In October 2022, Christie’s set the world auction record for L.S. Lowry with the £7.8 million acquisition of a painting titled Going to the Match by the Lowry Museum in Salford. The lot was presented alongside a catalogue that brought a combined turnover of £26.9 million.
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Equal success was achieved once again with this month’s round of Modern British & Irish Art sales (21-22 March), which achieved a combined £24.3 million across the evening and day auctions. Highlights included Barbara Hepworth’s rare sculpture Pierced Form (Toledo), which led the sale with a hammer price of £3,522,000. Hepworth, from the St Ives group, drew strong bidding in the room alongside fellow artists Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Henry Moore.
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A new record was also set for Wyndham Lewis, whose painting Protraction achieved £107,100. The piece was offered as part of the largest group of Vorticist art ever presented to the market, which included artists David Bomberg, William Roberts, Lawrence Atkinson, and John Duncan Fergusson, who all achieved either world records or records in the medium for works on paper.
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A group of paintings by L.S. Lowry emphasised once again the appeal of the Lancashire-born artist to collectors, with two works selling for above a million. David Hockney, an unmissable presence in British auctions, also achieved strong results.
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Sotheby’s edition of Made in Britain (8-14 March) also celebrated the best Modern British Art. Among the highest estimates, two quintessentially British artists achieved high sums, with an edition of Chris Levine’s portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II (Lightness of Being, 2008) hammered down for £50,800 and an iPad drawing by David Hockney (No. 643, 2011) achieving the same price. Anish Kapoor, Keith Vaughan, Alan Davie, Alfred Wallis and Henry Moore were also noteworthy highlights.
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A relative surprise result of this edition was Maggi Hambling (b. 1945), who is best known for her sculptures, but achieved the highest price of the auction with her abstract painting titled Wall of Water (2014-2015), which was sold for £69,850, against an original estimate of £30,000 - 50,000.
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A few of the sculptures by equally-known British artists in the catalogue did not have the same luck, however, with some of the higher-priced pieces by Kenneth Armitage and Dame Elizabeth Frink going unsold. British studio ceramics, on the other hand, saw strong results thanks to the usual suspects – Dame Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Emmanuel Cooper, John Ward and Edmund de Waal all seemed popular with collectors. Photography seemed to have gained the favour of collectors, too, with strong features by Terry O’Neill, Mike Figgis, and Hiro.
See also: Ceramics 101: British Studio Pottery
Overall, the market for Modern British and Irish Art has proven to be relatively resilient, with 20th-21st century artists from pioneering movements increasingly being recognised on both the domestic and international art scene for their contribution to Modern Art.
