BLAST #11
Welcome to BLAST Issue 11
October 2023
The two key events for the Modern British art market this autumn have been:
The British Art Fair at the end of September which reported a 10% increase in visitor numbers to almost 12,000 over 4 days, and numerous sales. “The fair received much positive praise from exhibitors and visitors for the overall standard and range of British art on show and, at Saatchi Gallery it is shown in a superb setting” said the fair’s Director, Gay Hutson.
A Modern British and Irish Art sale at Christie’s on October 19 and 20 which made £16.6 million, not as much as hoped, but still a hive of interest and activity. Here, BLAST uniquely reveals details on those sales – who sold what, and who bought and bid.
British Art Fair
A selection of sales at British Art Fair (restricted to the Modern British content. A report from the SOLO contemporary section on the second floor will be issued separately/is available on request).
Naum Gabo (1890-1977) The Lyre Bird (OpusFour), 1950. Signed and titled. Monotype, 15.9 x 13.7 cm Provenance Annely Juda Fine Art, London. Courtesy of Austin/Desmond Fine ArtAustin/Desmond Fine Art – sold a rare construction from 1966 in perfect condition by Gillian Wise priced at £16,000, and works by Justin Knowles, Victor Pasmore, and Richard Eurich, a well as a rare print by Naum Gabo for £6,000 in Crossing Borders.
Whitford Fine Art – sold several early works from the 50s and 60s by the late Albert Irvin in the £12,500 to £35,000 range plus two oils by Caziel. The gallery was very impressed with the number of expat visitors on opening day.
Osborne Samuel – sold a big John Piper to a new client and works by John Minton, John Craxton and Keith Grant.
Portland Gallery – a large C.R.W Nevinson view of the South Downs, Cloud Shadows of Spring, c.1925-26, with an asking price of £85,000 plus works by Victor Pasmore, Richard Eurich and Gillian Wise.
Brooke-Walder Fine Art – sold Glyn Philpot’s Square in Ostend, 1936, priced at £50,000, a 1947 surrealist painting by the little-known Ronald Power priced at £3,500, and a large abstract from the 1950s by James Stroudley priced at £5,850, as well as works by Keith Vaughan, Lilian Holt and Gaudier Brzeska.
Headland with brigantine and ship, by Alfred Wallis (1855–1942). Oil and pencil on paper, 12 by 19 cm. Courtesy of PATRICK BOURNE & CO, LONDONPatrick Bourne & Co.– sold 10 works during the fair including three by Alfred Wallis priced from £15,000 – £35,000, a Winifred Nicholson abstract at £48,000, a Maxwell Armfield painting of fruit at £9,500, a John Ward black and white ceramic vessel at £12,000, as well as works by S.J. Peploe, C.R.W. Nevinson and the contemporary artist Haidee Becker.
The Redfern Gallery – sold works by Eileen Agar, Paul Feiler, Bryan Ingham, Merlyn Evans, Terry Frost and Diana Armfield. Price range £3,000 - £45,000.
Castlegate House Gallery – sold three works by Joan Eardley including a coloured drawing, Two Samson Children, c.1962, for £40,000.
Christopher Kingzett – sold works by Kenneth Armitage (£50,000), Laura Knight (£10,000), and Keith Vaughan (£25,000).
Jonathan Clark Fine Art – sold a 1930s surrealist composition, The Ladder, by Stanley William Hayter, Winifred Nicholson’s Window Still Life with Shells, 1935, a 1961 painting and a 1971 drawing by Roger Hilton, and an Ivon Hitchens painting.
The Fine Art Society – sold Eric Ravilious’ Fire Control Room, 1941, priced at £200,000, a 1975 painting by John Byrne, a 1927 drawing by William McCance, a stoneware vase by Robin Welch, a 1950s vase by Waistel Cooper, and a 1930s earthenware jar by Charles J. Noke and Harry Nixon.
Emma Mason - sold a number of works by Alistair Grant (1925-97) priced between £650 and £3000.
Amanda Aldous Fine Art – exhibited prints by Peter Lanyon, Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Procktor together with her stable of contemporary artists and reported good sales mainly under £5,000.
Enitharmon – exhibited prints by Caroline Walker (£1,500 to £3,000) and Paula Rego (£2,500 to £4,500) and reported good sales.
Jenna Burlingham Gallery – had a busier fair than previously. Sold work by Colin Self, Duncan Grant and Keith Vaughan amongst several others as well as a print by Kim Lim priced at £5,250 in the Crossing Borders exhibition.
Marcus Campbell Art Books – the art book dealer sold a large painting by Peter Kinley for £25,000.
