MARKET NEWS
Adesirable collection of vintage photographs by society photographer, Cecil Beaton, has emerged from obscurity to be exhibited by Beetles + Huxley in Mayfair. The gallery says the prints, priced from £2,000 to £20,000 each, were acquired in Los Angeles in the Sixties, but reveals nothing more about their provenance. However, The Daily Telegraph has learnt that they were owned by the controversial American billionaire Marc Rich, who died in 2013. Sales from Rich’s impressive art collection have been handled by his son-in-law, Londonbased art dealer, collector, and popular art world blogger, Kenny Schachter.
Manchester businessman Frank Cohen, continues to unload work from his extensive contemporary art collection as he reduces his warehouse space (see Telegraph, April 24) and is, once again, trying to do so incognito. Last week, Chiswick Auctions in west London announced it was selling 55 works by contemporary artists including Grayson Perry, Mark Quinn and Ugo Rondinone “from a distinguished private collection”. However, some of the pictures still have Cohen’s name on the back. Estimates range from £800 for prints to £50,000 for Quinn’s early sculpture, Young Dancer
Aged 14, from 1988, which was moulded with bread before being cast in bronze. The sale is expected to fetch upwards of £350,000.
Next week, Dreweatts & Bloomsbury in Newbury is selling the contents of a magnificent house in the Cotswolds, Abbotswood, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Although not named in the catalogue, the longterm owner of the house was Robin Scully, a successful horse breeder with an eye for art and antiques who died in 2013. One of his favourite outlets was the Crane Kalman Gallery in Knightsbridge, which converted him in the Sixties to the work of a littleknown but gifted Spanish artist, Celso Lagar, a close friend of Modigliani. Gallery owner Andras Kalman once recalled seeing Lagar’s work in a Paris gallery and tracking him down to an asylum before he died in 1963, a tragic figure. Still overlooked, 12 of his works from Scully’s collection are to be sold by Dreweatts. All estimated at under £5,000, they are priced to sell.
The Chelsea Flower show is almost upon us and galleries in London are responding in kind. The Fine Art Society in Bond Street has more than 120 works by the late botanical artist Raymond Booth while, just opposite, Richard Green has a dozen distinctive still lifes of roses by the great Scottish Colourist, SJ Peploe. In Fitzrovia, pop-up gallery, Apollinaire Fine Arts, launches with images of seeds and seed vessels by award-winning photographer, Anna Laurent, some of which will also be shown in the Great Pavilion at Chelsea. Also in the flower show, the Little Black Gallery will exhibit eye-popping, lenticular floral prints by holographer Rob Munday, who worked on the super popular image of the Queen with her eyes closed taken by photographer, Chris Levine. Finally, still life photographs by Paulette Tavormina composed in the manner of Old Masters, are hung in juxtaposition with the kind of Old Master paintings that inspired them at Colnaghi in St James’s.