BLAST #18
Paul Nash (1889-1946), Studio Interior. Image ©Dreweatts. Estimate £50,000-£80,000. Sold for £87,700
Modern British Art Auctions
What do biscuits and Modern British art have in common? Quite a lot when it comes to the Palmer family of Huntley and Palmers fame whose collection was sold by Dreweatts in June. Of the thirty plus Modern British works bought generations ago from dealers like Arthur Tooth, Agnew’s, New Art Centre and Crane Kalman, only one went unsold.
Highest price was for an unusual 1930 studio interior by Paul Nash which made a mid-estimate £80,700 and was shown a month later at Treasure House Fair where it was priced around £240,000. The painting resembles another much more surreal Nash painting of his studio of a similar date which will be shown by Patrick Bourne at the British Art Fair (see Highlights, price tbc). A 1920s Duncan Grant landscape trebled estimates at £52,000 and further sensible estimates drew competitive bidding for paintings by Anthony Devas, Matthew Smith, Richard Eurich, Alan Gwynne-Jones, William Brooker, Phillip Matthews, John Hubbard and works on paper by Keith Vaughan, Mary Potter, Mary Newcomb, Wyndham Lewis, and William Dring. As most of the family’s acquisitions were made through dealers, those prices were not disclosed, though one work of Cornish fishing boats by Alfred Wallis, which they bought at auction in 1987 for £2,200, sold for £55,000.
In August a sale at Bonhams in Sydney offered nineteen early 20th century modernist works from the Perth based entrepreneur, Graeme Morgan’s collection of Grosvenor School prints. Many were bought in the early 2000’s in London from Scolar Fine Art when Gordon Samuel (now Osborne Samuel) was there, and Redfern Gallery. All were sold doubling the pre-sale estimate to fetch A$578,715 (£296,000). The focus was naturally on the Australian artists who studied at the London school – Dorrit Black or Ethel Spowers – though top price was A$79,950 (£41,000) for The Merry-Go-Round, c1930, by the founder of the school, British artist Cyril Power, nearly A$30,000 more than Morgan paid for it in 2007.
Cyril Power (1872-1951), The Merry Go Round. Sold for £41,000. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939), The Last Self-Portrait. Estimate £8,000-£12.000. Image courtesy of Bonhams
Next stop on the Modern British auction calendar is Bonhams’ online sale of women artists concluding on 18 September which contains a nice selection of work by Jessica Dismorr, a contributor to the radical BLAST magazine after which this column is named. The works are from the collection of Quentin Stevenson, the executor of her estate. As reported in BLAST #11 last October, the record for Dismorr is a seven times estimate £35,200 paid by Philip Mould at Christie’s for a portrait of the artist’s sister. Top estimate in the Bonhams sale is £8,000-12,000 for The Last Self-Portrait dated c1933. The artist died by suicide in 1939.
Rachel Whiteread (b.1963), Untitled 2000. Sold at Sotheby’s for £162,000. Estimate £100,000-150,000. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s
Contemporary British auctions
Looking at more contemporary British art at auction, London’s summer season sales were much thinner than usual after Christie’s abandoned attempts to put a high value sale together. The major available collection, from the late Ralph Goldenberg and worth some £15 million, went to Sotheby’s instead. Here all seven works by Rachel Whiteread, dating from 2000-2013, were sold, mostly within estimate. Top price was £162,000 for an untitled 6½-foot-long single shelf bookcase sculpture dated 2000 (i.e., the same date as her library themed Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna).
At Christie’s, the results were more checkered. With previous backing from dealers Ben Hunter (London), Kasmin (New York) and Hauser & Wirth Somerset), Clementine Keith-Roach was in demand as her found terracotta vessel, Icon 2019, with cast arms wrapped round it, rose from a lower estimate of £8,000 to £29,000. But the overall impression was more muted. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 5am, Cadiz, 2009, suggesting a North African slave trade narrative, was estimated from £600,000 but sold on a £450,000 bid. Sarah Ball, a British painter of unusual portraits who was making waves into six figures after Stephen Friedman signed her up last year, experienced a hiccough when her portrait Mark, 2022, estimated from £40,000, only sold on a single bid of £30,000 from Taiwan. And Sarah Lucas’ neon coffin, New Religion (violet) 2001, bought at the George Michael collection sale in 2019 for £37,000 could find no bidder at £24,000 and was unsold.