Browse & Darby – sold paintings by Euan Uglow in the £32,000 – £85,000 range, a 1914 watercolour by William Ratcliffe, and a work by Elizabeth Blackadder.
Keith Vaughan courtesy of Stow Art HouseMiddlemarch Fine Art – sold works by Roger Hilton, Julian Trevelyan and Maggie Hambling.
Portal Gallery - sold ten works from its stable of idiosyncratic artists, Ben Unsworth (1), Peter Layzell (2), Lizzie Riches (3), Joseph O’ Reilly (1), James McNaught (3), from £3,000 - £15,000 each.
Freya Mitton - sold works by John Wells, Terry Frost, Ken Howard, Josef Herman, John Nash, Breon O’Casey, Leonard McComb and Fred Yates. Price range £750 - £40,000.
Dominic Kemp Modern British Prints - sold prints by Dorothy Carr, John Hoyland, John Piper, Barbara Rae, Prunella Clough, Stephen Gilbert and Keith Vaughan.
Sally Hunter Fine Art – sold works by lesser-known Modern British artists like Elaine Henderson and Mary Godwin – all under £10,000.
Stow Art House – sold a 1959 Keith Vaughan pastel priced at £35,000 within 15 minutes of the fair opening and continued to sell steadily throughout the fair.
The Crossing Borders exhibition of 20th c works by immigrant artists loaned by dealers sold 9 works from a £550 print by Helmuth Weisenborn from Gwen Hughes Fine Art to £14,000 for a painting by Peter de Francia from James Hyman Gallery (several times more than the auction record) and continues to run online.
An Indian Student (Kulwant Aurora) 1, 1957. Oil on canvas, 151.5 x 90.5 cm. Courtesy of James Hyman GalleryModern British and Irish Art sale at Christie’s
Lot 12: DAME BARBARA HEPWORTH (1903-1975) Three Obliques (Walk In), signed, numbered and dated 'Barbara Hepworth 0⁄2 1969' (at the base). Bronze with a green, brown and golden patina, 113 ¾ x 183 ½ x 130 in. (288.9 x 466.1 x 330 cm.) Conceived in 1968 and cast in 1969 by Morris Singer Foundry, London, in an edition of 2, plus an artist's cast. This work is recorded as BH 473. Estimate: GBP 6,000,000 – GBP 9,000,000. Price Realised: GBP 5,830,000. © Christie’s Images Limited 2023The Christie’s sale was a disappointment on the surface. The hammer total of £13.3 million was significantly lower than the pre-sale low estimate of £17.5 million with about one third of the lots going unsold. It was the lowest autumn season Modern British series total since 2014 but must been seen in the context of slackening supply and demand experienced throughout the international art market. Given all the negatives from war to inflation, there were enough positive takeaways to keep traders and collectors happy, from long term gains to competitive buying possibilities, which is what keeps the market ticking over.
The top lot was Barbara Hepworth’s 20-foot-wide bronze, Three Obliques (Walk In), 1969, estimated at £6/8 million which sold to a single bid of £4.8 million. The seller, though, might not have felt too despondent. It is not known exactly how much they paid for it, but they bought it at Sotheby’s Chatsworth House exhibition in 2007 not long after a cast from the edition of three was sold at Sotheby’s New York to US property developer, Martin Selig, for $1.46 million – a price which must have informed the sale at Chatsworth – and if an accurate pointer, reaped the seller a decent return.
Nevertheless, Christie’s may have been wrong footed by the adjustments going on in the international markets as, of the four other Hepworths in the evening sale, two also sold below estimate and two were unsold. Picking up on the slack demand was Osborne Samuel which bought the artist’s Six Forms (2x3), 1968, below estimate for £189,000.
Lot 6: ROBYN DENNY (1930-2014) The Austin Reed Mural, signed and dated 'DENNY '59' (lower left). Oil and collage on board, 78 x 120 in. (198.1 x 304.8 cm.) Painted in 1959. Estimate: GBP 180,000 – GBP 250,000.Price Realised: GBP 352,800. © Christie’s Images Limited 2023Staying with the internationally recognised artists, the three Ben Nicholsons in the sale were all Mondrian inspired abstracts of the 1930s with estimates from £60,000 to £1 million, from the collection of the late Allan Emil, a former vice president of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his wife Kate. Two sold, the largest and earliest for a mid-estimate £1.4 million, a record for one from this series. The second, smaller 1943 (painted relief ), was bought within estimate for £201,00 by Richard Green, while the third and smallest, with least colour, didn’t sell.
