This year of livestreamed auctions ended gently as the close-of-season Old Masters evening sales in London brought in slim totals compared with their contemporary and modern art counterparts. Sotheby’s fielded 27 lots that made a within-estimate £8.6m on December 10 (£10.6m with fees), while Christie’s 44 lots made a healthier total of £18.7m (£22.8m with fees, est £14.1m-£20.1m) on December 15.
At Sotheby’s, one telephone buyer from Asia picked up four religious paintings from the 15th to 17th centuries, including a Crucifixion attributed to Sandro Botticelli for a within-estimate £850,000 (£1m with fees, c1495-1505). Christie’s suffered the last-minute withdrawal of a Bernardino Luini painting (est £3m-£5m) but also produced some results to surprise consignors on the upside. A rediscovered work by Domenico Ghirlandaio, “Salvator Mundi” (1480s), soared above its £500,000 high estimate to sell for £1.8m (£2.2m with fees), a record for the Florentine painter. And an online underbidder from Latvia helped boost a 16th-century seasonal holy family scene — by the wonderfully named Bruges artist known as the Master of the Plump-Cheeked Madonnas — to £240,000 (£300,000 with fees). The highest price of the sales went to Jan Davidsz de Heem’s “A banquet still life” (c1643), an Antwerp-period painting that sold from an English family for £4.8m (£5.7m with fees). The buyer, Wentworth Beaumont, co-founder of Beaumont Nathan art advisers, was unusually in the (socially distanced) saleroom.
Overseas supply was held back this season but, says Andrew Fletcher, Sotheby’s head of Old Master paintings, this sector has not been particularly hard hit by the slings and arrows of 2020. With Brexit negotiations the rolling backdrop to the London auctions, he reported increased sales to the EU this year: “We’re getting closer to Europe, not further away.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic creeps into another year of art fairs, the Marrakesh edition of 1-54, due to have its fourth outing in the swanky La Mamounia hotel in February, has been cancelled. Instead, organisers have joined forces with Christie’s in Paris, which has offered its already-adapted space for a physical fair of 18 exhibitors between January 20 and 23.
“We need to bring the collectors and galleries to Marrakesh, whereas France already has collectors who are enthusiastic about contemporary African art. It’s a good way to do a local fair,” says 1-54’s founding director Touria El Glaoui. Seven galleries plan to travel from Africa to Paris, including Galerie 127 from Marrakesh and This is Not a White Cube from Luanda. El Glaoui intends the Paris showing to be a one-off. “Christie’s gave us a great opportunity, in an exceptional year. But, 100 per cent, we plan to be back in Marrakesh next year,” she says.
Also committing to Paris is the gallerist Almine Rech who doubles up with a second space in the city, on the upmarket Avenue Matignon, from January. Rech has a larger, flagship space in the Marais neighbourhood, which she confirms will stay but, she says, the new spot is “more convenient for clients who live nearby or visitors in some of the hotels — and we have some great neighbours.” This week, Perrotin gallery has announced it is taking over a five-floor building down the road to launch a secondary market business.
Rech is sticking to her space in London’s Mayfair, which opened in 2016 — “Europe can have two cities for art,” she says. She opens on Avenue Matignon on January 21 with a show of the American Kenny Scharf, a 1980s street artist who recently revealed a partnership with the French fashion house Dior. “It will be good to start with an artist who is so energetic in the midst of Covid,” Rech says.
A major California collection of Australian indigenous art, reportedly worth at least $10m, sold to the Swiss private equity fund manager and art collector Bruno Raschle this month. The sale of about 250 items from the Kelton Collection, amassed by the real estate developer and avid yachtsman Richard Kelton, who died last year, marks the largest private acquisition in this field. The works include seven pieces by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and five by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the most prized modern Aboriginal artists.
“There has been a major shift in sentiment. A work of art can no longer be put in its place because of where a person comes from,” says D’Lan Davidson, the specialist art dealer and consultant who co-brokered the Kelton Collection sale. Earlier this month, Sotheby’s Aboriginal Art sale made a total $1m with fees, topped by Kame Kngwarreye’s “Summer Flowers II” (1992), which sold for $189,000.
Last year, other items from Kelton’s collection of Pacific-focused art — including about 50 works by Paul Gauguin and 18th-century topographical paintings and China Trade pictures — were sold through Christie’s.
Despite this week’s new lockdown restrictions, it is still possible to visit London’s commercial galleries (mostly by appointment) and emerging art enthusiasts can now get an online map of some of the lesser-charted spaces in the city. Called “Credit X”, the website has been developed by students at Central Saint Martins, in collaboration with Kingston School of Art — and has a suitably raw look and feel. Currently included are nearly 60 galleries that stretch west-to-east from Kensington (Exposed Arts Projects) to Canning Town (arebyte Gallery) and north-to-south from Upper Holloway (The Bomb Factory Art Foundation) to Peckham (Bosse & Baum). It also incorporates digital platforms such as Where’s The Frame?, founded by two Central Saint Martins graduates.
The project is sponsored by the financier collector Hussam Otaibi, owner of the Modern Forms collection. His curator, Nick Hackworth, says the plan is to extend it through the UK. “This is one of those initiatives that slightly shames the art world because it should have existed long ago. The good news is it’s happening now, when it has never been needed more,” says Kate Bryan, head of collections at the members’ club Soho House.
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