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This New York pier table dates to 1815 and will be on display at the Winter Show which opens at the Park Avenue Armory in New York today. The table is attributed to Duncan Phyfe and will be exhibited by Bernard and S Dean Levy. Objects from antiquity to the present will be on display at the leading art, antiques and design fair in the US. The 66th edition of this prestigious show brings together 72 of the world’s leading experts in fine and decorative arts. It runs until February 2.
The latest ‘Off the Wall’ affordable Irish art auction by Morgan O’Driscoll runs until the evening of January 27. There are 439 lots on offer with work by a variety of artists including Julian Opie, Norman McCaig, Estella Solomons, Colin Middleton, Graham Knuttel, John Morris, Henry McGrane and many more. The catalogue is online.
The design created by Theo van Doesburg (1883 -1931) for the historical Café L’Aubette building, at the Place Kléber in Strasborg would become one of the most iconic works of De Stijl. It will feature at Galerie Gmurzynska (Stand 404), part of TEFAF Modern Art at TEFAF Maastricht which runs from March 7 – 15. The colour design for the ceiling and three walls of the building, as part of a conversion into a complex of restaurants, bars, caberet and cine-dancing hall, was commissioned i 1926. van Doesburg worked with Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber Arp to create the design, still on display today.
A total of 21 Claddagh rings from the collection of the Hon Garech Browne, founder of Claddagh Records, sold for a total of £75,759 at Sotheby’s Royal and Noble sale in London today. They made various prices from £625 to £9,375 for a c1700 ring made by Thomas Meade of Kinsale or Galway. Most went over estimate and one lot, a c1820 ring estimated at £2,500-3,500 remained unsold. The top lot of the sale was an Anglo Indian ivory inlaid writing table, Vizagapatam, which made 471,000 over a top estimate of £180,000. A c1815 Irish Regency seven pedestal dining table once at Carton House with an estimate of £80,000-120,000 failed to sell. A set of eight Irish George III hall chairs from Killadoon House in Co. Kildare sold for £47,500 over a top estimate of £25,000. A caricature from Killadoon after Sir Joshua Reynolds depicting Thomas Brudenell Bruce, 1st Earl of Ailesbury, the Hon. John Ward, Joseph Leeson, later 2nd Earl of Milltown and Joseph Henry of Straffan made £87,500 over a top estimate of £6,000.
(See posts on antiquesandartireland.com for January 12, 2020, December 31, 2019 and December 20, 2019)
Cecil Maguire’s Fair Day, Clifden made a hammer price of 9,500 at Morgan O’Driscoll’s online sale of Irish art tonight. It was one of a number of encouraging results in O’Driscoll’s first online sale of 2020. Glenveagh Hills, Donegal by James Humbert Craig, Picnic by a River by Frank McKelvey and Farm Gate, Wicklow by Peter Collis each made hammer prices of 4,200; Fishing Village, Connemara by Maurice Wilks made 3,600, Venice by Arthur Maderson made 3,400 and Lake Scene, Evening by Percy French made 2,700. There will be an online sale of affordable Irish art by Morgan O’Driscoll on January 27.
It is, according to the auctioneers Christie’s, in paintings like The Sky Lovers that we see the roots of Yeats’ most emotional and highly evocative works. The 1947 work provides a striking example of his late painting style. Early in 1947 Yeats lost Cottie, his wife of 53 years, and when he returned to his easel it was with a new found emotional intensity. In this work two figures are depicted looking to the sky as one raises his hands imploringly to the heavens. Through light and vigorous brushstrokes the artist brings energy to the work, a sense of desolation and a yearning for something lost. The Sky Lovers comes up at the Modern British Art evening sale at Christie’s in London on January 21 with an estimate of £200,000-300,000.
Contents from Newtown House and other clients will come under the hammer at Sheppards in Durrow on January 21 and 22. Around 870 lots will come under the hammer in two days of sales broken up into four sessions. Among them in a sale of antique furniture, silver, jewellery, art, rugs and collectibles is a Chinese silver rickshaw supporting condiments with an estimate of just 200-300. The catalogue is online.
UPDATE: THE RICKSHAW CONDIMENTS SOLD FOR 650 AT HAMMER
Tamara de Lempicka’s Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932) will be a highlight at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale in London on February 5. The painting was commissioned by the husband of the British-born cabaret star Marjorie Ferry at the height of Lempicka’s fame in Paris where she was the most sought-after and celebrated female modernist painter. By 1930 Lempicka had become the première portraitist in demand among both wealthy Europeans and Americans, specifically with those who had an eye for classicised modernism. The portrait is estimated at £8,000,000-12,000,000.
Three works recently restituted to the heirs of Gaston Lévy, one of the most notable patrons and art collectors living in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, will come up at Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art evening sale in London on February 4. One is by Camille Pisarro, two by Paul Signac. Lévy’s art collection was dispersed under the Nazi occupation, and two of the works to be offered in February were lost to the ‘Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg’ (an organisation dedicated to receiving looted cultural property) in October 1940. After the war, the works were repatriated to the French state, and have recently been restituted by the French Government to Lévy’s heirs from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The third of the works to be offered – Signac’s Quai de Clichy. Temps gris – had been stored in the Lévy’s country home, the Château des Bouffards, but later found its way into the collection of the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, whose illicit hoard was discovered by the authorities in 2012.
UPDATE: The three works restituted to the heirs of Gaston Levy made #22.2 million. Pissarro’s Gelee blanche made #13.3 million, Signac’s View of Istanbul made £7.6 million and his Quai de Clichy made £1.3 million.
David Hockney’s The Splash will highlight Sotheby’s Contemporary Art evening auction in London on February 11. It is estimated at £20-30 million, over six times the price achieved when it last sold at auction for £2.9 million at Sotheby’s London in 2006. That was then an auction record for a Hockney.
Painted in 1966, The Splash immortalises a fleeting moment just seconds after a diver has broken the calm surface of a swimming pool. The painting’s protagonist is present, yet absent, masked by a torrent of displaced water. The work is a quintessential example of Hockney’s lifelong fascination with the texture, appearance and depth of water – a fascination which culminated in one of the most celebrated and instantly recognisable bodies of work in 20th century art.
It is the second in a series of three ‘splashes’, the largest and final of which, A Bigger Splash is in the Tate collection in London. These paintings represent the apex of Hockney’s Californian fantasy. Created at a watershed moment in his career, the three ‘splashes’ secured the artist’s international reputation as a leading artist of his generation and confirmed his unrivalled ability to combine elements of disparate movements – Minimalism, Modernist Abstraction and Pop Art – into a new style entirely of his own.
