Sale-rooms
Multiplying over the years
Alistair McAlpine
he beginning of this year was not a good time for the fine art and antiques trade and neither has the end of it been madly exciting. Dealers still go for weeks without selling a single item, whereas five years ago all dealers were doing so well that they borrowed large sums of money and their debts have not yet been exorcised from the art market.
Our recession is by no means over. Despite this, Christie's have at least ended the year on a note of optimism with the publication of what is probably the finest auction catalogue of the second half of the century — 'Works of Art from Houghton.' This grand volume is stuffed full of even grander furnishings. The contents of the sale were impeccable but, with the excep- tion of several sets of pewter plates from Sir Robert Walpole's service, they were of no real interest to me. This is the stuff that Greek yachts are furnished with, or per- haps these days it is the mammoth vessels of the Far East that soak up the finest French furniture and porcelain.
Looking back over the season, if I had been a buyer I certainly would have bought `Village, Brittany' painted in 1897 by Roderic O'Conor when he was working with Gauguin, which sold at Sotheby's for £60,000. This passionately painted picture seems wonderfully cheap, especially in comparison with the prices that his com- panion's work fetches. I would perhaps also have tried to buy `The Great Tent has Col- lapsed' by Jack Butler Yeats, which sold, again at Sotheby's, for £106,000. Both prices are rather more than these artists usually fetch and both paintings are rather better than those which they usually pro- duced. These painters are worth watching out for in future sales.
`The Presentation of a Pineapple to Charles 11' c. 1677, which sold for £463,500 at Sotheby's is a work I have always loved. It is one of a small group of evocative British paintings which come on to the market so seldom that when they do they cannot be missed. If you wish to own them you pay one bid higher than your competitor.
There were at least two modern paint- ings and a sculpture that came up in the rooms this year which I would love to have bought. I would have given my eye teeth, but not £90,695, for Milton Avery's 'Artist's Family by the Sea'. I can remember only too well the days when Leslie Waddington used to sell such a gouache for £1,000. The sculpture, a classic by David Smith, `Cubi V' at £2,697,000 would always have been expensive as would Picasso's 'Femme et Enfants au Bord de la Mor' which went for £2,974,600. As a young man Picasso and I lunched at the same restaurant, Felix, in Cannes, though sadly not together. I left the restaurant before Picasso and noticed his hat hanging on a peg on my way out; I have never in my life been so tempted to steal anything.
Matisse's Jazz fetched £71,900 at Sothe- by's. I can recall selling several copies of it for between £2,000 and £4,000 in the early Seventies when I owned a book shop. At the time Matisse produced Jazz he was painting his decoupages. These cut-outs were made while he was an invalid and they heralded the culmination of his career. They were not much thought of in the 1960s. I bought two of them in blue and white, each four feet square, and paid £4,000 for each of them. After a time I dis- posed of these beautiful pictures to buy a sculpture of a reclining nude by the same artist. A larger and more colourful version of my pictures fetched £9,292,200 at Sotheby's. I also sold copies of Redoutes Les Liliacees, in those days for between £5,000 and £15,000 depending on the quality of their bindings. A copy sold at Sotheby's this year for £221,650 and one at Christie's for £210,000.
I mention the prices that I sold books and paintings for in the Sixties or early Sev- enties in order to demonstrate that the quality most needed by a collector of art is patience, rather than a brilliant eye or a deep pocket. Wait long enough and you will show a profit. May I also add that despite Oscar Wilde's remark 'all success is due to luck, ask any failure' there is indeed considerable luck in buying and selling art. Who in their right mind could possibly have foreseen that the cousin of the two decoupages by Henri Matisse that I bought in 1964 for £4,000 each, would fetch such a staggering sum of money in 1994?
My advice is do not buy anything you cannot afford and under no circumstances buy anything just in the hope that it becomes valuable. However should Picas- so's hat ever come up for auction I will pawn whatever I have to buy it. I am afraid I am never able to take my own advice.
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