BLAST #22

A Banker’s returns

Edinburgh based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull had an interesting outing in London on 15 January when they offered the art collection of the late banker Bernard Kelly. Kelly collected across several disciplines but the sector that attracted most bidding and buying was the Modern British one which included 108 lots estimated at £194,000 (excluding the buyer’s premium), 102 or 94% of which sold for £467,391 (including the premium).

Kelly came from a cultured European background and gravitated initially towards older work. But in the 1980s, when he became vice chairman of Lazard bank and returned to London to work, his interest shifted towards Modern British with some advice from Anthony Mould, the brother of Fake or Fortune? co presenter Phillip Mould, and, it would appear, the auction rooms, employing the art and jewellery dealer Sandra Lummis to bid on his behalf. As befitting a banker, he bought quite carefully, rarely exceeding estimates or spending over £5,000 on any one work at auction. As a result, he acquired few masterpieces or art historical gems.

Top price in the Mod Brit section was Roger Fry’s Dancers, c.1910, at £35,200. Influenced by Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne, it carried a tempting £5,000 estimate. Also tempting were a number of studies for the abstract The Spirit of Energy murals made by John Piper for The Piper Building in London where Kelly had a loft house style apartment. The most expensive was a single gouache design that sold for a double estimate £4,788. Many, though, were not in good condition and sold in groups for as little as £1,000 each.

Some work Kelly bought at auction saw very little or no return. In 1986 he bid £3,000 to take home a voluptuous nude by the little-known Harry Bloomfield (1883-1940). Although it exceeded estimates at Lyon & Turnbull, it made a loss selling on a winning bid of £2,800. In 1987, he paid £3,190 for another nude by Bloomfield, but it made a loss in real terms selling for £4,100. These losses may not be bad news, however. For an artist’s prices to have remained static for 40 years could suggest a correction upwards is due.

Faring much better was a drawing of the dancer, Anna Pavlova by Laura Knight which Kelly bought in 1986 for £750, which now sold for £8,190. At Sotheby’s in 1984 Kelly paid £1,550 for a portrait by Duncan Grant of his lover, Paul Roche, and it now sold for £28,950. Another gain was registered for a small 1945 tempera on paper painting of three robed figures dancing on a hilltop by John Armstrong which Lummis bought for Kelly in 1988 for £1,500. This month it returned £8,820 including the premium.

Similarly, one of his earlier Modern British acquisitions was a painting by the ill-fated Scottish artist Robert Colquhoun of a goat in a landscape for which he paid £550 in 1983. Colquhoun’s reputation has been improved since then and this sold for £11,340 including premium. Rounding off the sale was a semi abstracted studio interior by Peter Kinley which Kelly bought in 1988 for £1,100 and was sold again for £11,970.

Vorticist seller outed

David Bomberg, The Dancer, 1913/14, Crayon, watercolour and gouache on paper. Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd. Sold for £170,000.

When I wrote about the Vorticist collection sale at Christie’s in March 2023 (Blast #6), I was unable to track down the identity of the American collector who was selling. Now one of the works in that sale, David Bomberg’s watercolour The Dancer, 1913/14 - which sold for £170,000 to the dealer/collector Daniel Katz, a record for a work on paper by the artist - has been acquired from Katz by The Art Institute of Chicago and named the collector in its provenance as Herbert L. Lucas from Los Angeles. Lucas, who graduated from Harvard in 1952, has been a director of several companies, most recently the pharmaceutical company SCOLR Pharma Inc, as well as a Trustee of The J. Paul Getty Trust and The Pierpont Morgan Library.

Katz included a similar work, but in oil, in a lavish book about his collection of Modern British art, Into the Light, written by former head of Modern British art at Sotheby’s, James Rawlin, and recently published by Lund Humphries. It’s a hefty tome which takes a look at over 100 works by 48 artists ranging from the overlooked: Robyn Denny, Bernard Meadows, James Pryde and Eric Kennington – to the fully established: Lynn Chadwick, Henry Moore Babara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. They are all first rate and Katz had to pay top dollar for most, like the Bomberg, or as he did for Paul Nash’s surreal 1936 Spanish Civil War response War in the Sun, 1936 (£1.8 million in 2021); Chadwick’s Barley Fork sculpture (£241, 200); or Hepworth’s gouache Figure and Mirror, 1948, for which he paid a triple estimate £471,000 at Lyon & Turnbull in 2021.

London Art Fair tracks Modern British

Having turned to Modern British art dealers in 2003 when the Frieze Art Fair launched and pinched its higher profile contemporary art exhibitors, the London Art Fair, as it has become known, has taken a leaf out of British Art Fair’s book by publishing a report on the Modern British Art Market . A few years ago, British Art Fair commissioned a series of graphs from Art Market Research on different sectors of the British art market (from Newlyn to Pop art, which came out on top) for which I wrote the commentary.

Nowadays, interested readers can look at BLAST for my monthly updates on the market. The London Art Fair report is short and contains only one graph, compiled by number crunchers, ArtTactic, which displays the ups and downs of Modern British art auction totals in relation to the presale estimates. Last year, it tells us, was the sixth highest in the last 10 years The accompanying 400 words text describes the market as “solid and steadfast, assured and confident”.

Paule Vézelay - credit where it’s due

A press release and preview featured in The Art Newspaper, Artnet News and The Guardian, all served to raise expectations about a retrospective for Vézelay at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol (January 25 – 27 April, and then Towner Eastbourne mid-May to August 2025). “Major show to celebrate UK’s forgotten female trailblazer of abstract art” ran The Guardian headline.

Paule Vézelay, *Two Red Forms*, 1968, Oil and mixed media on canvas. Courtesy Sotheby’s. Sold for £32,760

Paule Vézelay, Lines in Space No. 53, 1965, Wire construction. ©️Estate of Paule Vézelay, Courtesy England & Co

Vézelay died in 1984, aged 92, a year after a life’s retrospective was staged at the Tate. Prior to that she had been overshadowed by her male counterparts and restricted by the vagaries of war. The Bristol exhibition, curated by Simon Grant, is the largest show of her work since 1983 containing over sixty exhibits. But what the press release and the previews fail to mention is the role London dealer, Jane England, has played in keeping the flame of interest in Vézelay alive since her death. England became the representative of Vézelay’s estate in 1988 and proceeded to mount a stream of exhibitions – four in her Notting Hill gallery including a large retrospective in 2004 - and others exploring Vézelay’s mastery of line, textile designs, and her relationships with European avant-garde artist Hans Arp and the surrealist, André Masson. England also facilitated acquisitions and exhibition loans with institutions such as Tate; British Museum; Imperial War Museum, Pallant House, Chichester; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and the Henry Moore Institute – and now at the Royal West of England Academy. No one knows better than she where to go to borrow the best Vézelay’s, whether in a museum collection or not, something that does not really come across in a short acknowledgement in the back of the book/catalogue (published by Lund Humpries).

It remains to be seen whether the Bristol exhibition will have any impact on Vézelay’s market. Her record was set three years ago at Sotheby’s (Women) Artists online auction where a large 1968 abstraction, Two Red Forms, sold for a five times estimate £32,760 and is included in the exhibition. At the London Art Fair, England included about half a dozen works on her stand priced from £1,500 to £50,000.

BLAST #23

BLAST #21