Another international artist in the spotlight was Lynn Chadwick with 3 works (and many more in the day sale) that met with mixed results at the top end. A 7-foot Walking Woman from the estate of National Gallery of Art Washington trustee, Morton Funger, was the first of that edition to be auctioned but couldn’t raise the £700,000 low estimate. Size may also have been a factor with Chadwick’s 6 ½ foot Teddy Boy and Girl, 1979, that sold below estimate to a pre-sale guarantor for £819,000, £90,00 shy of the highest price for an example from that edition of six and accurately reflecting the state of the market.
St Ives abstractions and neo-Romanticism were surprisingly thin on the ground, with Jonathan Clark and Alan Wheatley, seemingly buying in tandem, picking up John Minton’s darkly muscular Cornish Fisherman, 1948, below estimate for £63,000, and Terry Frost’s burnished abstraction, Yellow Painting, 1954 also below estimate for £94,500. It must be nice for dealers to be able to buy good art at sensible prices again.
When it comes to British pop and the Royal College generation of the 50s and 60s unexpected things can happen. The first lot, a small Untitled (self-portrait), 1962-63 by the young Alan Jones, had an estimate of £50/80,000, but was taken to double estimate £163,000. Five lots later, the same phone bidder, thought to be Carphone Warehouse owner, Charles Dunstone, paid double estimate again setting a record £352,800 for the long-underrated Robyn Denny and his 10-foot-wide Austin Reed Mural, 1959, a collage with a jazzy jumbled typographic impact, made famous as the backdrop in a Beatles photoshoot. The lot was underbid by Jonathan Clark who previously owned and sold the work. “It really should be in a museum,” he said.
Lot 15: SIR CEDRIC MORRIS (1889-1982) Richard Chopping, signed and dated 'CEDRIC MORRIS/41' (lower right). Oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 27 ¼ in. (101.6 x 68.6 cm.) Painted in 1941. Estimate: GBP 80,000 – GBP 120,000. Price Realised: GBP 239,400. © Christie’s Images Limited 2023Also selling well was a portrait of Richard Chopping in 1941 by Cedric Morris, which sold to art advisor Nick Holmes for a double estimate £239,400. Although Morris’ wildflower and garden produce paintings have made more, this was a record for a portrait by Morris by some way, demonstrating his influence over the young Lucian Freud at the time.
Failing to deliver a return was L.S Lowry’s Going to the Match , 1946, (not to be confused with the 1954 Going to the Match which Christie’s sold in 2022 for £7.8 million). To make things more confusing, not only are the titles the same, so was the seller, the Players Foundation. The Foundation has recently been selling works by Lowry which it bought as an investment at a loss to generate income, but this work, which they bought in 2012 at Christie’s for £541,250 did not get a bid at £480,000 and went unsold. It is thought they simply paid too much for it in 2012. Also making a loss for the Foundation was Lowry’s small Woman with Dogs which had been bought in 2015 far above estimate for £149,000, but now sold for £81,900. A better return for the Foundation was the £113,400 paid for a drawing, Footbridge at Droylesden, for which they had paid a double estimate £80,000 in 2015.
Consistently positive returns were also made for a group of drawings and small paintings by Lowry that appeared in the lower value day sale. They had been bought in the 1980s and 90s by the late Dave and Mefus Ensor, about whom Christie’s could tell me nothing except that they used to visit the auctions to buy a small Lowry on an almost annual basis, rarely bidding much above estimate. One drawing, Street in Whitby, 1955, was bought in 1988 for £3,800 and now sold for £41,800. A small painting, Merchant Ship, 1958, bought in 1992 for £6,000 sold for £119,700. Which goes to show that buying established artists for the long term without getting carried away can reap dividends.
The day sale had got off to an electric start when a 1919 portrait of the Vorticist artist Helen Saunders by Jessica Dismorr sold way over its £5,000 estimate for a record £35,280. A pre-pop 1959 gouache still life by Pauline Boty, who died in her 20s and has only recently been rediscovered, sold for a double estimate £55,000. It was last at auction as the property of Joe Boyd, the American record producer (of Pink Floyd and Nick Drake among others), in 2014 when it did not sell with a £6,000 estimate. Bought after the auction probably for less, it has stood the buyer in good stead.
Here's some more action from the day sale with buyers and underbidders: (Prices include buyer’s premium, estimates do not)
LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976) Merchant Ship, signed and dated ‘LS Lowry 1958’ (lower right) Oil on board. 3 ¾ x 14 5⁄8 in. (9.5 x 37.2 cm.) Painted in 1958. Estimate: GBP 70,000 – GBP 100,000. Price Realised: GBP 119,700. © Christie’s Images Limited 2023 101. Jessica Dismorr. Portrait of a Woman Seated (Helen Saunders), 1919. Estimate £5/8,000. Sold for a record £35,280 to Philip Mould. As is his wont, Mould discovered the sitter was not the Vorticist artist, Helen Saunders, but Dismorr’s sister, Margaret and Christie’s made a statement to that effect. More will be revealed when Mould shows the work in his gallery.
