BLAST #3
Welcome to BLAST Issue 3
September 2022
BLASTS FROM THE PAST
The original publication of BLAST sprung back to life this month when an X-ray revealed that Praxitella, a painting by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) in the Leeds Art Gallery collection, had been painted over Atlantic City, an important work by Vorticist artist Helen Saunders (1885-1963) that was reproduced in issue number 2 of BLAST in 1915, but was subsequently lost.
Saunders is the subject of an exhibition at the Courtauld Institute of Art that opens in October. Most of her paintings are believed to have been destroyed, and the exhibition will be centred around a group of works on paper that were gifted to the Courtauld by Brigid Peppin, a relative of the artist.
Examples of Vorticism rarely surface on the market, but when they do, they attract a premium. A Dawn, a 1914 painting of marching soldiers by C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946), made a record £1.9 million against a £700,000 estimate at Sotheby’s in 2017. War Celebrations, 1919, an ink drawing by William Roberts (1895-1980) sold for a double estimate £334,500 when it surfaced in 2016. There are only three works by Saunders on the Artnet auction database going back to 1990, none attracting much competition so possibly not the genuine articles. Like Saunders, bona fide examples by Cuthbert Hamilton (1885-1959) or Frederick Etchells (1886-1973) are as rare as hen’s teeth both at auction and in the galleries which could be why no one has attempted a statistical analysis of the Vorticist market...yet.
Helen Saunders
Atlantic City c.1915
Image courtesy of Estate of Helen SaundersA Man Ray (1890-1976) photograph of Julie Lawson, personal assistant to co-founder of the ICA, Roland Penrose (1900-1984), was spied on England & Co’s stand at Photo London, setting off a memory trail with special links to the British Art Fair. Inscribed ‘for Tommy - as in a dream - love Man Ray’ (‘Tommy’ was Julie’s nickname), it was dated 1976, the year Man Ray died, and copyrighted to the Man Ray Trust.
Man Ray (1890-1976)
Julie Lawson
© Man Ray TrustJulie, who was president of the International Association of Art Critics, was also a founder member of the advisory committee of British Art Fair in 1988, providing energy and support for the fair in the days before Frieze and Frieze Masters lured many of them away. Since her death in 2020 aged one hundred, the task of sorting through the reams of material that constitute Lawson’s archive, much of which is believed to be destined for museums in London and Edinburgh, has fallen to the dealer, Jane England, to whom she became close. Lawson’s association with Penrose, Man Ray, Lee Miller (1907-1977) and the group that inhabited Farley Farm in Sussex, for instance, is known about, but the details are obscure. England hopes to be able to flesh out what was a fascinating life in the months to come.
BRITISH CONTEMPORARIES STAND OUT AT ART FAIRS ABROAD
Seoul (2-5 September)
Tristan Pigott (b.1990)
Parallel Motion
Image courtesy of CYLINDERIf Frieze Seoul and its older companion KIAF (the Korean International Art Fair) have turned heads globally this month, then it could be very good news for the British artists who made their mark there. The youngest was probably Tristan Pigott (b.1990), a 22-year-old surreal realist artist who was nominated for the BP Portrait Award in 2015 and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2019. In recent years he has shown with the Cob Gallery in London and presently with Alice Black in Fitzrovia. But in Seoul he was showing with local gallery CYLINDER which mounted shows for him both in their gallery and at KIAF Seoul where all ten exhibits, priced from $1,320 to $13,200, sold to Korean and Taiwanese collectors.
The oldest living British artist to make their mark in Seoul was 80-year-old Hastings based Laetitia Yhap (b.1941), whose father was Chinese, and who enjoyed an exhibition with Tabula Rasa of London and Beijing.
At the fair an impressive ten of Yhap’s paintings were sold priced between $5,000 and $35,000 to European and Asian collectors, while her first retrospective exhibition in Asia is currently on view at the Yanlan Arts and Culture Foundation in Beijing curated by Tabula Rasa.
Laetitia Yhap
Boy Tossing Water Over His Rowboat, 1981 – 84
Image courtesy of Tabula Rasa.THE ARMORY SHOW, NEW YORK (8 – 11 SEPTEMBER)
At New York’s Armory Show this month, London’s Frestonian Gallery made a killing with 40-year-old Anna Freeman Bentley’s (b.1982) figurative interiors, inspired the recent biopic about Clarice Cliffe, selling five large canvases for between $25,000 and $30,000 each and six smaller works for around $6,000 each. Among the buyers were private collectors from New York, Tulsa, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, Tokyo and London - as well as institutional acquisitions by the Ahmanson Foundation in California and the BASMOCA Museum in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Anna’s latest work will be revealed at Frestonian, so named after the hippy haven between Shepherd’s Bush and West Kensington named itself the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia in the 1970s. The new show, from which three further large works were sold before the opening on 21 September, runs until 11 November.
Anna Freeman Bentley
Ribbons, Wrappers, Designs, 2022
Sold at the Armory Show, New York for $26,000
Image courtesy of Frestonian GalleryAlso at The Armory was GRIMM, one of several new galleries to open in London this year, which took Cashing Up, 2022 a painting by rising young Scottish figurative painter Caroline Walker (b. 1982), and sold it for $150,000, a price that compares well with her burgeoning auction market
AUCTIONS BUOYED BY ESTATE SALES
The first UK auction of Modern and Contemporary British art of note this season is Made in Britain, staged by Sotheby’s online, winds up on 23rd September, including an array of pots (by Lucy Rie (1902-1995) and Hans Coper (1920-1981) from the family of designer Sir Ove Arup), small nuggets from the estate of dealer Karsten Schubert (an early, figurative Bridget Riley (b.1931), and a drawing by Nat Tate, the fictitious American artist who supposedly committed suicide in 1960 whom the Scottish author, William Boyd, had created and wrote a book about in 2011. ‘We are grateful to Boyd,’ says Sotheby’s in the catalogue, ‘for authenticating the present work,’ which has an estimate of £2,000 to £3,000.
