The 20/21 British Art Fair at the Royal College of Art opens the new sales season after a summer of discontent.
At 5pm tomorrow, Anthony Horowitz, the novelist best known for his tales about the teenage spy Alex Rider, turns his hand to the art world when he opens the 20/21 British Art Fair at the Royal College of Art. Quite what he will say is a mystery (although I can reveal that an art dealer plays an important role in his next novel – a new Sherlock Holmes story called The House of Silk, which is published in November).
Certainly the way the art world works is mystery enough for most of us. But for the Modern British art market, the basics of the story are straightforward. The salerooms have had a record-breaking year, with Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams selling more than £90 million in their 20th-century British art sales in the past 12 months – and that doesn’t include the British art sold in the international contemporary art sales. Christie’s sales this year have increased by 257 per cent over last year, overtaking sales for Russian, American and Latin American art, while Sotheby’s, which took £41.4 million for the Evill/Frost collection in the summer, has increased by even more.
Auction prices for many established artists represented at the fair have risen greatly since January 2008, according to the Art Market Research Index. These include two of the stars of the Evill/Frost sale, Edward Burra (up 191 per cent) and William Roberts (115 per cent); the St Ives artists Christopher Wood (74.7 per cent) and Roger Hilton (65 per cent); the neo-Romantics Keith Vaughan (59 per cent) and Graham Sutherland (48 per cent); and the sculptors Henry Moore (120 per cent), Barbara Hepworth (52 per cent), and Jacob Epstein (45 per cent).
The last three were included in the Royal Academy’s Modern British Sculpture exhibition this year, alongside Anthony Caro, the Boyle family and Leon Underwood, all of whose works will be displayed at the fair.
Underwood, who taught Henry Moore and is sometimes referred to as “the precursor of modern sculpture in Britain”, is flavour of the moment. At the fair, the Redfern Gallery, which handles his estate, is displaying an African-influenced female nude, The June of Youth, 1933, priced at £30,000.
Beyond sculpture, the fair loops its way through modern art history, going down many of the lesser-known byways – from politically charged muralists, dreamy surrealists, and hard-edged constructivists, to “kitchen sink” painters, and self-taught outsider artists – like an intricate plot.
There is always a strong whiff of St Ives at the fair, and, this year, the Belgrave Gallery boasts a classic primitive view of steam and sail boats entering the harbour by the retired fisherman Alfred Wallis, who was discovered in the late Twenties by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. Meanwhile, a view of the harbour by Wood, painted in 1928, and one of several paintings that have long been in private collections, is on the stand of Richard Green. And post-war, abstract St Ives is given fresh resonance by the Whitechapel’s current Mark Rothko show.
British “pop” art is still an unexploited area of the art market, and the fair has unearthed some treasures. A collage of he-men, glamour girls and flash cars made from American magazines in 1947 by Eduardo Paolozzi on Jonathan Clark’s stand is testament to the claims that he truly was the originator of “pop” art.
The 20/21 fair opens the new season after a summer of discontent in the money markets; how that affects sales remains to be seen, but the odds are people will continue to see good art as a safe place to put their money. “It’s elementary,” I can hear the dealers saying as Mr Horowitz makes his rounds.
