MARKET NEWS
According to experts, there are only 12 Bronze Age helmets in existence, 10 of which are in museums, and one in a private collection. The 12th is about to make a cameo appearance at the Olympia Art & Antiques Fair, west London, which opens next week, and runs for seven days. This helmet, once owned by the arms and armour collector
Axel Guttmann, was discovered by Dutch antiquities dealer Alexander Biesbroeck of Alexander Ancient Art. It was most likely produced in the Carpathian Basin in Eastern Europe (Hungary), some 3,000 years ago, he says. X-rays show that it was made with a rounded hammerhead.
The price is in the region of £32,000.
Britain’s Modern British art sales this month have shown little vulnerability to the political instability that has gripped the country – a very healthy 80per cent of lots offered have found buyers. In the run-up to the general election, Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury clocked up its first ever £1million plus picture sale, far exceeding the £440,000 estimate. In London last week, Sotheby’s took more than £8 million, as expected, in its Modern British art sale. Several records tumbled, notably for the late Richard Smith, the subject of an exhibition – Work of Five
Decades – currently at the Flowers Gallery on Cork Street, London, W1S, and represented in the large “Untitled” hall at Art Basel. Matthew Flowers thought he would win a painting, estimated at £40,000, for £100,000, but was outbid as it fell to a rival phone bidder for £131,250. At Bonhams, a painting of a Greek musician by John Craxton – a gift to Roy Jenkins, the former home secretary – tripled estimates to sell for £75,000, while a grimly intense 1935 self-portrait by the society portraitist David Jagger surprised almost everyone by selling for £221,000, more than ten times its estimate. Other portraits by Jagger barely scraped £5,000 each.
It was home to Lucian Freud for more than 20 years, and Kensington Church Street has boasted an array of high-quality art and antiques shops for very much longer. On Wednesday evening, the street stages its summer street party when all the shops put on special displays and stay open late. To pick out just two highlights that indicate the range on offer: Butchoff Antiques has one of a pair of rare Regency armchairs, designed by Thomas Hope in 1803 for poet Samuel Rogers, priced at £75,000; its other half is in The Fitzwilliam Museum. Meanwhile, dealer Gregg Baker mixes ancient Japanese works of art with modern paintings in the shape of works on paper by Suda Kokuta, an abstract artist of the post-war era who was courted by the Gutai group but never joined. Some art work from members of the group now sell for millions, but these are priced from as little as £3,800 each.