Scott Reyburn checks in on the Masterpiece Fair in London to see what the mood is among dealers and find out what might have sold:
‘“The market feels difficult. There’s a weird atmosphere because of Brexit,” said Hugh Gibson, director of the London modern and contemporary dealers Thomas Gibson Fine Art.
Sales weren’t strong but they weren’t lacking either:
- Yet the FAS did sell a fine, if suitably somber 1942 “Grey and Pink Still Life” by the postwar Scottish painter Anne Redpath to a British collector for £245,000.
- The antiquities specialists Ariadne Galleries of New York and London found an American buyer for an ancient Greek marble head of Aphrodite, dating from the mid-2nd century B.C., priced at between £1 million and £1.5 million.
- But Robert Young, a dealer in folk art based in London, sold 28 objects priced between £3,000 and £26,000 within three hours of the June 29 preview. These included a 19th-century model of a butcher’s shop, snapped up for £25,000 by a Canadian living in London, typifying the fair’s core clientele of locally based internationals.
- M & L Fine Art, specialists in 20th century Italian art based in London […] found a European buyer at about €700,000 for a rare Enrico Castellani 1961 pale green “Untitled (Superficie)” nail and canvas abstract that the fair’s Awards Committee voted the outstanding work by a living artist at the event.
British Art Fairs: One Country, but Worlds Apart (The New York Times)
