MARKET NEWS
There has been hot competition for vacant stands at Masterpiece, London’s swankiest summer season fair. In the course of normal turnover for a young fair, a clutch of modern art and antique dealers have made way for 26 new exhibitors – an indication of how the fair’s character is evolving. In antiquities, David Aaron will focus on Islamic art, Asian dealer John Berwald will mix oriental grace with modern British art, while Old Master dealers De Jonckheere, Derek Johns, and Sarto will add gravitas. “The fair will reflect the market of today,” says chairman Philip Hewat-Jaboor, with additional galleries showing modern and contemporary art, notably Kálmán Makláry from Budapest and Paul Kasmin from New York. Modern decorative arts are boosted with galleries Chastel Maréchal and Mathivet from Paris. Photography has a greater presence with specialist dealers Peter Fetterman, and Bernheimer from Switzerland, whose 1940 vintage print of Lisa
with Turban by Horst P Horst (£97,000) epitomises the glamour of the fair. “Handpicked” was the name given to a selection of 50 works from the Saatchi Gallery collection that were sold at Christie’s in South Kensington to support the gallery’s free entrance policy and education programmes.
If they had been picked for today’s re-sale market, the choice was astute, as all but seven works sold for a total just under £400,000, which was at the high end of the presale estimate, demonstrating that Charles Saatchi has not lost his touch. A painting by Turner Prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, bought in the low thousands in 2005 when she was unknown, sold for £39,000. A manic portrait by the Ivorian artist Aboudia, bought in 2014 for about £4,000, sold to an internet bidder in Japan for £20,000 – an auction record.
Even artists who had never sold at auction did well. Glaswegian pair Littlewhitehead’s life-size sculpture of a group of hoodies, It Happened in the Corner, cost around £6,000 in 2004 and sold for £27,500.
In Cape Town, auctioneers Strauss & Co have just delivered a national record total £4.6 million for a South African sale. Top price was R13.6 million (£754,000) for a painting of a young Arab by Irma Stern.
Although there were no individual records, 89 per cent of lots were sold. Still a far cry from Bonhams’ £7.5 million London sale back in 2011 when they sold Irma Stern’s Arab Priest for £2.7 million. Their sale this week carries a more modest £1 million to £1.5 million estimate. “There aren’t so many big Irma Sterns coming on to the market now,” says Giles Peppiatt of Bonhams.
He does, however, have some big sculptures by 60-year-old Willie Bester, a star of the British Museum’s recent Art from South Africa exhibition. Of the 14 works by Bester entitled Apartheid
Laboratory, nine are highly politicised assemblages from found objects (estimated at between £7,000 and £18,000 each), which are too large to travel but have been viewable in Detroit as part of the respected Gilbert and Lila Silverman collection. CG