Sale-rooms
Learning to hustle
Alistair McAlpine
The last two years have been hard ones for the sale-rooms. No longer do the own- ers of masterpieces rush there to dispose of them — for two reasons. The first is that there are far fewer masterpieces about, as so many of them have already been sold. For the last 30 years the number of the World's museums has multiplied and their aggressive buying has greatly reduced the availability of what might even loosely be called masterpieces. The second reason is that generally prices in the sale-rooms are clown, so that it is difficult to tempt owners of masterpieces to offer them for sale at the moment The risk is too great. . 'Burned' is a word much used in dealing circles these days. It is the expression attached to an unsold lot that was expected to fetch a high price. In order to prosper the sale-rooms have to change their tactics, and one of the first auction houses to address this problem is Bonhams. They !lave sought to make inroads into the col- 1,ectors market, which surprisingly is still it)gging along. They have already held sales c',f scent bottles and theatrical costumes; on 18 February they are having a sale of Carved picture frames and on 19 February of vintage fountain pens. Part of that sale is a collection of Mont Blanes from the mid- 1920s to the late 1950s. One of Bonhams' more unusual ideas is to allow prospective Purchasers of lots in their sale of modern ste°1-ting guns on 6 April to try out any gun at catches their fancy. Just laying the goods on green baize tables and expecting t,he customers to trample each other to eraith trying to buy them does not work kthese days. If you want to sell goods, you "aye to hustle, and Bonhams are certainly doing that. i 1-asl year they had a very successful sell- ng exhibition of decorative arts, and this sear they are trying it again. It opens on 24 iannary and the quality of this year's offer- _ng Is generally far better, with a number of crstablished names exhibiting, including ..,.°111 Dixon, John Makepiece, Mark Bra- `ler Jones and others. But by far the most 'tkitstanding piece is by Danny Lane: a glass able with six legs, it is quite wonderful, PerhaPs 'a masterpiece'.
No 73A in the exhibition is a 'space stor- age unit' by Jonathan Hoad. I love it, but why on earth did he have to call it a space storage unit? Does the title indicate that this piece of furniture is used by astronauts to store useful bits and pieces while travel- ling in space, or perhaps it is for astronauts to store their space memorabilia in? Why must people invent new names or, worse still, use old words for new purposes?
Take the word 'chair'. I would expect to find many chairs in this exhibition and I did. Amongst the best of them is one by Rupert Williamson (No 80A). A chair is an object for sitting on, not a person of inde- terminate sex who conducts a meeting: that is a chairwoman or a chairman. Why, as Alice said, do we no longer say what we mean? In any event, there can be no confu- sion over tables, not yet anyway, though I have little doubt that there are numerous committees working on this in the munici- pal offices of our land. Andrea Stemmer and Fiona Sharp are particularly good at making tables, or so the example in the exhibition leads me to believe. No 68A is a set of display shelves also by Stemmer and Sharp and well worth taking the trouble to look at. Bonhams are cleverly following this selling exhibition with a sale of classic 20th-century furniture and design.
It would be almost criminal after writing about British furniture design not to men- tion that in Christie's sale of 19th- and 20th-century posters on 4 February, lot 71 is a poster for the Glasgow Institute of the Arts by Rennie Mackintosh, estimate £30,000. This sale also offers a number of posters made for various railway companies before nationalisation. The most beautiful of these is of ICnockholt Beaches, by Harold Sandys Williamson for London General Transport (lot 82). Included in this lot are three other London General Trans- port posters by Clive Gardiner, estimated to fetch £400. That seems very good value. It will be interesting to see how this sale goes, for a large number of very good qual- ity posters are on offer covering such sub- jects as the circus, theatre and travel, often at modest estimates.
For those stuck without a valentine for 14 February, both Christie's and Phillip's are selling them on 9 February: 500 at Phillip's and over 1,000 at Christie's.
'OK. Now smile, though your heart is breaking.'
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