By Georgina Adam
Published: November 28 2009 00:35 | Last updated: November 28 2009 00:35
The French often rename streets in honour of notable
citizens, and the latest person to be so feted is British artist Sir Anthony
Caro. The sculptor has been working for a number of years in the Gothic
church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in the little town of Bourbourg (pop: 7,059) near Calais. The church and its
choir were severely damaged in the second world war when a British aircraft
crashed into it. Caro was commissioned by the French ministry of culture to
make a sculptural “intervention” in the Chapel of Light, filling niches with a
series of steel, wool and terracotta sculptures. It was inaugurated last year,
and the edifice is now being compared with Vence’s
Matisse chapel. At the inauguration of the newly rechristened avenue, Bourbourg’s mayor was enthusiastic: “Bourbourg
is becoming an internationally famed, major tourism site,” he proclaimed.
This week brings the Russians to London, with
specialised sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, MacDougall’s and Bonhams. There are two seasons for Russian art sales
in the British capital, in June and late November, and in the last three
seasons the small, specialised MacDougall’s has vaulted into a position just
behind Sotheby’s, elbowing Christie’s into third place. Its sale on Thursday,
which is estimated at up to £14m, features the highest-priced lot of the week, Zinaida Serebriakova’s sensuous
“Nude” (1932), carrying expectations of £1m-£1.5m.
Sotheby’s evening sale on Monday is estimated at over £7.8m (pre-sale
estimates don’t include commission; results do) and the firm expects up to £20m
for its four sales, which include £1m for a group of 100 items from the Romanov
family, going under the hammer on Monday. These comprise cigarette cases and
cufflinks, many by Fabergé, belonging to Grand
Duchess Maria Pavlovna and her husband, Grand Duke
Vladimir, brother of Tsar Alexander III. They recently resurfaced after being
hidden in pillowcases in the Swedish legation in Stockholm for 90 years, and
are being sold
by the family. Estimates here start at just £80 for a set of cufflinks; the
cigarette cases start at £700. Christie’s is expecting a little over £9m for
its two day sales, held Tuesday to Thursday.
As elsewhere in the market, volume and prices for Russian art contracted
after the credit crunch, with sellers and buyers holding off. “Prices for
Russian art fell by up to 40 per cent, but not as much as Russian equities,
which fell, from peak to trough, by 75 per cent,” says William MacDougall. “But
things started to recover in April, and the June sales were healthy.” He points
to Sotheby’s auction of Russian art earlier this month in New York, which
totalled $13.8m, well over its high estimate of $9.6m, as a sign of an upturn.
And he says, “While we may not beat Sotheby’s for first place this time around,
we’re snapping at their heels.”
It is extremely rare for Larry Gagosian,
incontestably the world’s most powerful art dealer, to speak publicly, so his
appearance on a panel in Abu Dhabi last week (November 20) caused quite a stir.
The title of the session was “Collecting Then and Now”, and many of Gagosian’s colleagues, including White Cube’s Jay Jopling and Tim Marlow, Tony Shafrazi
and PaceWildenstein’s Marc Glimcher
crammed into the room to hear him. Gagosian was a
cogent and forthright speaker, noting that “I have learned in my 30 years as a
dealer that a sense of competition and envy is what drives collecting.” His own
need to succeed seems to have been driven by his early experiences; he
recounted how, at a holiday camp and just seven years old, he had “thrown a
towel” over his clothes, smart by his own standards, when he saw another boy’s.
The same thing happened when, aged 10, he started collecting coins.
Speaking about the recession, Gagosian said it had
been “mild” for his business: “I know a lot of galleries have closed, and my
business is certainly down from a year ago. We’ve taken a hit, but it’s quite
manageable.” Asked for advice for budding collectors, Gagosian
said: “You have to have some sort of passion. People shouldn’t collect just
because they have been told to. Reading magazines is helpful, if you’re smart
enough to understand what they are saying.” And the dealer in him probably took
over when he continued: “At some point you have to start purchasing, so don’t
be paralysed by doing research. Don’t be gun shy – just pull the trigger!”
Former leading art dealer Anthony d’Offay’s
collection has been enriched with another work. Bruce Nauman’s neon piece, “Violins Violence Silence” (1981-82),
offered at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in New York earlier this month,
sold to d’Offay for $4,002,500, over its estimate of
$2.5m-$3.5m (which does not include commission). However the piece is not – as
yet anyway – going into “Artists’ Rooms”, the collection d’Offay
sold at a generously discounted £26.5m to Tate and the National Galleries of
Scotland last year.
“Zero” was the name given to a progressive art
movement that started in the late 1950s and continued to the mid-1960s.
The name derived from a publication, Zero, and from the artists’ aim to
“go back to zero” by abandoning the art of the past and incorporating non-art
elements – such as light, fire and water – into the works. In the group were
such well-known names as Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, Roman Opalka and
Victor Vasarely.
A Salzburg couple, Anna and Gerhard Lenz, have assembled a world-famous,
600-strong collection of Zero art, which has been widely exhibited. Now,
advancing in age, they are selling 49 works at Sotheby’s in February 2010, with
the remaining ones going into a foundation. “The collection is probably the
best of its type in the world,” says David Leiber of
New York’s Sperone Westwater
Gallery, which held a show of Zero works last year. “I am sure it will focus
more attention on these artists.”
The top lot in Sotheby’s auction is Yves Klein’s “Feu
88” (1961), made using fire, body and water imprints on paper, and estimated at
£2.5m-£3.5m; a blood-red Fontana studded with glass pebbles, “Concetto Spaziale, Ritratto di Carlo Cardazzo” (1956) has a target of
£1m-£1.5m. But the sale also includes more accessible offerings, such as
Turi Simeti’s “Weisses Strukturbild” (1962), a
cardboard-on-paper abstract, at £8,000-£12,000.
Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper
Copyright
The Financial Times Limited 2009.