MARKET NEWS
Last week’s auctions ended on a high, with lowervalue works at Sotheby’s and Christie’s selling for more than expected. This was largely due to the Picasso ceramics factor. Picasso’s ceramics, once derided as a decorative sideline for the artist, have been one of the market phenomena of the past decade. At Christie’s, 98 per cent of the examples offered sold for a doubleestimate £1.4 million. At Sotheby’s, which was offering drawings and unique ceramics owned by the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso, estimates had been set low to encourage competition, resulting in a virtual sell-out that doubled the estimate at £12.3 million. Top-priced ceramic was a unique, slim-necked vase with three faces painted on it which sold for a quadruple-estimate £305,000. A painting that was judged on the BBC’s
Fake or Fortune programme to be worth “in excess of £300,000”, failed to sell at Sotheby’s last week with an estimate of £250,000. The oval painting of women seated in a Parisian café by Edouard Vuillard was investigated by the BBC after the Wildenstein Institute refused to confirm its authenticity. The owner, Keith Tutt, had acquired it in a sale in Norfolk in 2007 for £11,000. However, in a riveting piece of detective work, the Fake or Fortune team managed to establish its authenticity through provenance research and forensic analysis. The only thing they seemingly got wrong was the price. Perhaps the market has changed since 2014, when the documentary was broadcast. Mr Tutt now has the option to sell it privately through the programme’s co-presenter, art dealer Philip Mould, or re-offer it at auction at a lower price. More than 300 photographs that belonged to Philip Rivkin, owner of Houston-based biodiesel company Green Diesel, are to be sold by the US government at Christie’s next week after Rivkin pleaded guilty to fraud last summer. (While Green Diesel described itself as a biodiesel producer, all it did was to sell renewable but invalid energy credits, the court heard.) Losses sustained amounted to more than $78 million. Among Rivkin’s seized assets was a $15 million photography collection, most of which was bought for high prices at auction in 2011. One of the best examples is a rare 1850s albumen print by Gustave Le Gray of the French fleet leaving Le Havre, which Rivkin bought for a record £710,000 at auction in France. It now carries a more modest £210,000 estimate. London’s Works on Paper fair opens this week in a new location, the Royal Geographical Society, with a revitalised line-up that includes some of the capital’s top specialist dealers – including Stephen Ongpin, Martyn Gregory, Guy Peppiatt and Chris Beetles – who are returning to support the fair. Meanwhile, the 20/21 British Art Fair is looking for a new home, after the Royal College of Art announced it would turn over all its gallery space to teaching. Now in its 29th year, the fair was due to have taken place there in September.