BLAST #13
Courtauld choice reflects the market
Frank Auerbach (b.1931), Head of Gerda Boehm, 1961, Charcoal and chalk on paper. Private Collection courtesy of Eykyn Maclean © the artist, courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London
The Courtauld Institute’s current exhibition of charcoal drawings of heads by Frank Auerbach may have been described as “sepulchral” by The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke, but they’re very much a live wire discussion topic in the art market which usually means sponsorship is not an issue for the exhibiting institution. Ever since the appointment of a curator for Modern British Art at The Courtauld in 2007 supported by the art dealer Daniel Katz, the programme for Modern British art, beginning with Walter Sickert, Frank Auerbach’s building sites and Peter Lanyon’s gliding pictures, has been on the button in market terms. This exhibition, for instance, includes the four top selling Auerbach head drawings at auction. Three sold in the market breakthrough year of 2010. A head of fellow painter Leon Kossoff was sent to Sotheby’s in February that year with a £60,000 estimate and was met with a barrage of bids from dealers Pilar Ordovas, James Holland-Hibbert, and Offer Waterman who eventually won out on behalf of a private client at £890,000 - a record for a work on paper by Auerbach by a long way. That year, further strong prices for Auerbach head drawings were seen for a Head of EOW, 1957, that doubled estimates (which had inevitably risen) to sell for £325,500, and a Head of Helen Gillespie, 1962, with an even higher £300,000 estimate, which sold for £445,2000. All were sold at Sotheby’s and are in The Courtauld show. The peak of this market came five years later in 2015, again at Sotheby’s, where dealers Eykyn MacLean surpassed estimates again to buy a Head of Gerda Boehm 111, 1961, for £2.2 million.
Who were the mystery buyers? Waterman’s client was rumoured in the trade to have been Taylor Thomson, the Canadian publishing heiress, whose brother, David, is a big British art collector (from Constable to Patrick Heron), though Waterman has denied that. Perhaps there is another clue in the list of sponsors. The lead sponsor for The Courtauld show is Citadel, the hedge fund company owned by Ken Griffin, one of the biggest spenders on post war and contemporary art in the world. Griffin is known to be largely involved with acquisitions of American art - Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko etc. - but that could always change. He recently bought a mansion close to St James’s Park.
London Art Fair; a Bloomsbury Blast in Islington
Duncan Grant (1885-1978), Vanessa Bell (The Red Hat), c. 1917-18. Oil on panel, 46 1/8 x 30 3/4 in. (117.2 x 78.1 cm). Image courtesy of Piano Nobile
Looking ahead, The Courtauld has a show lined up this May for another Modern British artist whose market star is currently in the ascendant, Vanessa Bell. Bell will also be included in the first specialised Bloomsbury auction to be held online by Bonhams in April. Last month the London Art Fair made a big play for the audience for Bloomsbury art allowing Charleston a prominent display from its collection near the entrance. Among the exhibits on loan to the collection were a portrait of Angus Davidson by Duncan Grant which had fetched a modest £20,000 at Duke’s in 2019, and another of E.M. Forster by Roger Fry that had fetched a ten-times estimate record £325,000 at Bonhams in July 2020. With collectors like Dior designer Kim Jones in the hunt, Bloomsbury material and notably later works from the Charleston era by Bell and Grant, have been making serious bucks.
At the fair, Piano Nobile, which has good relations with Charleston having sold them Grant and Bell’s Famous Women Dinner Service in 2018 for somewhere south of the £1 million asking price, set up stand next door with a row of paintings by Grant of which one, a 1917 painting of daisies, bought in 2023 for £32,000, did not find a buyer immediately at £95,000, and a pre 1920s still life, which sold with an asking price of £120,000. A large but unflattering portrait of Bell by Grant (The Red Hat, c 1917), which had been posted previously on Philip Mould’s website, was painted at “the moment,” Piano Nobile’s Robert Travers believes, “when Vanessa realised she had conceived with Duncan their daughter Angelica”, was priced in record territory, well in excess of the £325,000 Bloomsbury record. Although unsold at the end of the fair, it has gone to Charleston where, it is hoped, funding bodies or wealthy benefactors will be persuaded to allow it to stay.
Six figure sales at the fair were, in fact, thin on the ground, but included a large abstract by Roger Hilton (sold by Jonathan Clark Fine Art), and an early, degree show self-portrait by Jenny Saville (sold by Cyril Gerber Fine Art). Another sought after artist of the moment is the surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, and a 1952 still life priced at £65,000 by the Jenna Burlingham Gallery, was sold in the early stages of the fair.
