Ceramics to take centre stage during Frieze fair

Christie’s is not alone in blurring the traditional dividing line between craft and fine art (see feature, left). Next month, Phillips will conduct the first sale devoted to international contemporary artists working with ceramics, during the Frieze contemporary art fair in London.

Henry Highley, head of contemporary art evening sales at Phillips, notes that the company has achieved numerous records for contemporary ceramics in different sale categories. They have, for instance, sold the majority of the most expensive works by UK potters Lucie Rie (up to $212,000) and Hans Coper (14 of his most expensive works for up to £181,000); a stoneware pot by the American abstract expressionist potter Peter Voulkos, for $915,000, and a painted pink ceramic egg by another American, Ken Price, for $509,000. But he believes such artists can do better within the contemporary art context that Frieze provides.

Artists already represented in the sale include Voulkos with a £40,000 stoneware pot; Lucio Fontana, with a £400,000 stoneware horse; and the Chinese political activist Ai Weiwei, with 2,200 porcelain crabs (£400,000-£600,000). Italian art critic Francesco Bonami has curated the sale and says that artists use ceramics when they want to convey a more direct relationship with material, combining both painterly and sculptural elements.

The auction display will be combined with Phillips’s sale of paintings by Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Georg Baselitz from the estate of former head of patrons of new art at Tate, Howard Karshan, liberating the medium of clay, says Bonami, from the traditional limitations placed on objects associated with craftsmanship rather than high art.

A sale of property belonging to the late Edward du Cann, the former chairman of the Conservative Party who was instrumental in bringing Margaret Thatcher to power, takes place at Duke’s in Dorchester this week. Scores of ceramics commemorating historical events such as the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Battle of Waterloo, and sculptures of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, including a £50,000 maquette for the imposing bronze by Ivor Roberts-jones that dominates Parliament Square, mark this as a classic Tory politician’s collection. But, even with works by Somerset artist Arthur Knightonhammond (Du Cann was MP for Taunton for 30 years), the estimated value of the whole only comes to about £90,000.

It’s perhaps also a reminder that Du Cann’s business career – as a former chairman of Lonrho and the ill-fated Homes Assured property company – was plagued by debt and ended in bankruptcy and the loss of several properties. However, his collection of 230 political caricatures, many relating to a book he wrote on the Duke of Wellington, which he kept in his home in Cyprus, is not included in the auction and is destined for the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection.