Rumbles in the art market

London’s International Modern and Contemporary art sales at the end of June told a number of different stories. Although there was jubilation over a Gustav Klimt going to Hong Kong for a record £85.3 million, sale totals were down by over 20%. That of course doesn’t necessarily mean prices were down – just the supply of major works.

British artists, for instance, performed well...Frank Auerbach in particular. Those in the know were aware that former Marlborough Fine Art directors Franki Rossi, Geoffrey Parton and John Erle Drax, had split from the gallery and mounted an independent exhibition of 25 recent Auerbach self-portraits and sold out; prices from £200,000 - £500,000.

`Frank Auerbach, Mornington Crescent, Oil on board, Executed in 1969. Estimate £3,500,000 - 4,500,000 Sold for £5,565,200. Courtesy of Sotheby's London.`

Older work did better at auction. At Sotheby’s his thickly encrusted, brilliantly coloured EOW on her Blue Eiderdown 1963, from the collection of Magnus Konow, whose father had been a drinking companion of Francis Bacon’s, was chased by adviser Nick Maclean before selling to a phone bidder well above estimate for £4.5 million. The same bidder later saw off MacLean again to buy Auerbach’s larger Mornington Crescent, 1969, for £5.6 million ($7 million – a record in $ if not in £’s, though another painting of Mornington Crescent is said to have sold privately for more through the Piano Nobile gallery).

Sotheby’s had another Auerbach, JYM Seated 1987, which sold for a mid-estimate £1.1 million. Both had come from the collection of UK collector Douglas Woolf, referred to anonymously in the catalogue as a ‘Distinguished’ private collector. An investor with a huge property portfolio in London and America, Woolf, now in his 80s, was also selling Night Interior, a 1968-70 Lucian Freud portrait of the society beauty, Penny Cuthbertson, which sold just above the low estimate for £9.6 million ($12.2 million) to dealer Offer Waterman.

Another British record was set when a 1999 burnished terracotta pot by the Dame Magdalene Odundo, the subject of a stunning exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2019, which had a punchy £100,000 estimate, sold to the ceramic specialist adviser, Ben Williams, for £533,400. Williams remembers selling Odundo’s work at Bonhams in the £10,000 to £30,000 range fifteen years ago.

Christie’s, too, flew the Union Jack with a self-portrait by the rising young black painter Sahara Longe. Longe, who trained in Florence under the influence of the old masters, was recently commissioned by Buckingham Palace to make a painting honouring the Windrush generation of immigrants from the Caribbean and is warming up for a show with the Timothy Taylor gallery. In the meantime, demand is building, and her self-portrait soared to a double estimate £113,400.

Auerbach was again in demand at Christie’s as his Reclining Figure I, bought in 1996 for £29,000, sold for £529,000, and the newly knighted Sir Grayson Perry celebrated a record price for a tapestry when one of his Hogarthian series, The Vanity of Small Differences, doubled estimates to fetch £226,500.

`Lot 227| Grayson Perry (B. 1960), Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close (from The Vanity of Small Differences) wool, cotton, acrylic, polyester and silk tapestry, 78 3/4 x 157 1/2in. (200 x 400cm.) Executed in 2012, this work is number six from an edition of six plus two artist's proofs. Price realised: GBP 226,800. CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023`

`Howard Hodgkin(1932-2017) The Spectator, signed twice, titled and dated 'The Spectator Howard Hodgkin 1984-1987 Howard Hodgkin' (on the reverse) Oil on wood, 17 3/4 x 19 5/8in (45 x 49.8cm.) Executed in 1984-1987. Estimate: GBP 800,000 – GBP 1,200,000 .CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2023`

Another unannounced seller was Michael Green, the founder of Carlton Communications and former chairman of ITV broadcasting company, now in his 70s and a practising psychotherapist. In 1987, Green engaged in a bidding war with his wife, Wolfson heiress Janet Green, to buy Howard Hodgkin’s The Spectator, 1984 – 87, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery fundraising auction, for a generous £172,000 against a presale estimate of £35,000 - £50,000. Green was now looking to quadruple that price at least at Christie’s with an £800,000 - £1.2 million estimate, the highest yet on a work by Hodgkin. But Hodgkin’s market has been on the backburner for a while now – the prevailing trend being for figuration – and The Spectator sold to a single £590,000 bid – still a decent enough profit considering how much contemporary art does not hold its value.

High level Modern British art did not, however, escape the prevailing mood. A Barbara Hepworth bronze, Elegy III, 1966, that sold below estimate for £4 million ($5.1 million) compared poorly with another cast from the edition in the Paul Allen collection that made $8.4 million last November in New York. And Douglas Woolf slipped up with a latish, 1960s marble carving by the lesser-known British artist, Frank Dobson, priced too high at £600,000 and better suited for a specialised Modern British art sale.

`Walter Richard Sickert, A.R.A.(1860 - 1942) Bonne Fille , Oil on canvas . Executed circa 1904-05. Estimate 30,000 - 50,000 GBP. Lot Sold 196,850 GBP. Courtesy of Sotheby's London.`

Well, it would have been in more normal times. While Sotheby’s attempted to elevate the profile of its separate Modern British Art sale on June 28 by placing it within its sequence of international modern and contemporary sales, it nullified any scheduling advantage by timing it to coincide with Christie’s main international modern and contemporary art sale making it difficult for clients to attend or focus on both at the same time.

Estimated at £4.5 million to £6.7 million it returned just £2.9 million (hammer) compared to last year’s equivalent sale which made £6.9 million (including premium). Six of the highest estimated lots (£100,000 and over) failed to sell. These included the top lot, a rare surrealist work by Paul Nash from Canada’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery collection (£400,000 to £600,000) in which a prominent disembodied head was perhaps a little off putting, and a Breton scene by Christopher Wood that was too formal a composition to reward the seller, who paid £164,000 for it in 2011, with a return to meet its £200,000 estimate.

Best performances came for cheerful, colourful works by F.C.B Cadell and L.S Lowry, and a sombre but subtly coloured pre-Camden Town era painting by Walter Sickert that quadrupled estimates to sell for £199,000.

Lower down the price ladder, though, there were too few highlights to cheer up proceedings. Pieta, a red, 1981 painting by stained glass artist, Brian Clarke, sold from the estate of publisher Niamh Attallah who had bought it from Mick Jagger’s favourite art dealer, ‘Groovy’ Robert Fraser, soared overestimate to sell for £53,340 – the highest price Clarke has ever achieved in a Modern British art sale. And a still life by Eliot Hodgkin, whose work always seems to sail calmly through stormy waters, fetched a triple estimate £28,000. It had cost £7,500 back in 2001. But otherwise, this was a sale that reminded investors that values can go down as well as up.

`Brian Clarke (b. 1953) Pieta,Oil and charcoal on canvas. Executed in 1981. Estimate 25,000 - 35,000 GBP. Lot Sold 53,340 GBP. Courtesy of Sotheby's London.`

A sombre 1956 Paul Feiler abstract that had cost £28,600 in 2010, could not find a buyer at its £10,000 estimate. A Kenneth Armitage plaster of 1953, sold by Danny Katz at Sotheby’s in 2013 for £24,400, found no buyer with a £12,000 estimate. An Elisabeth Frink Warrior which had cost £32,450 in 2008, was back with a lower estimate but could not find a bidder at £25,000.

In all, a high 40% lots failed to sell. A softer buyer’s market seems to be in store waiting for a new crop of specialists which Sotheby’s are grooming to replace the old. In recent months, Simon Hucker has left for auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull, Lydia Wingfield Digby has left to work for Jenna Burlingham, Charlie Minter (Sotheby’s lead specialist in Irish art and spokesperson for Irish art in Paris) likewise for a dealership, and Head of Department, Frances Christie, is acting as a consultant but will have left by September when Andre Zlattinger, hired from Christie’s, takes the helm. It’s a precarious situation to be in especially when so many provincial auctioneers are making inroads into this market.

Meanwhile a small Mod Brit cameo was playing out at Phillips, better known for its cutting-edge contemporary. The auctioneers were handling the estate of US lawyer, Thomas Lemann, which included a group of works by Mod Brit artists Bernard Meadows, Alan Davie, Gillian Ayres and Robert Adams, some acquired from Gimpel Fils and others in New York from Berta Schaeffer, during the early sixties when contemporary British art held sway in New York.

Here were the two best bargains of the week. Sculptures by Meadows, who was Henry Moore’s first studio assistant, have sold for over £100,000. But one example, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and carrying a soft estimate of £8,000 -£12,000, sold for just £2,160 to the privately owned Elgiz Museum in Istanbul. Another sharp-eyed opportunist snapped up a pair of 1962 coloured drawings for sculptures by Meadows, also exhibited at the 1964 Venice Biennale, which had a tame £1,000 estimate but was knocked down for just £100.

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.

BLAST #9

Rumbles in the art market

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