117. John Cecil Stephenson. Vortex No 2, 1939. Estimate: £15/25,000. Sold £47,880 to advisor Nick Holmes
118. Barbara Hepworth . Three Forms, 1935/1971. Estimate: £120/180,000.sold for £182,700. Underbid by Osborne Samuel
130. Lynn Chadwick. Bird IV, iron. 1958. Est £80/120,000. Sol for £78,120 to Osborne Samuel.
136. Henry Moore. Reclining Figure, terracotta, 1940. Est £8/12,000. Sold for £15,120 to Mark Goodman
JOHN CECIL STEPHENSON (1889-1965) Vortex No. 2, signed, inscribed and dated 'JC STEPHENSON 1939/"VORTEX" No. 2' (on the reverse), inscribed again '6 Mall Studios Hampstead NW3 Parkhill Road' (on the stretcher) Tempera on canvas laid on panel. 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm.) Painted in 1939. Estimate: GBP 15,000 – GBP 25,000. Price Realised: GBP 47,880. © Christie’s Images Limited 2023138. Henry Moore. Reclining Figure, bronze, 1940. Est £12/18,000. Sold for £10,710 to Mark Goodman.
139. Kenneth Armitage. People Walking 1956. Estimate £25/35,000. Sold for 27,720. Underbid by Alan Wheatley.
141. Reg Butler. Musee Imaginaire, 1961-61. Estimate £50/80,000. Sold for £81,900. Underbid by Jonathan Clarke.
160. Keith Vaughan. Supper at Worpswede, 1951. Estimate £80/120,000. Sold for £163,800. Underbid by Osborne Samuel.
162. Henry Moore. Maquette for Reclining Figure 1955. Estimate: £50/80,000. Sold on the low estimate to Osborne Samuel for £63,000 or much the same price as the seller bought it for in 2005, since when prices for other casts of this edition have sold in the £100,000 range.
166. John Piper. Seaton Delaval, c 1941. Estimate £60/80,000. Sold for £75,600 to Jonathan Clark.
182. Ben Nicholson. Nov 59. Estimate £100/150,000. Sold for £126,000. Underbid by Osborne Samuel.
183. William Scott. Bowl with Lid on Blue, 1975. Estimate: £25/35,00. Sold to Richard Green £68,040
186. William Scott. Untitled White and Blue,1965.Estimate: £70/£100,000 . Sold to Richard Green £88,200
LEON KOSSOFF (1926-2019) Christchurch, Spitalfields No. 2. Charcoal and coloured chalk on paper. 29 5⁄8 x 21 ¾ in. (75.5 x 55.2 cm.) Executed in 1989. Estimate: GBP 18,000 – GBP 25,000. Price Realised: GBP 94,500. © Christie’s Images Limited 2023198. Keith Vaughan. Mill at Cuddington II : Green. Estimate: £25/35,000. Sold for £69,300. Underbid by Conor Mullan
203. Lynn Chadwick. Second Stairs, 1991/2000. Estimate: £80/120,000. Sold to Osborne Samuel £81,900
216. Matthew Smith. Sottish Landscape, 1930s. Estimate: £20/30,000. Sold for £49,140. Underbid by Nick Holmes
223. Samuel John Peploe. Bouquet.... c 1905-9. Estimate: £18/25,000. Sold for £32,760. Underbid by Duncan Miller.
234. David Hockney. Peter Reading, drawing, 1966. Estimate: £30/50,000. Sold for £69,300. Underbid by Mark Goodman. Last sold in November 2010 for $8,800.
236. Leon Kossoff. Christchurch Spitalfields No2, 1989. Charcoal drawing. Estimate: £18/25,000. Sold for £94,500. Underbid by Robin Katz.
237. David Hockney. Study for Wiltshire Figure, 1963. Estimate: £12/18,000. Sold for £16,380. Underbid by Mark Goodman.
240. Antony Gormley. MOON, 2017, work on paper. Estimate: £4/6,000. Sold for £8,190 to Robin Katz.
242. Lynn Chadwick. Trog 1960. Estimate: £30/50,000. Sold for £65,520 to Osborne Samuel.
258. Patrick Heron. 30 DECEMBER: 1982: 1. Estimate: £12/18,000. Sold for £23,940 to Richard Green
261. Alan Davie. Shellfish Elements 1956. Estimate: £25/35,000. Sold to Alan Wheatley £40,320, underbid by Mark Goodman.
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 Fair.