New highs for Modern British artists
Colin Gleadell reports on a week of record prices for Blake and Hamilton – plus, a surprising pair of Canovas
Artists who represent key art movements of the 20th century set the pace during last week’s Modern British art auctions in London. At Sotheby’s, top price was for A Dawn, 1914, a classic First World War vorticist picture by CRW Nevinson – a patchwork of angles portraying French soldiers teeming through a street on the way to war. “It was a rare opportunity that had to be seized,” says Gordon Samuel, a London dealer who fought off rival dealers Daniel Katz and Richard Nagy to buy the painting for £1.9million, a double estimate record and almost quadruple the artist’s previous record.
At Bonhams, sparks were flying for another vorticist related work – a 1913 drawing for a mural about Billingsgate Market by William Roberts, made when he was a student and which prefigured his shift into vorticism. It tripled estimates to sell for £162,500.
At Christie’s, a collage by the British pop artist Richard Hamilton, a study for his 1958 painting $he, which riffs on domestic products and consumer culture, stormed beyond its £120,000 estimate to sell for a record £440,750. And fellow pop pioneer Peter Blake’s 1965 painted collage of a female wrestler, Little Lady Luck, just pipped Blake’s previous record to sell for £704,750. The painting was owned by restaurateur Mr Chow, who bought it in 2000 for around £90,000.
A painting by rediscovered artist Pauline Boty – a fellow student of Blake’s who died at 28 – doubled estimates to sell for a record £632,750. Boty’s works were unearthed in a garage in the late Nineties, when collectors queued up to purchase them. This particular example came from the estate of Kenneth Tynan, who commissioned the 1966 painting – aptly titled BUM, for his erotic cabaret Oh! Calcutta!.
Christie’s sale also expanded into the contemporary with an 8ft bronze dancing hare, titled Nijinski Hare, by Barry Flanagan. It scored a record £1.3million, selling to art adviser Gilly Kinloch.
At Christie’s British Impressionism sale, a large 1904 hunting picture showing the four children of Edward Lycett Green (one of the then Prince of Wales’s gambling set) on horseback, provoked a bidding battle between private dealers Anthony Mould and Guy Morrison that pulverised the previous record for artist Charles Wellington Furse. Morrison won the painting for £668,750. Generally, though, the sale was a subdued affair, with few true impressionist paintings. Anyone who has enjoyed the National Gallery’s current exhibition devoted to Finnish artist Akseli Gallenkallela’s turn of the century paintings of Lake Keitele should head to Duke Street, where an exhibition featuring Gallenkallela and his Nordic contemporaries celebrates the centenary of Finland’s independence. Some 50 works by 30 artists display the influences of impressionism and post-impressionism. The exhibition has been organised by Scandinavian art specialist Anna Grundberg, together with Adrian Biddell, formerly head of 19th-century European art at Sotheby’s. Prices range from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Sculptures by the Italian neoclassical artist Antonio Canova, a favourite of Napoleon, are not that common on the market. How unusual, then, that two busts of members of the same family by Canova appear for sale separately within days of each other. This evening, at Christie’s Paris, a marble bust of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, which has belonged to the sitter’s family ever since it was commissioned in 1812, is to be auctioned with a €1million (£894,000) estimate. Then, later this week, as part of the new winter incarnation of London Art Week, Mayfair dealer Robilant + Voena unveils an original plaster cast of Murat’s wife, Caroline, sister to Napoleon, which belongs to another branch of the same family (the marble version is lost). Because it is in plaster, Caroline’s bust is priced at €850,000 (£760,000).