Francis Bacon – Three Studies for Portrait of Henrietta Moraes sold for £24,300,000
Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes sold for £24,300,000 in London last night. The Now and Contemporary auctions achieved a total of £96.1 million in the highest grossing Frieze Week evening sale at Sotheby’s since 2015. Gerhard Richter’s 192 Farben (192 Colours) sold for £18,287,800. There was a new record for Frank Auerbach whose Head of J.Y.M. made £5,648,800 and new records were set for Caroline Walker, Julien Nguyen and Kiki Kogelnik. Nobody Put Baby in the Corner by Flora Yukhnovich made £1,608,000, Cecily Brown’s Beautiful Not Realistic made £1.8 million over a high estimate of £800,000 and Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets (QOTP:) made £3.4 million.
A new design series by Joseph Walsh – Riverstick, Co. Cork based global design superstar – opens at Sotheby’s in London today. On show is a selling exhibition of key pieces from his newly developed Gestures series on display for the first time. The 12 sinuous works include a large dining table, a sculptural bench, free form lounge chairs, dining chairs and various wall mounted sculptural shelves.
Now in mid career Joseph Walsh is the Eileen Gray of this generation – and not every generation throws up designer innovators of this calibre. A century ago Gray was making lacquered pieces in Paris. This new series by Joseph Walsh, whose work is celebrated by design cognoscenti from Tokyo to Chicago to Paris, is finished in ebonised black. Beginning with charcoal sketches which Walsh translates into scale model studies in wood Gestures has emerged over the past three years. Wood is cut into layers, rebuilt and carved to create an uninterrupted sculptural form and finished in black. Each piece is functional and boldly sculptural. The show at Sotheby’s, which coincides with the London Design Festival, runs until September 29.
Banksy – Love is in the Air. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £189,000
Sotheby’s biannual Banksy sale opens for bidding online today. This much-anticipated auction surveys the activist’s groundbreaking work with a selection of prints from his initial foray into screen printing to one of his more recent editions, Banksquiat. The auction of 34 lots runs until August 17.
A Gorgosaurus skeleton sold for $6,095,600 at Sotheby’s Natural History sale in New York on July 28. It had been excavated on private land at Judith River, Choteau River, Montana in 2018. The exhibition mounted skeleton measures nine feet, two and a half inches tall and just under 22 feet long. It is from the late Cretaceous Period and approximately 77 million years old. The Gorgosaurus was a relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
A series of unpublished handwritten poems by Ted Hughes, written the in aftermath of the suicide of his partner Assia Wevill and their daughter Shura in 1969 – just six years after the suicide of his first wife Sylvia Plath – come up at Sotheby’s Books, Manuscripts and Music from Medieval to Modern sale open for bidding until July 19. Estimated at £10,000- 15,000 they offer an insight into the overwhelming grief and loss that Hughes experienced. Wevill and Hughes began an affair in 1962 and this was one of the causes of the breakdown of his marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath in the summer of that year. Following Plath’s suicide their relationship continued but was plagued with troubles, from money to Hughes’ lack of commitment. Wevill suffered from depression and in a terrible parallel with Plath’s death, gassed herself in her London flat in March 1969. The four pages of verse are written – sometimes illegibly – in ink, and are clearly early drafts, unintended for publication. Their fragmentary and incomplete structure suggests that Hughes found the subject too painful and abandoned the works. They are extensively revised and the beginning and endings of the poems are not always clear.
The sale includes an inscribed copy of Plath’s first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems (£20,000- 30,000) gven by Plath to her husband and childhood items of Plath’s from a lock of hair as a toddler to her stamp collection.
UPDATE: THE unpublished manuscript poems made £12,600, The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath made £94,500.
Peter Turnerelli (Belfast 1772-1839 London) -Bust of Henry Grattan (1746-1820)
THIS 1813 marble bust of Henry Grattan sold for £13,860 over a top estimate of £12,000 at Sotheby’s sale of Old Master Sculptures and Early Jewellery in London today. The prime version of Turnerelli’s portrait of Henry Grattan is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Born in Dublin in 1746 Henry Grattan was a brilliant politician and orator who, in his mid-thirties backed by the Protestant Volunteer movement, declared an independent parliament for Ireland. “Grattan’s Parliament” did not last long and when rebellion broke out in 1798 he was blamed by conservatives for having stirred up resentment against the status quo. He opposed the Act of Union in 1800, but this did not prevent him from later sitting as a MP in London. While he continued his efforts on behalf of Ireland his great days as a parliamentarian were over and he died in 1820.
