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Works by Zao Wou-Ki and Pierre Soulages from an Irish collection are to feature at Sotheby’s Paris Art Contemporain evening sale on June 24. This sale is anchored by a museum quality selection of blue-chip Post-War and Contemporary Art. 17.5.63 by Zao Wou-Ki is estimated at 1.5-2 million, Peinture 65 by Soulages has an estimate of 500,000-700,000.
THIS 1916 view of Roundstone, Connemara by Jack Butler Yeats made a hammer price of 70,000 at Morgan O’Driscoll’s online Irish art sale on June 8. Westport Famine Ship by John Behan made 27,000, Evening, a Chinese ink of paper drawing by Yeats made 24,000, Lisa by Daniel O’Neill made 19,000, The Evening Tide by Patrick Hennessy sold for 18,000, Tom Cromie by Colin Davidson made 12,500, a charcoal drawing of landscape with clouds by Paul Henry made 10,000, Girls Playing in the Woods by George Russell made 9,500, Dusk by Arthur Maderson made 8,500 and Rugby by Pauline Bewick made 8,000.
On May 18 in the year 2000 the Irish artist Louis le Brocquy made headlines when his Travelling Woman with Newspaper sold for a record £1,158,500 at Sotheby’s. The buyer was Michael Smurfit. He is now selling off some of his collection so the same painting will come up at Sotheby’s in London next September 9, this time with an estimate of £700,000-1,000,000. In pure investment terms this amounts to no appreciation for a fascinating work of art by one of the leading Irish artists of his generation.
Change is gathering pace in the global art market. The restrictions wrought by pandemic has forced the market to adapt in all sorts of inventive ways. ONE: A global sale of the 20th Century is a new auction event at Christie’s on July 10. Using streaming technology Christie’s will hold a relay style auction of Impressionist and Modern, Post War and Contemporary art and design across four time zones. The aim is to create an engaging platform for selling major works of art to a global audience. With $20-30 million works like Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger Version F, Lichtenstein’s monumental Nude with joyous painting and Ed Ruscha’s Annie all available this amounts to a further blurring of the line between digital and live sales. There will be four consecutive sessions in Hong Kong, Paris, London and New York. It will replace New York’s 20th Century evening sale originally scheduled for June 22.
In this brave new topsy turvy world Oliver Barker, an auctioneer at Sotheby’s, will take to the rostrum in London on June 29 to conduct an auction in New York. This digital auction, live streamed in high definition around the world, will allow bidders participate by phone or online, in a sale of Contemporary Art immediately followed by the Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale. These big ticket sales at Sotheby’s were originally scheduled for New York in May. Works can be viewed online from June 8 or by appointment at Sotheby’s Manhattan galleries. Francis Bacon’s 1981 “Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus” is estimated to make at least $60 million. Bacon’s theme of divine punishment is taken from Aeschylus’s most famous trilogy The Oresteia in which Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon in revenge for the sacrifice of their daugher Iphigenia. When Orestes finds out he kills his mother to avenge his fathers death, provoking the avenging Furies who drive Orestes insane as a punishment. At times like this the highest levels of the art market tend to be best insulated against price drops largely because sellers at these stratified levels can afford to hold back. There was a 5% drop in the global art market last year, representing a $3.3 billion drop in sales over the stellar year of 2018. Digital sales by major auction houses so far this year have been highly successful with many lots going over estimate. Expectations are high.
Roger Fry’s 1911 portrait of E.M. Forster is at Bonham’s Modern British and Irish art sale in London on July 1. In that year Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) had recently reached a new audience and a breadth of critical acclaim with his fourth novel Howards End, published in 1910. Friends from King’s College included the writer Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862-1932) and Roger Fry (1866-1934). Dickinson and Fry were close friends and both followed with great interest Forster’s career, beginning with his first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Over the years, Fry seems to have read everything Forster published. There was great praise for A Passage to India (1924) – ‘a marvelous texture – really beautiful writing,’ he wrote to Virginia Woolf. In an early draft of A Room with a View, Forster included a character called Rankin (later dropped from the novel), an art historian attending tea-parties in Florence. The estimate for the work is £30,000-50,000.
The Bitch Pack of the Meath Foxhounds by the Victorian painter John Emms (1843-1912) made £225,000 at a behind closed doors sale at Bonhams in London today. It had been estiamted at £180,000-250,000 and was originally scheduled for auction in April. The British Impressionist art sale achieved £1.4 million with 70% sold by lot and 70% sold by value.
In this unusually large work – it is 40 x 60 inches – Emms (British 11843-1912) employed fluid brush strokes to give weight and solidity to the different physical characteristics of the dogs as well as their individual temperaments. It is known that the artist walked to the kennels every day and returned to his studio with one hound after another so he could make detailed preliminary sketches which he then worked up into the overall composition.
Hunting with hounds is a tradition in Ireland that goes back to ancient times and features strongly in Celtic literature and legend. There is a pack recorded in the Meath area as early as 1723, although the Meath Hunt itself dates from 1817. The Bitch Pack of the Meath Foxhounds was painted in 1896 when the famous John Watson was Master, his mastership spanning 1891-1908.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for February 24, 2020)
The Spire by the Northern Irish artist Colin Davidson – who painted a portrait of Angela Merkel for the cover of Time Magazine in 2015 – was the top lot at Gormley’s Auctions online sale of Irish art on June 2. It made a hammer price of £7,600. Davidson lives and works near Belfast.
The catalogue for Morgan O’Driscoll’s current sale is now online. The sale runs to June 8. It features work by a wide variety of artists from George Russell, Jack B. Yeats, Sean McSweeney and Paul Henry to Pauline Bewick, Dan O’Neill and Mary Feddan.
Works from across Picasso’s entire oeuvre including paintings, drawings, unique ceramics, editions, photographs, and even paint palettes will come under the hammer at an online sale at Sotheby’s from June 8-18. Over sixty lots are from the personal collection of the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso. The sale will be exhibited at Sotheby’s in London with appropriate safety restrictions from June 15-18 and viewing is available by appointment on request prior to those dates.
Doneraile based Aidan Foley, who quickly moved to an online only model when the pandemic lockdown began in Ireland, will hold a two day sale on May 30 and 31. Around 350 lots are to come under the hammer on each day. He reports that successful online auctions make more work for the auctioneers. There is more demand for pre-sale reports and afterwards lots have to be packaged and despatched, sometimes crated. One lot from his sale at the beginning of May went to Sri Lanka and buyers and collectors registered from around the globe.
The upcoming auctions on easy live will include boxed sets of promotional discs sent to RTE’s Lorcan Murray. Items from his extensive collection of rock and pop memorabilia have already featured at several of Aidan Foley’s auctions and garnered much interest. Another upcoming lot certain to arouse great interest is a pencil sketch of a river scene by John Butler Yeats estimated at €800-1,200. It is from an artists sketch book purchased at a Yeats family dispersal auction.
