Robert O’Byrne revisits the advertisements in Apollo 40 years ago
In some publications, advertisements can appear to be present only on sufferance. In those that are read by art collectors, however, they have long been intrinsic to the visual fabric of the magazine. In the case of Apollo, many of the advertising pages in recent decades were sold by its advertising director Nigel McKinley, who joined the magazine as an advertising sales executive years ago this autumn.
When it comes to investigating archives, advertisements often provide better insight than editorial content into the culture of the age in which an issue appeared. This is very much the case with an issue of Apollo published in November . The magazine ran to an astonishing pages, as many as might be found in a novel. However, only around
of these were devoted to the month’s articles. The rest – more than pages – were allotted to advertising, most of which were bound together at the front of the magazine, with a numbering system distinct from that of the editorial content and indexed on the final page.
Certain companies clearly believed in the merits of bulk-buying. A full third of those advertising pages, for example, were taken by one auction house: Christie’s. At the time, the auction house published its regular saleroom notice in Apollo, with the magazine printing run-on copies for Christie’s to distribute to prospective clients (the pages were pasted together at the Apollo offices in Davies Street). Its section opened with an image of a fine equestrian painting, Tristram Shandy by George Stubbs, which the auction house sold later that month for , . Seven years later, the work reappeared in New York at Sotheby’s, where it made . m; and in June
, the picture was back with Christie’s, this time fetching . m. During the intervening
years, not only had the price of Stubbs’s work risen, but so too had commission fees.
These were first introduced in , and in November , the auction house’s advertising noted that ‘Standard commission charged to sellers is on each catalogued lot sold for over , . All property sold is subject to a premium of payable by all buyers as part of the purchase price.’ Today those percentage figures can induce tearful nostalgia.
Equally striking is the almost total absence of new or recent work from Christie’s advertising: a sale of modern art was promoted by an image of Allen Jones’s Pleated Skirt, painted in
. An auction of ‘Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture’ included pictures by Picasso and Severini, but also Boudin and Fantin-Latour. Otherwise the focus remained on traditional fields such as Old Master paintings, antique furniture, Japanese and Chinese porcelain, and so forth. That particular issue, the auction house’s most notable inclusion was a page devoted to the upcoming sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester: bought by Armand Hammer for . m, years later it was sold again by Christie’s, this time to Bill Gates for . m.
As Christie’s advertising demonstrates, auction houses had yet to pay much attention to the contemporary market. This can be seen in the pages Sotheby’s took in the same issue. Its advertising ran to a more modest pages, beginning with notice of an auction of modern British paintings, drawings and sculpture, featuring the likes of Sickert, Munnings and Clausen. Many of the house’s other sales were highly specialised, one in Zurich being devoted to stained glass and European metalwork, while another in New York offered pieces of th-century French furniture and decorative art from the collection of heiress Margaret Rockefeller Strong.
Meanwhile what today is the third global auction house, Phillips, took but a single page, given over to a reproduction of Francis Cotes’ portrait from of Sir Edward Astley’s two children, Anna Maria and Edward: it was bought by Agnew’s, which sold the work the following year to the Tate Gallery. Like most of the major dealers at the time, Agnew’s had its own advertisement, promoting the company’s winter exhibition of Old Master paintings and drawings. Asprey’s page featured a George IV silver entrée dish and cover, while that taken by Garrard was given over to two gold freedom caskets presented to the first Duke of Albany in the mid s.
From the Leger Galleries advertising an exhibition of English watercolours to Marshall Spink spotlighting a flower and still life painting, the impression given by successive pages is of an art world relatively unaltered since the end of the Second World War; the Redfern Gallery’s notice of an upcoming show of new work by Patrick Procktor provides a rare hint of contemporaneity (and is, McKinley thinks, the first full page that he sold into Apollo). At the time, the editorial content was also predominantly retrospective in character, most of the November issue being devoted to a series of essays about the author Sacheverell Sitwell – all of them written by editor Denys Sutton.
Much would change in the decade ahead. Sutton would retire in after years at the helm, but more importantly the art world itself would undergo an upheaval, with modern and contemporary work demanding more and more attention. Nothing better reflects that change than a comparison between advertising in and today. o