross.
David Hockney (b.1937), In Front of House Looking West, 2019. Inkjet print. edition of 35, 86.4 x 109.2 cm. £135,000
With the onset of COVID in 2019, David Hockney set off for Normandy on a whim and bought a 17th century property there, converting the high-ceilinged barn into a studio from which he could observe the seasonal changes at close quarters. The following Spring he staged his first exhibition of Normandy springtime iPad paintings, two hundred and twenty of which were made into inkjet prints forming the series 220 for 2020, and eight of which, made from an edition of 2,020 and priced at £1,995 each will be displayed on Blond Contemporary’s stand. The earliest and perhaps the progenitor of the series was this depiction of the barn/studio set within its verdant green gardens.
Dame Barbara Hepworth, DBE (1903-1975), Two Forms (Atlantic), 1961. Polished bronze, the tallest height 8.5 cm (not including base). £115,000
These miniature sculptures belong thematically to the large body of work which was inspired by the Atlantic Ocean after Hepworth’s move to Cornwall at the outbreak of war in 1939. The artist never elaborated on the significance of place names in her titles, so the viewer is left to play with their own associations – in this case, probably pebbles washed up on the beaches between St Ives and Land’s End. The sculptures also belong to the early period in her life from the late 1950s when she advanced beyond carving into making bronze sculptures. Large scale sculptures inspired by the Atlantic have sold in the millions. Another cast from this edition was included in the Tate Gallery’s Hepworth exhibition in 1968
Henry Moore (1898-1986), Woman Leaning on a Table, 1948. Gouache, ink on paper, 22.9 x 24.1 cm. £40,000 + 5% import tax + ARR
During the 1940’s Moore coined the phrase ‘two-way sectional line method’ to describe the way he brought figures to life in two dimensions with a maze of geometric lines. The method was employed particularly when depicting figures engaged in domestic activities. In Woman Leaning on a Table, we can see how the sectional line drawing helps to define the three dimensionality of the figure, its volume and weight.
As is characteristic for drawings from this period, many of which are included in prominent public collections such as the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, or the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the surface of the figure is divided into panels – giving the appearance of being “composed of stones cut into sections and fitted together like a three-dimensional jig-saw puzzle.”
Euan Uglow (1932-2000), Italian landscape, 1972. Oil on canvas, 86.4 x 111.8 cm. Price on application
A slow and meticulous worker, Euan Uglow is best known for his paintings of nude or semi-naked women which have fetched up to £ ½ million at auction. Landscapes are much rarer but still significant, often painted abroad, and this Italian landscape from 1972 has understandably surfaced for sale with Browse & Darby who were the artist’s long-term dealers during his lifetime. The view is of a hill near Pignano in Tuscany, where Uglow stayed that summer with his artist friend, Craigie Aitchison. As Andrew Lambirth relates in his latest biography of Uglow, they stayed at the summer residence of Hans Hortig and his wife Gloria, who used to model for him. The painting testifies to the impact which Italian light and colour had on Uglow’s art which was previously more sombre.