MARKET NEWS

Sotheby’s is packing a lot into its London summer sales of Impressionist and Modern art. Not only is it thinking big with some very highly estimated works, around £20 million each, by Kandinsky, Giacometti and Miró, bringing the estimate up to £148 million to £195 million, or more than 50 per cent higher than last summer, but it is also thinking small. First, it is opening the series, with a sale devoted to 35 works by Picasso, Fontana and others no bigger than the page of its catalogue, with a total £19.3 million estimate. Then, the following day, it is offering a collection of 22 sculptures, the majority less than two feet high, by Hepworth, Moore, Giacometti and others, belonging to the late George and Mary Bloch. The Blochs were best known for their collection of Chinese snuff bottles. Sotheby’s sold 1,740 of them in Hong Kong for more than $56 million. The modern sculptures should make £4 million or more.

Tate Modern is staging an exhibition this week for the Turkish-born abstract painter Fahrelnissa Zeid, who bridged Ottoman decorative traditions with Western modernism and died in 1991. She has become one of the most sought-after Middle Eastern artists in the market and, after a record $2.7 million in Dubai for a large painting in 2013, the most expensive female artist from the region. Her last major painting in

Towards a Sky, by Fahrelnissa Zeid, made £992,500 a London auction was a six-metre jazzy abstract,

Towards a Sky, which sold this year for £992,500.

A sale of works once owned by Alexander Iolas, the Greek contemporary art dealer and friend of Andy Warhol, has slipped by almost unnoticed. That is because the collection was largely leftovers, passed down after his death. However, there were a few bright spots. A silkscreen portrait of Iolas, Alexander the

Great, which he commissioned from Warhol, made the highest price yet for a print of that subject – presumably because of the provenance – selling to an American collector for a triple estimate £125,000. And there were records for some minor Greek artists he knew.

Hokusai’s iconic print of

The Great Wave, featuring currently at the British Museum, has itself been subject to a wave of money, as prices for rare early impressions have risen. The British Museum has three versions, two of which are later impressions made when the original woodblock was deteriorating and the sky darkened. But for its early impression it needed assistance from the Art Fund to buy it in 2008 for £130,000. That price, though, has been far surpassed in the last two months at auction. Last week at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, an early impression sold for $488,000, five times the estimate. But it wasn’t a record. In April in New York, another fine early impression sold for $943,500, 10 times the estimate.