The bust is likely to have been acquired by Grattan’s contemporary Charles Kinnaird, 8th Lord Kinnaird. He was a prolific art collector who assembled one of the great Scottish collections of antique statuary and pictures. Many of his paintings, which included works by Rubens, Titian and Poussin, had come from the collection of Philippe Égalité, duc d’Orléans.
Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, R.A. – Vanity. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £176,400
This 1915 work by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, which comes up at Sotheby’s Modern British auction in London on June 30, was once in the collection of the world renowned Irish tenor Count John McCormack. He was an avid collector of up and coming artists in the early 20th century. The subject is the artist’s wife Anaïs. By 1915, the Brockhursts had moved to Ireland following the outbreak of war. Oliver St John Gogarty took them under their wing, and they were to remain in Ireland until 1919. Brockhurst produced some of his most experimental and exquisite works during this period, and he was friends with and worked alongside Augustus John and his circle. Vanity is estimated at £40,000-£60,000.
Francis Bacon – Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1964 (Estimate in excess of £35 million) Courtesy Sotheby’s. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £43,336,000
Francis Bacon’s magnetic portrait of Lucian Freud will highlight British Art: The Jubilee Auction at Sotheby’s in London on June 29. Paintined in 1964 the full-length portrait illuminates the powerful dialogue of friendship and epochal rivalry which would engulf two titans of art history and spur them to create some of their greatest works. The pair had first met 20 years earlier and would go on to share an intense friendship for over 40 years until jealousy and petty rows would ultimately splinter relations forever in the mid-1980’s.
Though their visual styles differed considerably, both artists were deeply committed to the human figure, painting each other on numerous occasions over the years. Indeed, for Bacon, Freud would become a recurrent – and one of the most significant – subjects of his work in the 1960’s. Bacon believed that: “the living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person…The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation.”
The black and white photographs taken by their mutual friend John Deakin would become Bacon’s primary source material as he painted Freud obsessively. Of great personal significance, Bacon would keep these photographs with him for the rest of his life, and they were rediscovered torn, crumpled and splattered with paint in his studio following his death.
Joseph Walsh – Unique “Lumenoria” Table. UPDATE: THIS WAS UNSOLD
This unique Lumenoria table by Joseph Walsh comes up at Sotheby’s Important Design sale in New York on June 9 with an estimate of $150,000-200,000. This beautiful and dynamic dining table marks a pivotal moment in the career of celebrated contemporary Irish designer Joseph Walsh according to Sotheby’s. Since 1999, Walsh has been experimenting with laminating and bending wood, creating highly expressive and sculptural furniture and installations. Some of his career-defining commissions include work for the Embassy of Japan, the National Museum of Ireland, and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The catalogue notes that: “In his woodworking practice, Walsh infuses techniques from his broad and deep understanding of other traditional craft methods. This innovative approach to making yields masterfully crafted furniture as evidenced in this dining table. Here, Walsh has expanded his material experiments by combining a slowly hand-poured clear resin top over a custom freeform base, resulting in poetic interplay between the materials. “Each piece is unique, speaking of the materials, process and a moment in time,” reads his artistic statement for the series. This unique dining table presents as a visual marvel where light twinkles through the transparent top to rain down and animate the swirling ash wood base below”. It was acquired directly from Joseph Walsh by the present owner. The catalogue also features an Enignum II chair by Walsh with an estimate of 10,000-15,000. UPDATE: THE CHAIR MADE $12,600.
FRANK HURLEY – SHACKLETON ON THE ENDURANCE. UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £6,048
THIS rare 1914 photograph of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his ship Endurance is lot 109 at Sotheby’s sale online sale of Travel, Atlases, Maps and Photographs which runs until the afternoon of May 24. It is estimated at £5,000-7,000. Frank Hurley was the official photograph on Shackleton’s Imperial Trans Antarctic Expedition which set out in 1914 and was marooned until August 1916.
