MARKET NEWS
London’s auctioneers are going head to head in the £21 millionplus Russian art sales which kick off next Monday. The rivalry is captured by two similarly sized bronze sculptures, one of the enlightened Tsar Alexander II at Christie’s (£50,000) and another more regal depiction of the ill-fated Alexander III at Sotheby’s (£80,000). Both are models for monumental memorial sculptures of the Tsars on horseback by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, the leading turn-of-the-century society portraitist. The Alexander III is probably the best known because it was removed from its site in 1917 and returned in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union; Alexander II was never placed in a public location because of the outbreak of the First World War. Leading the field is Sotheby’s with an estimated £9million, followed by Macdougall’s with £6 millionplus, leaving Christie’s (£4million-plus) and Bonhams (£2.3million-plus) seeking to upset the odds.
Last week, Christie’s held a sale in London of Indian art to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the continent’s independence. After the sale, it was also celebrating the highest price for a South Asian work of art this year when Tyeb Mehta’s 1994 painting Woman on Rickshaw, an allegory of imprisonment and suffering, sold for £2.7million. The buyer was the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. The museum is backed by Nadar, the wife of techno billionaire Shiv Nadar, and India’s leading collector of modern and contemporary art. The museum also bought an early, pop art-inspired painting by Bhupen Khakhar, the subject of a major Tate exhibition last year. Khakhar’s market took off in the lead-up to the Tate show but seems to have settled as this 1965 work sold within estimate for £161,000.
Another high price for a non-western postwar artist was set in Hong Kong this weekend when a 1964 abstract painting by Zao Wou-ki, admittedly a French citizen for much of his life, but born in China and lionised lately by the Chinese market, sold for a record $19.7million. Zao’s prices were cheaper than most post-war school of Paris artists until the Chinese reclaimed him. Prices reached $1million in 2006, $14.7million when he died in 2013, and are still rising. In the sale, Christie’s was also testing the market for contemporary Western artists in Hong Kong, which it protected by finding guarantors for works by Willem de Kooning, Rudolf Stingel and the young African-american artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, which all sold in spite of minimal bidding. The only real flop was a painting by Cy Twombly which Christie’s still owns, having guaranteed it two years ago in New York where it failed to sell with a $4.5 million estimate.
Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell 400 works from the collection of photographer Mario Testino. It says the story of the formation of his collection is “as yet untold”. However, the Telegraph featured it in 2014, highlighting painting and photography, including figurative and abstract paintings by artists such as former Turner Prize nominee Lynette Yiadom-boakye and Tauba Auerbach.