Unusually glossy mats from the St Ives school
The Scottish auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull made a promising start to their new venture selling modern art and design, Modern Made, in their London gallery this March.
Under the direction of Philip Smith (headhunted from the up-and-coming Mallams of Oxford), the sale achieved
an impressive £1 million, which included a world record £250,000 for a painting by the Malaysian modernist Abdul Latiff Mohidin.
Next week sees Smith’s follow-up Modern Made auction, the highlight of which is 70 abstract table mat designs by leading artists from the post-war St Ives school that have been sitting in an archive for as many years. Porthia Prints was a short-lived company established in the Fifties by the sculptor Denis Mitchell (assistant to Barbara Hepworth) and the artist Stanley Dorfman, who went on to find fame as the producer of BBC’S Top of the Pops.
In those lean years, even artists of
the stature of Hepworth, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon jumped at the chance to show and sell their work at the leading modern design emporium, Heal’s. Their designs will now be offered with prices ranging from £200 to £3,000 for paper collages by Hepworth.
Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips are preparing for a big slide in sale totals for their New York auctions of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art next week. Last November, the equivalent auctions racked up over $1.9billion. But next week’s are estimated to fetch only $1.2billion (£929million). The slippage is expected to be shared equally between the Modern and the Contemporary sectors. The sharpest downturn – of close to 50 per cent –
takes place within Christie’s Contemporary, which benefitted last year from $200million of art from the Barney Ebsworth collection.
Least affected appears to be Phillips, with $125.6million of art, a figure fractionally up on last year’s estimate of $123million. If all goes to plan, the usually third-placed auction house will inch that bit closer to the marketleading duopoly, which is, of course, their primary objective.
It is not that individual prices are falling, but that potential consignors – as witnessed during Frieze week in London last month – are reluctant to part with high-value works.