Modern British art is set for a hot summer
Recent prices for underrated 20th-century artists augur well for a flurry of auctions next month,
June is going to be a busy month for the market in Modern British art, with at least six specialised auctions scheduled to take place across the UK. So far this year, sales in this market have been promising. In the regional auctions, we have seen exceptional prices for good examples by underrated artists. At Henry Adams in Chichester, a flower painting by Lucian Freud’s teacher, Cedric Morris, estimated at £30,000, sold for £165,000. At Cheffins in Cambridge, a painting by the little-known Evelyn Dunbar, estimated at £300, sold for £69,000. And at Dreweatts & Bloomsbury in Berkshire last week, a marble carving by Barbara Hepworth’s first husband, John Skeaping, estimated at £3,000, sold for £116,000.
The first auction, next week, is at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury, which has the distinction of selling part of the collection of the late Keith Allison, a solicitor and reader of The Daily Telegraph, who would communicate with me from time to time about his collection. He was inspired, he told me, by the lawyer, Wilfrid Evill, whose collection he first saw at the Fitzwilliam Museum when he was a student at Cambridge in the late Forties. Evill’s collection was sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for over £41 million.
Allison never spoke about investment, but his collection was clearly a good one. One example, a view of Whiteleaf Orchard by Paul Nash, which he bought from Agnew’s in 1968 for £450, was sold by Woolley & Wallis to gallerist Richard Green two years ago for £86,000. Next month’s sale includes two landscapes of the south of France by Christopher Wood, which Allison bought at Sotheby’s in the early Seventies for a few hundred pounds and are now modestly estimated at £12,000-£20,000.
A Keith Vaughan of sunbathing boys he bought in 1970 for £300, is estimated, modestly again, at £30,000. But the jewel of the sale is likely to be a Fifties Jamaican period painting by John Minton, Tropical Fruits, which Allison bought in 1967 for just £85 and is estimated at £40,000.
“I had a feeling what he produced as a result of his visit to Jamaica,” he wrote to me, “wasn’t highly regarded by Minton admirers at the time.” How right he was and how things have changed. The Jamaican pictures are currently Minton’s most sought after – one sold last November for a record £293,000.
The action then moves to London. Sotheby’s £7million-plus sale boasts the highest estimate yet for a painting by Camden Town artist Robert Bevan, at £300,000. Owned by Manchester businessman Frank Cohen, it will sell as Sotheby’s has found someone to guarantee the price – a rare event at a Modern British sale. Bonhams’ smaller sale has an interesting little collection of neo-romantic work from artists including Keith Vaughan and John Craxton, owned by the late Dame Jennifer Jenkins, widow of former home secretary Roy Jenkins. Craxton, who was homosexual, gave his “Greek musician” as a gift to the politician, who had supported Leo Abse’s bill for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, which was passed in 1967.
After a tour to Edinburgh where Lyon & Turnbull has a good line-up of Scottish colourists, then it’s back to London. Here, Christie’s stages an impressive £21 million-plus sale, led by works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth at an estimated £1.5million. Christie’s Impressionist and Modern British Art department took more than £80 million last year, with the support of Christie’s president, Jussi Pylkkanen, who encourages it to sell high-value works by Moore and Hepworth that might otherwise be in an international sale. The sale also partly fills the gap left by the disappearance of Christie’s usual June contemporary art sale by including works from Antony Gormley and Tony Cragg.
Finally, Sotheby’s may be the underdog, but has made a lastminute move to close the gap with an impressive single-owner collection that ranges from neo-romantic art by Minton, Craxton and Graham Sutherland, through the postwar abstracted landscapes of Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter, to the non-referential abstracts of John Hoyland and a nod to the intense figuration of the School of London artists with a Frank Auerbach portrait of his son, Jake. Sotheby’s calls it A Journey Through British Art and while it is not revealing the name of the owners, the Telegraph has learnt they are the eminent QC Simon Davenport and his wife, Angelika. He is a trustee of the Contemporary Art Society, so maybe it is selling this collection, 30 years in the making and estimated at £3-£5million, to extend that journey into more contemporary art.