MARKET NEWS
When Sotheby’s closed its west London saleroom in Olympia in 2007, some of the slack was taken up by a new kind of auction room around the corner at 25 Blythe Road. Masterminded by Sotheby’s arms and armour specialist Thomas del Mar, 25 Blythe Road works like a co-operative of auction specialists in a variety of disciplines who each run their own auctions. The highest price for a painting there to date is £13,200 for a 19thcentury portrait. But next month, Blythe Road is to move up a gear with a collection of 19th-century, animal-themed paintings from a private London club that wishes to remain anonymous. Led by a tiny river scene with duck hunters by the sought-after Russian Ivan Pokhitonov, with a £60,000 to £80,000 estimate, it follows with an enchanting painting of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the fairy painter Joseph Noel Paton, at £15,000 to £20,000. A new house record seems to be on the cards.
Sotheby’s is hoping for an auction record this week of at least £6.5 million for German artist Georg Baselitz, described by curator and art historian Norman Rosenthal as the greatest living painter. In response, nimble German dealer Michael Werner, who gave the artist his first show in 1963 and represented him until 2000, is showing a portion of the work he bought from the artist during those years and never sold. From Friday, some 36 drawings and paintings dating from 1977 to 1992 will go on view in his London gallery priced from £40,000 to £4 million.
Tracey Emin once accused her former boyfriend, artist Billy Childish, of being “stuck, stuck, stuck” with figurative painting – hence the “stuckism” movement that he co-founded in 1999 to promote figurative painting over conceptual art. But out in New York last week, Childish’s art was far from stuck, and sold, sold, sold at the Art Dealers Association of America fair through his dealer, Lehman Maupin. Fifteen paintings sold for between €25,000 and €45,000 to buyers from Turkey, China, Hong Kong, Korea and the United States, where one work was acquired by a trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Institutional buying is rare at auctions, but sometimes a joy to behold. At Sotheby’s last week, there was the unusual sight of Old Master dealer Johnny Van Haeften bidding on an abstract painting. However, this was by Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch co-founder (with Mondrian) of de Stijl, or neoplasticism. As soon as the painting was knocked down to him (within estimate, at £1.6 million), Van Haeften’s entourage cheered, clapped and embraced with uncontained glee. It turned out he was bidding for Holland’s Museum Lakenhal, which is currently celebrating the centenary of the formation of de Stijl. A few lots later, after Sotheby’s Vienna representative had bought Klimt’s £48 million Flower
Garden for an anonymous client, she became engaged in a drawn-out battle for a small early portrait by Klimt, which she bought to a round of applause for a triple estimate £4.3 million. The buyer was the Gustav Klimt Vienna 1900 Foundation.