Sale-rooms
Tin soldiers and naked ladies
Alistair McAlpine
The sale-room results this summer, like the British summer weather, have been a bit mixed. Prices were in free fall at Christie's sales of Impressionist and Mod- ern Paintings. At one sale only 29 of 49 expensive works were bought and at a later one a Francis Bacon study of Pope Inno- cent X after Velazquez failed to raise a bid. Considering the importance of Francis Bacon's series of Pope paintings, the reserve put on this one for £2 million did not seem to me out of the way. The last one sold in 1991 for £1.98 million, and the record auction price for such a picture was £3.61 million in New York in 1980.
However, the market in lead soldiers seems quite brisk. The art market is not a single entity moving up or down en bloc. It is a mass of different sectors which com- mand the affection of different types of collectors whose pockets vary in depth. Thus the collector who might bid for a Francis Bacon is highly unlikely to compete against a collector of children's toys. He would not battle to the death to acquire a mechanical walking elephant or Salvation Army band in lead. Nor would he particu- larly want a tin clockwork mediaeval wan- dering music-playing minstrel known as a `blondin'. These sort of toys are much rarer than, say, a small painting by Renoir of a plump lady without her clothes on. The market in Renoirs depends on fash- ion and a fall in that market merely means that speculators have lost their money. The market in toys depends on the enthusiasm of collectors and when the market drops collectors have a field day. But the report- ing of the different fortunes of toys and impressionist paintings is very different. The failure of a tin soldier to sell, — howev- er rare it may be — will go unnoticed: a Van Gogh that doesn't sell will be headline news.
Christie's recently offered items suitable to grown up children in a category some- where between mechanical elephants and Renoirs. These childish items loved by adults included some original illustrations by Beatrix Potter. Similar lots were sold recently at a sale in Salisbury where a rare first edition of the 1901 Peter Rabbit book fetched £25,000 and 28 illustrated letters fetched £304,000. At this auction the auc- tioneer munched carrots all the way through the bidding, and with the art market in a volatile state this may have been what brought the high prices.
In what are still troubled times the best advice that I can give a collector today is to throw nothing away. Keep your children's toys, books and your old clothes. Perhaps you should keep even your dishwashers and vacuum cleaners, and most certainly your old television sets. In August, Sotheby's will display a collection of 85 television sets in their Bond Street show rooms. They will be showing an extremely rare one made in 1930 called the 'Baird': a futuristic domed one from the 1970s and, amongst other exotic items, the first domestic video recorder made in 1966. The truth of the matter is that you can collect almost any- thing and when another follows your exam- ple you have a market.
But collecting has more hazards than just the risk of financial loss. Mr Tony Devlin who collects cards that 'ladies of the night' leave in telephone kiosks discovered this when he exhibited his collection recently in London. The exhibition was extremely pop- ular until a lady with a chain saw turned up and set upon the exhibits.
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