Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Bonhams sale in London made £4.4m with 85% of the 35 lots sold.
Helped along by a clutch of School of London works, Bonhams racked up a strong £5.285m Post-War and Contemporary art sale in London this week. Auerbach led the way with a sale that was more than four times the high estimate. Leon Kossoff also demolished expectations. The sale was helped along by Anish Kapoor, Banksy, Sigmar Polke, and Serge Poliakoff.Continue Reading
Bonhams Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in London on Wednesday 7 March is dominated by School of London works from artists Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. The lead work is Kossoff’s Nude on a Red Bed No 3 estimated at £300,000-500,000. Here’s how Bonhams puts it in their release:
This Kossoff dates from 1968 and was originally in the artist’s personal collection. He then gave it to his sister Ashley Kossoff, from whom it passed to the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Since 2003 it has been in private hands. Other works included in the sale are:
- Reclining Head of E.O.W. II by Frank Auerbach, painted in 1969 and estimated at £280,000-350,000. This work was once in the collection of Lucian Freud who bought it in 1971. He was a great supporter of Auerbach and owned more than 40 of his friend’s paintings.
- Birth, Marriage, Death also by Auerbach, executed in 1951. It was bought direct from the artist in the same year, and has been in a private family collection ever since. It is estimated at £150,000-200,000.
- John Asleep by Kossoff from 1987, estimated at £120,000-180,000.
- Reclining Model, Back View a charcoal, crayon and pencil work on paper by Auerbach executed in 1960-61. It is estimated at £120,000-180,000.
Bonhams is trying something new with their African art sale at the end of February. The sale will be simulcast to an audience in Lagos, Nigeria where bidders will be able to participate directly in the sale:
Tutu, a portrait of the Ife royal princess Adetutu Ademiluyi painted in 1974 by the Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, leads Bonhams Africa Now sale in London on Wednesday 28 February. Enwonwu painted three versions of Tutu during 1973–74, and the image became a symbol of national reconciliation for a country struggling for unity in the wake of the Nigerian–Biafran conflict of the late 1960s. All three paintings had been considered lost until the discovery of the current picture for sale.
The series was of great personal significance to Enwonwu. The first painting, executed in 1973, remained in the artist’s studio until his death in 1994. It was lost at some point after that, and its current whereabouts are unknown. The location of the third Tutu painting is also a mystery, leaving the work for sale at Bonhams as the only known example of the image.
Bonham’s Director of Modern African Art, Giles Peppiatt said, “The portrait of Tutu is a national icon in Nigeria, and of huge cultural significance. It is very exciting to have discovered the only painting of the series that we now know still exists. Its appearance on the market is a momentous event and we expect it to generate enormous interest.”
The auction will also include six artworks originally in the collection of the renowned art patron and philanthropist, Jean Pigozzi. When Pigozzi visited the seminal exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Magiciens de la Terre, in 1989, he was greatly excited by a number of works by contemporary African artists, many of whom had never before exhibited overseas.
It’s happening again. Starting in 2011, Western auction houses saw a rise in runaway lots in their Chinese works of art sales. Chinese buyers were scouring the globe looking for works to re-patriate (or, at least, to return to Chinese ownership.) The price spikes eventually dissipated both through a more efficient market and a decline in Chinese purchasing power.
Surprisingly when Chinese capital controls are said to threaten Mainland buying, Bonhams has just seen two different lots get bid into prices orders of magnitude above the estimates. Here’s what Bonhams said:
A Set of Four Huanghuali Folding Chairs were sold for £5,296,500 at Bonhams Fine Chinese Art sale in London today (Thursday 9 November). The chairs are the only known version of this form and type, and are widely considered a masterpiece of Ming Dynasty furniture. They had been estimated at £100,000-150,000. In a packed saleroom, the bidding war finally came down to a tense battle between a bidder in the room and one on the phone with the chairs finally knocked down to the phone bidder.
The chairs came from the collection of the distinguished Italian diplomat, Marchese Taliani de Marchio. From 1938 to 1946, Taliani served as Ambassador to the National Chiang Kai-shek Government in Nanjing. Despite spending only eight years in China, Taliani was a shrewd and gifted connoisseur who assembled a collection of exceeding rare and important pieces that conveys the rich history of Chinese decorative arts.
An important and exceedingly rare pair of Huanghuali Tapering Cabinets from the Ming Dynasty from the same collection, estimated at £200,000-300,000, sold for £1,688,750.
