MARKET NEWS
On the morning after the Royal Academy’s celebritystudded party for the opening of its Summer Exhibition, a rash of red dots appeared all over its walls – a pretty impressive 254 of them. Whatever the critics say – and they always have mixed feelings about the Summer show – the public love it. After all, it was election day, and democracy had been hard at work. A lot of the sales were for small paintings, drawings and prints priced between £125 and £2,000, some by such established artists as Stephen Chambers, Bernard Dunstan or Norman Ackroyd. Top sale that I could see was £72,000 for Royal Academician Barbara Rae’s big red painting, Red Sea, with birds and fish shapes darting about – Rae’s work seldom appears at auction, and never at this price level. On the whole, the summer show bears very little relationship to the speculative side of the art market and the frenzy of the auction room. Top seller in this respect at £40,000 was a computer-drawn painting of a yellow laptop by Michael-craig Martin, who has only recently begun to make big money at auction. Other big auction sellers such as Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley or Sean Scully were probably a bit out of the price range of RA party revellers. Of the invited exhibitors, we were left to wonder how much a painting would cost by Christine Ay Tjoe, a red-hot Indonesian artist, an example of whose work just sold for a record $1.5 million in Hong Kong, as it was marked “Not for Sale” – sold already, presumably by her gallery, White Cube. Perhaps the most popular artist in the show was the RA’S keeper, Eileen Cooper, who sold six prints for under a grand each, and a painting of a typically wide-eyed couple dancing the night away, Till the Morning Comes, priced at £24,000. Lucky Fine Art Society then: the New Bond Street gallery will host her first ever show this coming October.
Six watercolour drawings of First World War aeroplanes by William Earl Johns, creator of the renowned Biggles adventure stories, are to be sold by Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers in Essex next week. Johns’s reputation is firmly associated with the 98 Biggles books he wrote about a fictional wartime pilot, but he also went to art school and was at one time a professional illustrator and aviation artist. One of the drawings is dated 1916, the year before Johns was commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps. His work has rarely been seen at auction before, and these drawings are estimated from £500 to £1,000 each.
After years of plunging totals, London’s Russian art sales seemed to have stabilised, clocking up £23.1 million of sales last week, on a par with last November’s series. Sotheby’s was by far the most successful, with £9.9 million picture sales that exceeded estimates. It was also up 90 per cent from last June. Modernism and contemporary art were in short supply as more traditional 19th- and 20th-century images prevailed.