Nat Tate
Wall Drawing
Image courtesy of Sotheby’sThe only other ‘Nat Tate’ to appear at auction was in a validation exercise at Sotheby’s in 2011 when another bridge drawing sold above estimate for £7,000. No one seemed to question why a drawing by a supposedly American artist was in a Modern British sale. Now, eleven years later, they don’t need to.
Several works by Patrick Heron (1920-1999), John Wells (1907-2000) and Peter Lanyon (1918-1964) were in the collection of fellow St Ives artist, Denis Mitchell (1912-1993), and passed down in his family; and several more in the sale were acquired by ‘a distinguished collector’ from the Crane Kalman Gallery in the 1990s including some first rate examples by the charmingly poetic and naïve Norfolk painter Mary Newcombe (1922-2008).
Meanwhile from 12 October, Crane Kalman celebrates the 70th anniversary of its first exhibition (in Manchester in 1952) to include paintings by L.S Lowry. Amongst the exhibits were ‘Gate Posts’ 1938, priced at 95 guineas, which they will show again.
Crane Kalman Gallery, priced list of exhibits, 1952.
Image courtesy of Crane Kalman.
L.S. Lowry
Gate Posts, 1938
Image courtesy of Crane Kalman GalleryAndras Kalman staged more exhibitions for Lowry than any other dealer (included in 37 shows between 1952 and 2014) and for this exhibition catalogue they will be reproducing a series of photographs taken of the artist by the fashion photographer, Clive Arrowsmith, in the 1960s, which were rediscovered in the photographer’s attic fifty years later . Kalman’s wife, Dorothy, was a model. About ten of the paintings and drawings will be for sale.
Back with the salerooms, Essex auctioneers, Sworders, has been entrusted with the estate of Sir Jack Baer, the dealer behind Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. Although better known for Old Masters, the Sworders sale on October 4th includes several examples by Modern and Contemporary British artists Baer promoted such as Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1987), Gwen John (1876-1939) and Mary Fedden (1915-2012).
On Sept 28th Bonhams follows up its inaugural sale for Modern British women artists last year with Blazing a Trail; Modern British Women on Sept 28th that will feature works by the constructivist, Mary Martin (1913-1990), Elizabeth Frink, Ithell Colquhoun and Mary Potter to name only a few with estimates from £800 to £100,000.
Mary Martin (1913-1990)
Opposition, 1956, estimate £30,000-50,000.
Image courtesy of BonhamsFourteen works by David Bomberg (1890-1957) are estimated to fetch over £1 million at Dreweatt’s in Newbury on 19th October. Spanning the 1920s to the 1940’s the collection has been in private hands since the first six works were acquired by Bomberg’s early patron, the engineer Arthur Abraham Stambois, and then sold privately to the Canadian screenwriter Stanley Mann in 1961. When Mann’s widow, Eithne, died in 2018 the collection was inherited by the present seller. Appearing on the market for the first time, estimates range from £3,000 to £300,000 for The Garden and Tower of the Sacristy, Cuenca Cathedral, Spain a dramatic, vertiginous view of the historic cathedral, set high on the edge of a ravine. Prospects for this collection must be good. A similar view of Cuenca Cathedral set a record £1.4 million for the artist in March this year.
David Bomberg
View of Cuenca Cathedral, 1934
Image courtesy of Dreweatt’s.Rare and second- hand art books dealer Marcus Campbell has come up with an ingenious idea to hang watercolours of books on the walls of his stand at the British Art Fair this month. The paintings are by Rebecca John, the granddaughter of Augustus John (1878-1961) and great niece of Gwen John (1876-1939). Rebecca is known in the art market as the keeper of authenticity of work by Augustus. Her research for an exhibition of his drawings held at Spink & Son and the National Museums & Galleries of Wales in 1996 is still a byword for scholarship on this subject. As an artist, she is probably best known as a botanical draughtsman, whose precise yet emotive drawings of plants shown at the Lefevre gallery in 1995 drew appreciative comments from the likes of Grey Gowrie. More recently she has turned her attention to the books she has enjoyed reading over the years such as Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes and Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta. Prices will be in the region of £5,000 each.
Colin Gleadell is the art market columnist for The Daily Telegraph and a regular contributor to Artnet News, Art Monthly, and Artsy. Prior to The Telegraph, he worked for the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art as a researcher, the Crane Kalman Gallery as a gallery manager, and Bonhams auctioneers as Head of Modern Pictures. He worked for ten years (1986 – 1997) as the features editor of Galleries Magazine, whilst also contributing to leading art market publications such as Art & Auction and Art News where he was the London correspondent of the Artnewsletter. He Introduced Sister Wendy Beckett to the BBC for whom he worked as a consultant on market programmes such as the Relative Values series (1991). He also worked as an art market consultant for Channel 4 News.
Gleadell was on the original advisory committee for the 20th Century British Art Fair in 1988, where he has served ever since as it changed its name to the 20/21 British Art Fair, and now British Art Fair.