Robert Organ (1933-2023), Mother and Child, 1960, Oil on board, 89 x 73 cm. Courtesy of Castlegate House Gallery
Of the lesser-known, still to be recognised artists, Castlegate House Gallery had a thickly impastoed 1960 painting, Mother and Child, by the late Robert Organ which had the feel of a Leon Kossoff or Chaïm Soutine (who were paired together at Pallant House Gallery recently) which was priced at £9,500 and sold to a School of London collector, and a 1954 painting of a lobster by the painter-turned-sculptor Bryan Kneale, once owned by Richard Attenborough, which was snapped up from Christopher Kingzett Fine Art priced at a bargain £15,000.
Several stands vied for the largest number of sales. Despite some disagreement with the organisers over the sheer number of works displayed on his stand, Paul Liss clocked up some 20 sales of Modern British art priced between £1,500 - £50,000. Manchester’s Contemporary Six appeared to have done even better with 26 red dots on its fair website for artists ranging from Ben Nicholson to Billy Childish.
Mod Brits multiply at The Decorative Fair
Anna Zinkeisen (1901-1976), Shell Fantasy, c.1935 signed lower right 'Anna Zinkeisen'. Oil and mixed media bricolage of glass, coral and faux pearl beads, and chilli seeds on board. 30 x 40 cm. Image courtesy Florence Evans
A few days later, BLAST paid a visit to The Decorative Fair in Battersea Park. In days gone by, Jenna Burlingham would say she liked doing the Decorative Art Fair in Battersea because she was the only dealer there specialising in Modern British Art. Not anymore. At this year’s iteration, visitors could also spot examples from the Foyer stands at the front, notably with Henry Saywell, to Panter & Hall at the back, which, after an uneventful outing at LAF, sold 40 works in the three-figure bracket. Close by was newcomer, Florence Evans. Evans is not new to the art trade, having cut her teeth with Sotheby’s Old Master department before graduating to the Fine Art Society where she developed a specialisation in Modern British. Now a sole trader, that specialism has refined itself into a focus on mid-century women artists and provided several highlights for her stand where nothing was priced over £40,000 with early works by Winifred Nicholson, Eileen Agar, a surrealist painting of fishes and jewellery by Anna Zinkeisen, and work by Richard Branson’s communist cousin, Rosa Branson. By the end of the first day, she had been rewarded with a dozen sales.
The biggest seller in numerical terms at Battersea was up and coming young artist, Tom Rooth, who sold over thirty of his own ‘Honeycombs’ - small hexagonal glazed earthen works with hand drawn bees - for £195 each on the first day. The Honeycombs had been a hit at The Treasure House Fair too, and several lines on his website have now sold out bringing total sales from the series to over 600. Bzzz!
Tom Rooth (b.1974), Honeycomb, 2023, Handmade and glazed earthenware panel, with hand drawn bees. Tom Rooth
International
On the international stage, news filtered back from Art SG (Singapore) in January about a six-figure sale for Ian Davenport by Waddington Custot. Davenport has been with the gallery since Leslie Waddington spotted him at his Goldsmiths degree show in 1989. Waddington told me at the time that he had avoided representing young contemporaries for a while as they needed too much looking after, but that Davenport was “the real deal”. At auction his work has been rare, levelling off at around £10,000 in 2010. But in March 2021 a big step forward was taken when a poured line painting, estimated £3,000/5,000, sold for £27,720. Then in Singapore that price was left in the dust when Waddington Custot sold a 20-foot wide, wall to floor dripped painting ‘Lake No.1 (Tide)’, 2023, which had been placed at the fair entrance for maximum impact, for $360,000. The piece was acquired for Lamar Development via The Artling, a consultancy based in Singapore. It will be installed as part of the launch of Park Lamar, an ultra high-end mixed use building in Dubai, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning British architect David Chipperfield.
Ian Davenport (b.1966), Lake No.1 (Tide), 2023, Acrylic on aluminium panels (with additional floor sections), 110 ¼ x 233 x 176 in. Image courtesy of Waddington Custot
In America, representation of the Eileen Agar estate has shifted from Wendi Norris (Blast #4 December 2022) to Andrew Kreps who immediately got a choice review in the New York Times from chief art critic, Roberta Smith. Interest in Agar has built sufficiently for Thames & Hudson to republish Andrew Lambirth’s biography of the artist, whom he interviewed at length in her later years. It was interesting to see Smith single out two of the works in the Kreps show for a mention - To a Nightingale from 1979 and Chess Head from 1970. Both were bought at auction last year in London for $22,000 and $13,000 respectively. Seems like the secret was already out. In another report, the Antiques Trade Gazette noted the resale of Agar’s ‘A Sea Change’, bought at Christie’s in 1999 for £900, and sold at Chiswick Auctions in December 2023 for £26,000. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic should remember that Agar’s estate in Europe and the UK is still represented by London’s Redfern Gallery.