BLAST #20
The autumn season produced a flurry of Modern British and Irish art sales which BLAST is covering in two issues. #20 (below) focusses on Sotheby’s which seemed to send out an ominous message to the market. #21 (out later this week), incorporates the subsequent action at Christie’s and Bonhams in which the danger signs were averted.
On Thursday November 14 the Christmas lights were going up in the West End of London and crowds of pedestrians were excitedly Instagramming views of glittering shop fronts and arcades. Outside Sotheby’s, Searcy’s was dispensing champagne from a vintage Rolls Royce, but inside, where some hefty prices were being sought for Modern British art, the mood was not so festive.
Duncan Grant, Portrait of Vanessa Bell
For its opening evening sale, four of the top lots were withdrawn for lack of pre-sale interest, and of the remaining 21 lots, only thirteen sold, most of which were on or below presale estimates. The sale would have been bigger had Sotheby’s not decided to put their Bloomsbury related material into a private selling exhibition organised in conjunction with Charleston Farmhouse and curated by the Dior designer and passionate Bloomsbury collector, Kim Jones (worth his weight in gold to the department as a buyer). Prices and sales from the exhibition were not publicly revealed, but BLAST did learn that some prices, like the £500,000 being asked for an early portrait of Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, were extremely ambitious.
So, without any Bloomsbury content the auction hammer total of £3 million (£3.6 million with the buyer’s premium added) was some way below pre-sale estimates of £4.2 – 6.2 million, and a lot less than the equivalent sale last November (£11.9 million) sending out a different message to the most recent Modern British sales at rivals Bonhams and Christie’s ( see BLAST #’s 17 and 19) where target estimates were comfortably met. The picture improved slightly the next day at Sotheby’s lower value day sale which made a premium inclusive £2.2 million. But, even with that premium, it could not match the premium free pre-sale estimate of £2.4 – 3.5 million.
(NB – auction prices include the buyer’s premium, saleroom estimates do not)
Taking the evening sale first:
Lot 23. Frank Auerbach, Albert Street, 2009, estimated £600,000-800,000. Sold for £744,000
Top lot was Frank Auerbach’s medium size north London landscape, Albert Street, 2009, with a £600,000 – 800,000 estimate. Similar sized paintings by the artist have made more, and his very recent death may have triggered extra demand considering the glowing obituaries that were published. But this was an unusually pale and thinly painted work. It also had an off-putting provenance having belonged to a convicted money launderer from whom the painting was seized by the UK government which was the seller. Consequently, bidding petered out once it had reached the low estimate – but it sold nonetheless for £744,000 including the buyer’s premium.
Going up substantially was L.S Lowry’s Glasgow dock yard scene, Queen’s Dock, 1947, last at auction in 1976 when it sold for a £6,500 hammer price. Now estimated to fetch nearly one hundred times that at £400,000 – 600,000, it did so, but only one bid over the low estimate again to bring £504,000. Lowry also provided the only lot for which there was any extended bidding in which a man stands isolated on a kerbside as if waiting for a taxi on one side of the composition against an otherwise blank white canvas. The 1964 painting had come from the family of Keith Ewart, a brilliant TV ad producer, who bought it in 1967, and died in 1989 stipulating that the Lowry should one day be sold to support the Keith Ewart Charitable Trust which he set up to improve the life of parrots. Several bidders vied for it until it sold for a double estimate £250,000. Squawk!
Lot 6. Laurence Stephen Lowry, Queens Dock, Glasgow, 1947, estimated £400,000-600,000. Sold for £504,000
Lot 8. Sir William Orpen, Mrs Evelyn St George, estimated £600,000-800,000. Sold for £690,000
Going up fast was Sir William Orpen’s five-foot portrait of his secret lover, Mrs Evelyn St George. Having been through the hands of leading dealer, Pyms Gallery, where it would have been priced in relation to a full-length version which sold for £925,000 in 2003, it surfaced at auction in a minor sale in New York in July where it was estimated at an inexplicably low $10,000, attracting multiple bids until it sold for $260,000 (£206,000). This was still far short of its real value, and it was swiftly shipped to Sotheby’s in London which gave it a £600,000 low estimate, a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, the only bid as it happened, but enough to give the seller a 235% increase in 5 months when it sold for £690,000 including premium.
Another bumper return was reaped by The Bean Harvest by Canadian born Helen McNicol which was only discovered in October this year on the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? programme where it was valued at £300,000 by Phillip Mould. Swiftly submitted to Sotheby’s for sale it must have been slightly disappointing when they sold it below estimate for £174,00 including premium. The owner, retired art dealer, David Taylor, though will be happy. He bought it at auction in Lincoln two years ago when it was vaguely catalogued as ‘in the style of Helen McNicol’, an established Canadian artist, for just £2,090.
Lot 10. Helen Galloway McNicoll, The Bean Harvest, estimated £150,000-250,000. Sold for £174,000
Not everything was reaping gains. Sir John Lavery’s, The Bathing Hour, the Lido, Venice, 1912, was only recently on view in the ‘Lavery on Location’ exhibition at the National Galleries of Ireland and Scotland but could not find a buyer at £520,000. Its auction history may not have helped having sold in 2014 for a triple estimate £686, 500 and again in 2021 below estimate for £499,000.
Patrick Heron’s market should be helped by the confidence provided by the forthcoming publication of a catalogue raisonne written by former Tate Britain curator (and regular member of the British Art Fair vetting committee) Andrew Wilson. But an early, pre-abstract work, Le Jardiniere, 1948, could not find a bid at £95,000 against a £100,000 estimate in spite of previously fetching a multiple estimate £174,000 at Bonhams in 2009. Interestingly, Bonhams had another Heron of the same period two weeks later, French Café: 1950 with a lower estimate, that sold for £165,500 (see BLAST#21) which would seem to indicate bidders just didn’t like the higher estimate at Sotheby’s.
Sotheby’s results also placed a serious question mark over the Leon Kossoff market and how his work is valued at present. Seemingly lagging behind his School of London contemporaries, Freud and Auerbach, Kossoff prices have been advancing gradually since his death, but at this sale two paintings in the £250,000 – 350,000 range were withdrawn for lack of pre-sale interest at that level, and, while two of the three drawings offered did find buyers, neither sold at the level estimated.
A victim perhaps of oversupply was Paul Feiler who had 14 works available between the two sales, most from the collection of recently deceased antique dealers, Mollie and Graham Dark, who befriended the artist in Cornwall. It proved too many for the market to absorb as four went unsold (including the higher estimated lots which dealers said were too high) and the majority of sales went below estimate. Still, to sell ten works by the same artist in a day was something of an achievement.
One noticeable factor at the sale was the unusually thin level of dealer bidding in the room. The only successful one that evening was private dealer, Christopher Kingzett who bought a 1953 painting, Levant Zawn, by Peter Lanyon, below estimate for £95,000. ‘That’s a real bargain’, whispered an art advisor into my ear.
The weakest section of the Sotheby’s day sale was devoted to Irish art in which about half the lots went unsold. The best performers were not modern but 19th century marine paintings by George Atkinson which all flew over their estimates. Apart from these and the Orpen in the evening sale, Irish art seemed to have gained nothing from Sotheby’s experiment to sell modern Irish art in Paris.