The works he couldn’t bear to sell
Colin Gleadell previews next season’s major sales, including the private collection of one of London’s most significant dealers
Last week, Sotheby’s announced the £10 million sale of David Bowie’s collection (see Market News, right), and this week it is Christie’s turn. Ahead of the Frieze Art Fair in October, it will offer choice examples from the £20 million private collection of leading modern and contemporary art dealer Leslie Waddington, who died last November.
It is often said that dealers have the best private collections – if they can bring themselves not to sell everything, they can squirrel away the best art they come across.
Waddington is a hugely significant figure in the recent history of modern art dealing. He defined the London art landscape with his five galleries in Cork Street long before the current craze for contemporary art took place. Spanning the modern (Picasso, Matisse, Miró) with the European avant-garde of the Fifties (Jean Dubuffet, Patrick Heron and the St Ives school), contemporary American “colour field” painting in the Sixties and younger British contemporaries – Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake, Barry Flanagan – he pursued a diversity that is reflected in his collection.
From his early beginnings working in his father’s gallery (a Jack B Yeats painting in the sale is a solitary reminder of his Irish roots), Waddington opened a gallery in London in 1966, and by 1989 was Britain’s leading dealer by sales, with a turnover above £74 million. Among his clients were Tory party treasurer Alistair McAlpine and pop art collector EJ “Ted” Power. In 1990, Waddington nearly went under as the recession hit, but he persuaded his creditors that he was the best person to sell his own art (rather than the auction rooms).
He avoided selling works he had acquired in the Eighties, and are now the most valuable in his collection. Top prices are expected for paintings by Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder (a rare wall-mounted mobile called Serpent) and Agnes Martin (another classic of a spare, pale grid), each valued at £2 million to £3 million. Displaying the range of Waddington’s interests is Lampe, an early Twenties painting by Francis Picabia, which explores the idea of beauty in mechanical terms, estimated at £800,000 to £1.5 million.
Not long after he married his second wife, Clodagh, in 1985, Waddington moved into a house in Chelsea. The Calder and the Picabia, as well as works by Matisse, Dubuffet, Caulfield and Flanagan, were all still in the same place when he died. These are works he chose to live with rather than sell – this a sale not of tired gallery stock, but of treasured things that the dealer kept for himself.
Inevitably, there are examples by the artists he represented – several excellent Patrick Caulfields, Peter Blakes and groups of abstract squares by Josef Albers, whose estate he worked with. The sale also bears traces of the close relationship he had with his artists. A 1972 collage by Dubuffet is inscribed and dedicated to the dealer. In a second sale to be held in November, there will be drawings made by Patrick Heron on a holiday Waddington took with the artist after Heron’s wife had died. One thing everyone comments on is how loyal Waddington was to his artists.
In terms of size and value, the collection does not compare with those accumulated by other great dealers of his era such as Ileana Sonnabend or Anthony d’Offay, but this was a collection he wanted around him in the limited space of his own home, reluctant, with characteristic business nous, to pay storage fees for art he could not enjoy.