A week of belated recognition
Two groups of previously undervalued artists are standing out at this year’s Frieze, says
If you sift through the range of exhibitions and the contents of gallery stands at major art fairs, you will quickly get a sense of where the market is bubbling. In London this week – Frieze Week – two groups of artists from the pool of previously undervalued and now historic 20th-century artists stand out: the African-americans, and the avant-garde Japanese artists associated with the Gutai group.
Playing a significant role in the former is Tate Modern, with its rehabilitating Black Power exhibition, Soul of a Nation. Several of the featured artists have concurrent solo shows. The 78-year-old abstract artist Jack Whitten, for instance, is experiencing an explosion of interest.
Whitten only emerged into the limelight when he was signed up by the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in 2016, and is having his first solo exhibition at the gallery in Savile Row, London. Everything in the show, which opened last week, has sold, at prices up to $500,000 (£376,000): sums Whitten had never dreamed of before.
The slightly younger sculptor Martin Puryear has been in the mainstream for longer, but only experienced lift-off in the past seven years, selling for almost $2million (£1.5million) at auction in 2014. His retrospective exhibition at Parasol Unit in north London is his first in a public gallery in the UK and, while nothing is ostensibly for sale, his New York dealer, Matthew Marks, is only three miles away at the Frieze Art Fair to field enquiries.
Also at Frieze, London gallerist Stephen Friedman is devoting his stand to the sculptures of 80-year-old Melvin Edwards, whose sinister series of Lynch Fragment bronzes, resembling instruments of torture from the Slave Trade era, are priced from $90,000 to $350,000 (£68,000 to £263,500).
The largest array of modern Afro-american art is supplied by New York dealer Michael Rosenfeld, who brings works by 10 artists represented in the Tate show to Frieze Masters, the Frieze Art Fair’s sibling event for older art. Rosenfeld has been exhibiting black American artists for 28 years. To begin with, he says, “no one was interested”, but in the past five years, he has seen “a snowball effect”. A combination of worldwide museum interest and the realisation the artists were undervalued were probably the key drivers.
Rosenfeld boasts masterpieces that far outshine anything that has been seen at auction. A two-metre fabric collage titled Liberty #6, critiquing the Statue of Liberty during the Vietnam War, is by Benny Andrews, an artist brought up picking cotton in the Deep South. The work is priced at $375,000, 10 times the artist’s auction record.
Mercer’s Stop, 1971, an equally large abstraction by the reclusive William T Williams, who went without gallery representation for nearly 50 years (he was taken on in 2016), is a companion piece to a work in the Tate show, and is priced at $875,000 (£658,700), six times his auction record.
There were around 60 members of the Gutai group during its short lifespan (1954-72). Dedicated to doing “what has never been done before”, against a backdrop of political and social revolution in Japan, much of the art was linked to performance, the exploration of unusual materials and visual effects.
It has taken history a while to assess their work, notably with a large survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2013. The market has lapped up examples by the founder members – Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka and Shozo Shimamoto – pricing it in the millions but, two years ago, that market levelled off. Since then, another phase has developed, exploring the later members of the group, where prices have not moved on so far.
Currently, there are three Gutai exhibitions in London featuring the group’s younger members – one at Sotheby’s S/2 gallery, which has sold a number of works by Yuko Nasaka priced between £50,000 and £120,000 – and another at the Dover Street Arts Club, where Takesada Matsutani holds his own with his Gutai seniors. At Frieze Masters this week, Hauser & Wirth will also show a small work by Matsutani, priced at $89,000 (£67,000).
The new addition to the Gutai phenomenon, though, is cosmic dot painter Minoru Onoda, who died in 2008 having never exhibited outside Japan.
At Frieze Masters, the Anne Mosseri-marlio Galerie from Basel is presenting Onoda’s first solo show in London. With no precedents at auction to go by, the gallery is pricing his work from 1961 to 1984 in line with other younger generation Gutai artists, from $35,000 to $175,000 (£26,000 to £132,000).
Colin Gleadell