BLAST #16 | Triumphs and tribulations in the Modern British market
June 2024
A pair of Modern British art sales at Sotheby’s in early June saw 163 or 70 % of 234 lots sell to reap £11.6 million (including the buyer’s premium), against a presale low estimate of £13.2 million (without the premium).
Sotheby’s combined sale tactic
In view of the adverse economic climate, the below estimate result was not a surprise. However, the extent of the damage was not as great as it might have been. Sotheby’s appeared, for instance, to backtrack on many of the reserve prices agreed on consignment with vendors for a much higher than usual percentage of lots. About one-third of sales sold below estimates, with some works by Bomberg and Nicholson selling for half their low estimates, but selling, nonetheless. Moreover, the results were a considerable improvement on last summer when Sotheby’s sold just 83 lots for £3.7 million.
The number of lots increased this year partly because the department, under new head, Andre Zlattinger, merged the sale with the lower value Made in Britain sale normally staged in March, which last year consisted of 235 lots and made £1.7 million. This year, the combined sale tactic offered fewer lots, but saw the amount achieved rise; a ratio that should mollify Sotheby’s management in ferocious staff cutting mode.
Shifting markets for Dame Magdalene Odundo and Victor Pasmore
Lot 1. Dame Magdalene Odundo, Untitled, Sold for 240,000 GBP
The sales opened with a bullish performance by Dame Magdalene Odundo whose untitled shapely necked terracotta pot from 1985 far exceeded its £60,000 estimate to sell for £240,000. The seller had contributed to a sharply rising market for the artist when they acquired it in 2021 at a specialised ceramics sale at Lawrences Auctioneers in Crewkerne for £94,000 over a £5,000 estimate, and watched as Odundo’s market has continued to rise. The next gallery show for the artist will be at Thomas Dane from 8 October.
A different observation regarding shifting values could be made about Victor Pasmore’s View on the Cam from Magdalen Bridge, Cambridge, no 2, 1947. The painting is a prime example of Pasmore’s early figurative style, relating to the Euston Road School, just before he turned to abstraction. It was last sold in 2014 for £170,500 against a £40,000 to 60,000 estimate to Richard Green. Green is thought to have priced it at around £265,000 but could not sell it and was now prepared to take a loss, reflected in the low £80,000 estimate. However, he almost broke even as it was one of the few lots in the sale to exceed estimates selling to private dealer, Conor Mullan, for £168,000.
Another strong performer was a decorative floral still life, Orange Lily, by Ivon Hitchens, which doubled its estimate to sell for £144,000 to art advisors Beaumont Nathan.
Lot 8. Victor Pasmore, View on the Cam from Magdalene Bridge, Cambridge, no 2., sold for 168,000 GBP
Sotheby’s play it safe with blue chip artists
Lot 8. Dame Barbara Hepworth, Sea Form (Atlantic), sold for 3,960,000 GBP
Sotheby’s policy for its main sale seemed to be to play safe on artist selection and focus on the blue chips. In this case that meant L.S. Lowry, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. The Hepworth market did best, perhaps because there was less available. Three out of the four works on offer found buyers who gave the sellers reasonable profits. Lot 6, a stringed bronze Hollow Oval, 1965, only sold on the low estimate for £312,000 but the owner who bought it in New York in 2001 for $274,000 saw a price increase of $120,000 in the interim. This was followed by the cover lot (8), a recently restored 6-foot 9-inch bronze, Sea Form (Atlantic), 1964, which had been acquired in 2005 in an unrestored (less colourful) state for £534,400 and attracted two bidders, one of whom won it for a mid-estimate £3.9 million giving the seller a very decent return.
The Lowry market, though, may have suffered from over supply and over optimistic estimates as three out of seven examples in the evening sale did not find buyers. These included the top estimated lot, Going to Work, 1957, with a £1.2 million low estimate. The painting, with over 100 figures scurrying purposefully about in it, had last sold in 2015 for £1.02 million to Richard Green, who sold it on. But the buyer did not see a return at that level as it was bought in at Sotheby’s at £950,000.
