Sale-rooms
Only worth a gamble
Alistair McAlpine
Christie's sale of Impressionist and modern paintings in New York did not go well, even most of the good paintings failed to sell. The results of this sale confirmed my feeling that if you wish to buy a paint- ing then it must be because you like it.
The investor should keep well clear of the art market at the moment as it is still full of black holes. The truth of the matter is, that even those who have spent a life- time in the art trade are pushed to put a price on a painting, they cannot be certain that it will fetch that price at the auction. On 29 June Sotheby's are selling an extremely important Monet, the first ver- sion of his monumental masterpiece Bar at the Folies Bergere that hangs in the Cour- tauld Institute Galleries in London. They must keep their fingers crossed for they expect it to fetch over 0 million.
British paintings and sculptures are in a very different class from the paintings offered in what were once the mega sales of Impressionist and modern paintings. British contemporary art is sold at sales where the customers wear suits rather than dinner jackets and they are sold without the benefit of floral decorations that cost the price of a semi-detached house. There are no tickets to get in and the crowd is not so large that many of them sit in overflow salerooms. They are largely sold to collec- tors — serious collectors who buy paintings because they are interested in the artist and his work rather than it matching their wall paper. These paintings are sold without massive publicity and the actual sales are not covered by banks of TV cameras. Christie's have such a sale on 25 May and they are offering as good a selection of lots as I have seen in the rooms during the last 30 years. Perhaps the importance of this sale combined with the apparent lack of interest for Impressionist and modern work may help the art market reassess the efforts of a number of British painters who have for too long been confined to the second league. Lot 93 is a ravishing painting by Patrick Heron, estimate £30,000, and there is absolutely nothing second rate about this painting. Lot 41, Teddy Boy and Girl II one of Lynn Chadwick's most important works, estimate £80,000 and by internation- al standards a snip.
The last week in May will be an exciting time for collectors of musical manuscripts and memorabilia. On 25 May Phillip's are selling 129 lots of musical instruments, let- ters and memorabilia in aid of the Musi- cians Benevolent Fund. For anyone interested in collecting such things and helping musicians at the same time then this is a wonderful chance to do both. Sothebys have a sale on 26 May where they are selling a small calf bound volume con- taining the only keyboard music by Henry Purcell written in his own hand. One of the most important post Medieval manuscripts in existence, it was discovered in a bundle of music brought in for sale. This is the sort of experience that can ruin the life of the young man or woman who found it. From now on they will spend hours, perhaps even years of their lives leafing through dusty papers in vain, hoping that this remarkable experience will happen to them again. It won't, so they better change occupation and prospect for gold for he or she has a far greater chance of finding a gold mine than another such document and a gold mine will fetch rather more than the £300,000 that Sotheby's expect for this manuscript. Also in that sale are a collec- tion of love letters from Dmitri Shostakovich to his young mistress. It seems that nobody in the west at least, realised that the 20 year old language stu- dent was teaching this great composer rather more than German. His letters go thus 'My Beloved Lala — I kiss you ardent- ly, I miss you, I dream about you often. I think about you all the time'. The 21 letters are expected to fetch £15,000- this sale is filled with love letters. Jenny Lind, 'The Swedish Nightingale' wrote in these terms of Mendolssohn 'then come the blow that put in his grave the most beautiful, the most pure flower of my life, the sea rolls between me and his grave, there lies my music, my poetry, my art my purest joy'. These letters are expected to fetch £38,000. I just wonder about the morality of poking about in someone's past to this extent. All very interesting to scholars I am sure, but for myself I would rather have bought the builders model of the Kaizermarine Submarine U-1 built by Fried Krupp sold earlier this month by Christie's; 66 inches long it's far too large for the bath but a thing of beauty nevertheless.
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