BLAST #8
Welcome to BLAST Issue 8
June 2023
AUCTIONS
Hambro sale
Christie’s sale of works from the collection of banker Rupert Hambro and his wife Robin in June encapsulated the concept of cross collecting by a wealthy couple with a collector cum interior designer’s eye for quality. Robin was probably the chief driver having worked at Christie’s, designed jewellery and been fashion editor at Vogue. The evolution of her taste can be charted as it moved from the antique to the modern and contemporary, where there was a healthy smattering of British art, and it was these that produced the stand-out results.
A six-foot speleothem onyx carving of a head, chiselled out of rock, Time Boy, 2011, by Emily Young, sailed overestimate to hit a new record £478,800. Bought by the Hambros at the Fine Art Society in 2012 when its price was nearer £200,000, Young’s work hit its last high in 2018 when a 43-inch head sold for £345,000. That price did not, however, send the market into overdrive. Represented at the time by Robert Bowman, the next large work at auction came last June with a £250,000/£350,000 estimate and did not sell. Her new agent, Willoughby Gerrish (formerly of the Fine Art Society), then took several examples to the British Art Fair last year, selling with a top asking price of £300,000. So, what generated the new record at Christie’s? At 67 inches high Time Boy was certainly the largest work of hers at auction to date.
Union (Horse with two Discs) by Christopher Le Brun, Bronze, 2001. CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023
Time Boy by Emily Young, Speleothem Onyx, 2011.CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023Another sculpture record from the Hambro’s garden was for former President of the Royal Academy, Christopher Le Brun’s almost 2-metre-wide bronze Union (Horse with two Discs), 2001, which sold overestimate for £163,800. Le Brun was showing in those days with Marlborough Fine Art, but this work was commissioned and then sold to the Hambros by Madeleine Bessborough of the New Art Centre, Roche Court in Wiltshire.
Henry Thomas, by Glynn Philpot, Oil on canvas, 1936. CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023 The price was not disclosed, but Le Brun says it was ‘very expensive to make.’ Le Brun’s previous sculpture record was never going to be hard to beat. He has made relatively few sculptures (compared to his paintings which have sold for up to £60,000). The only sculpture to be sold previously at auction was a small horse which made £7,500 in 2016. By then Le Brun had switched representation to the more cutting-edge Lisson Gallery which has been making in-roads into the Chinese exhibition circuit and which may have been a factor at Christie’s; Le Brun’s next exhibition will be at the Lisson in Beijing. The Hambros sculpture evolved from a painting of the same title Le Brun made in 1984 that is in the Tate collection and was his first monumental sculpture. One from the edition of three can be seen outside the Barbican as part of the Museum of London’s collection, another is in a private collection in Florida. Christie’s would not reveal where this third casting will go, but it will be difficult to hide.
More historical Modern British paintings in the Hambro collection revealed a generally upward trend for quality as far as investment was concerned. A glowing still life by Ivon Hitchens, bought from the Reader’s Digest collection in 2004 near the low estimate for £38,240, sold for a slightly disappointing mid-estimate £50,400, but a 1936 portrait of the young Jamaican, Henry Thomas, by Glynn Philpot in his late more modern style, bought in 2004 for £33,600, performed much better selling above estimate for £189,000. Some thought it should have made more.
A Circle of Flowers by Ivon Hitchens, Oil on canvas, 1968. CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023 
Standing Woman by Duncan Grant, Lithograph on paper, 1973. CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023One of the better performers was the Scottish painter Alberto Morrocco whose colourful Still Life with Clown (1996), bought in 2014 for £11,000, sold for a triple estimate £30,000 – a handsome return for a work by a second-tier artist.
The worst return, unpredictably, was for a lithograph by the currently in favour Duncan Grant. In 2004 when his late, very decorative Standing Woman, 1973, was sold by the Reader’s Digest, it was estimated at just £100 but bought by Robin Hambro for £3,346. This month there was slightly less competition for it as it sold for £2,142. The moral – if you get carried away with something you fall in love with, don’t expect someone else to do the same when you’re gone.
The King’s market
At Bonhams print sale on June 2 were four coloured lithographs by King Charles 111 printed in 1991 by Curwen Prints Ltd, signed, titled, dated and numbered from an edition of 295. Subjects were royal residencies in Sandringham, Balmoral, and Highgrove as well as a Greek landscape. Estimated at between £500 and £1,000 each, all sold easily enough for between £1,000 and £3,000. Top price was £3,200 for a view of Greece but a view of Sandringham languished below estimate at £1,024 - perhaps not as much as some in trade had hoped. At the Kervis House Gallery in Petworth, two prints from the editions, of Sandringham and Balmoral had been priced at £6,000 and £7,950 respectively, and one had sold at press time.
At Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury on June 7 - five more prints dated 2006-2012 were offered with £300-£500 estimates. Top price was a view of the terrace at Highgrove which made £1,300... so still a long way to go for the King’s s prints at auction.
Early memorabilia in the form of drawings by the King when he was about six years old underwent a slightly different test at Hanson’s auctioneers in Derbyshire on June 16 when a collection of ten drawings that had belonged to the late Henry Maule, Royal Correspondent for the New York Daily News, came up for sale. Maule obtained the drawings whilst writing a biography of Prince Phillip. Most of the drawings - boats, an Easter bunny and a Harrods delivery van , often inscribed by the young Prince - sold within or below estimates of £1,500 - £3,000. But a pair of coloured drawings of his mother and father, Queen Elizabeth 11 and Prince Phillip, inscribed ‘Mummy’ and ‘Papa’, excited stronger competition, selling five times overestimate for £59,800 much to the ecstatic auctioneer’s delight.
Childhood drawing by King Charles of his father Price Philip.
Childhood drawing by King Charles of his mother Queen Elizabeth IIFAIRS
The price of rubbish
Artnet News reports from the Taipei Dangdai art fair in May that London dealer Ben Brown sold one of Gavin Turk bronze bin bags (American Bag, 2015) for £100,000 – which may seem a lot for a load of rubbish, so here’s a rundown. Turks bronze binbags, fun Duchampian comments on contemporary consumer society, have come in various shapes and sizes since about 2001 with titles like Bag, Dump, Pile, Trash or Refuse – all in editions of 8. They usually fetch no more than £60,000 at auction, but they are smaller than American Bag which measures 70 x 83 x 83 cms. One of the larger versions – just called Bag - is 42 x 61 x 61cms and sold in New York for $131,000 in 2014. An edition from American Bag was shown by Brown at the Armory Show in 2015 and reserved with a price tag of $131,000. So maybe the price for Turk’s rubbish in Taipei wasn’t so steep after all.
American Bag by Gavin Turk, Painted bronze, 2015.
American Bag by Gavin Turk, Painted bronze, 2015. In situ.China’s Cumbrian connection
At the same fair, London dealer Richard Saltoun sold 12 works by Chinese born UK resident, Li Yuan-chia (1929- 1994), who famously bought a tumbledown farmhouse from Winifred Nicholson in the Lake District to practice his very different form of abstract and conceptual art, for between $70,000 – $250,000 each. The artist is now scheduled for inclusion in the Crossing Borders exhibition at the British Art Fair courtesy of Saltoun, a former regular exhibitor at the fair.
LI Yuan-Chia, Cosmic Point Multiples, 1968. Set of 4 steel panels with 17 magnets, 95 x 4 x 63 cm (each panel); dia. 7.5 cm (each magnet) (LYC582) All Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery London and Rome. All Copyright The Estate of the Artist .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.