Phillips had probably the most interesting contemporary British work this summer in a 7 x 5 foot painting The Bird Seller: Are You Listening, 2021, by the 2017 Turner Prize winner, Lubaina Himid – the first major work by her to come to auction. Estimated at an eye opening £300,000 it sold for a record £381,000. Himid is gaining global appeal and is currently enjoying a solo exhibition at US collector, Glenn Fuhrman’s FLAG Art Foundation in New York.
Lubaina Himid (1954), The Bird Seller: Are you Listening. Estimate £300,000-500,000. Sold for £381,000. Image courtesy of Phillips.
Overseas Fairs
Catherine Goodman (b.1961), Mise en Scene, 2024. Sold by Hauser & Wirth for $135,000. Image courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
The Autumn season opened with major fairs owned by Frieze in Seoul and New York, where young and mid-career British artists featured among the early sales. In Seoul, Hauser & Wirth sold two 6 x 8 inch oil studies by 34-year-old London born, Baroque influenced Flora Yukhnovich sold for £22,000 each to a private collection in Asia as did Mise en Scene, 2024, a much larger painting in her new atmospheric abstract style by 63-year-old Catherine Goodman (who exhibited with Marlborough for ten years until it closed this year) which sold for $135,000.
At New York’s The Armory Show, Immortal XX1X, 2024, a large semi abstracted expressionistic painting by 40-year-old Daniel Crews-Chubb on LA’s Roberts Projects stand sold for $85,000. 36-year-old Tomo Campbell sold seven paintings on London’s Cob Gallery stand for between £17,500 and £30,000 each, and Ireland’s 53-year-old Caroline McCarthy sold six paintings in the $6,000 to $12,000 range through Dublin’s Green On Red Gallery.
French exploration of British female surrealists continues with the inclusion of Edith Rimmington, along with more obvious choices Leonora Carrington and Ithel Colquhoun, in the major Surrealist show, Surrealisme, until January 13, 2025, at the Pompidou Centre with Museum, a 1951 watercolour. Barely anything by Rimmington had appeared at auction when last year a watercolour appeared at Christie’s with a £1,000 lower estimate and sold for £15,000. Meanwhile Richard Saltoun has been flying the flag for British female surrealists in New York by including works by Marion Adnams and Eileen Agar in his surrealist exhibition Butterfly Time at the Independent 20th Century fair.
Galleries
Terry Frost (1915-2003) Black and Red Dish, 1978. Image courtesy of Belgrave St Ives Gallery.
An exhibition at Belgrave St Ives of some fifty works by Terry Frost has been selling like hot cakes, with over half spoken for before it opens on 14 September. The works have all come from a single collection and incorporate early figurative paintings from the 1940s, before he embarked on abstraction (all sold), prints, collages and ceramics (nearly all sold priced from £200 to £700 (example illustrated).
Books/catalogues
Mabel Nicholson by Lucy Davies. If you missed the exhibition at the Grange Gallery in Rottingdean (the first in 100 years for this neglected member of the Nicholson family), then this biography will help to fill some gaps. Eloquently written by my former editor at The Daily Telegraph, it is published by Eiderdown Books which specialises in lesser-known Modern British women artists.
John Rothenstein in the Interwar Years by David McCann. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). A doctoral thesis which gives a sympathetic airing to the Director of the Tate Gallery from 1938-1964 who found himself at odds with the avantgarde modernists of the day in his support for figurative art.
Augustus John & the First Crisis of Brilliance, by David Boyd Haycock, published by Piano Nobile. This gallery takes care to solicit outside academic sources to assist in creating museum style commercial exhibitions with catalogues to match. Again, if you missed the exhibition, the catalogue is a well-produced substitute with large, full-page illustrations.
British Women Artists: From Suffrage to the Sixties by Carolyn Trant. (Thames & Hudson). A well informed and illustrated survey covering scores of known and neglected 20th century artists.
Harold Harvey: Painter of Cornwall. Includes essays by Professor Kenneth McConkey and Pauline Sheppard and an expanded catalogue raisonné of over 800 paintings. (Sansom & Co). This book was produced to accompany the exhibition The Exceptional Harold Harvey at the Penlee House Gallery & Museum in Penzance until 29 September. Works by Harvey will be for sale with Messum’s at the British Art Fair.