Lot 15. Laurence Stephen Lowry, RA, A Factory Town under Snow, sold for 300,000 GBP
The next Lowry, A Factory Town Under Snow, 1942, had been bought longer ago, in 1986, for £20,000 by the Crane Kalman gallery and resold. It saw a much better rate of improvement selling, albeit below estimate, for £300,000.
The other artist on whom these sales hinged was Ben Nicholson. Following our story in BLAST #15 about the power of the anonymous Ben Nicholson Catalogue Raisonné Committee to overrule an auctioneer’s cataloguing, but not necessarily because of it, confidence in the Nicholson market seemed to sag as only two out of five offered works founds buyers. The best, in relation to estimate, was a Mondrian inspired abstract from 1942 which sold on the low estimate for £144,000 to dealer Jonathan Green.
While Green is no stranger to the auction rooms, it's not often you see a humble art scribe bidding into six figures at an auction. But here I was impressed to see the Australian indigenous art collector and philanthropist Ken McGregor (author of several books on the Australian artists John Olsen, Charles Blackman, Tim Storrier et al.), see off an online bidder to buy lot 26, a crudely primitive ‘Mother and Child: Arch’, 1959, by Henry Moore, for a mid-estimate £108,000.
Star performances from C.R.W Nevinson and female Surrealist’s
Lot 189. Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, ARA, Among the Bathers, sold for 20,400 GBP
Lot 182. Eileen Mayo, Lobster Pot, sold for 57,600 GBP
In the day sale, the star performers were a painting of naked boys on a beach by C.R.W. Nevinson, acquired at Woolley & Wallis in 2016 for £3,000 by US collectors Leslie and Johanna Garfield, and now sold for £20,400. In addition, a 1940s painting, Lobster Pot, by the Australian surrealist, Eileen Mayo, which had fetched a record $37,145 when last sold in Australia in 2008, but now both doubled estimates and the previous record to sell for £57,600 ($73,000).
Interestingly, the only other Modern British record of note that week was for a British female surrealist, Eileen Agar, not at Sotheby’s, but across the channel at PIASA in Paris where they were selling the collection of the late surrealist collector Jean-Paul Kahn and his wife Geneviève. The untitled collage dated c.1940 is an example of how beachcombing was a source of inspiration for Agar. Composed around a painted wooden lyre it is decorated with shells and rope no doubt scavenged from some beach or other. It is a rare example from the war years when the artist reportedly suffered from anxiety and devoted more time to the war effort than to art. It had been acquired by the Kahn’s from the specialist Paris Gallery 1900 -2000. Now estimated at €10,000 it sold to a European buyer for €136,600 (£115,000), surpassing the previous Agar record of £81,900 set at Christie’s in 2022 when it was estimated at just £8,000. The recent price increases for her work reflect the growing interest in female surrealists, and the expansion in the representation of her estate. While that role continues to be played by London’s Redfern Gallery, it was recently shared by Wendi Norris in California, who is also active in the Leonora Carrington market, and now by contemporary gallery, Andrew Kreps in New York, taking her work to an ever-wider audience.
Disappointment for William Turnbull and Winston Branch
Back in London, a big disappointment was the small bronze Head 3, 1993, by William Turnbull which had sold previously in 2015 for a multiple estimate of £112,500 but could now not sell at £50,000.
Eileen Agar, The Muse Listening, circa 1940, sold for 136 500 EUR
It must have been disappointing also for Sotheby’s to see two paintings by Caribbean born abstract painter, Winston Branch, whose prices had shot up from a record £12,000 prior to 2022, to £126,000 later that year (see BLAST #1), and for whom Sotheby’s staged a private selling exhibition last November, flounder. One was withdrawn before the sale with a £20,000 estimate and the other declared unsold when there were no bids at £20,000. This of course, may have nothing to do with confidence in the Modern British market, just an adjustment away from the rapid rise that had taken place for the artist two years earlier, or, even, a vote against an auctioneer trying to take on the role of a dealer.