Droit de Suite: a new dawn?
When we wake up on 1 January 2012, the Artist’s Resale Right scheme will have been extended beyond living artists, to give the estates of artists who have died in the last 70 years a percentage (on average 2.5%) of works sold on the secondary market. This means that many recent sales – such as that of ‘The Railway Platform’ by LS Lowry (1887-1976) that sold for £1.1m at Sotheby’s on 15 November – would have netted the heirs up to a maximum of €12,500, as would any other sales from the Lowry show presently on at a major Bond Street gallery.
Yet, as we have seen in France, where the full extent of Droit de Suite has long been in force, it is the larger estates that stand to gain most: a 1996 survey found that 70% of all French resale funds went to just seven artists, including – unsurprisingly – Picasso and Matisse.
In this country, the likelihood is that Moore, Bacon, Freud and co will reap the lion’s share of the benefits, while the smaller dealers and auction houses, who will have to administer these extra levies for the most part, may simply pass the costs on to buyers. A sore New Year’s headache for some, but a welcome tonic for others. If you have any concerns about this scheme then don’t hesitate to contact someone at Seymours.
London eye on Pipilotti Rist
Amid the autumn season madness it was hard to find moments of sanity, a feeling wonderfully summed up by a tiny video work in the Hayward’s enjoyably immersive Pipilotti Rist retrospective, ‘Eyeball Massage’. Only those who stopped and stooped to look and listen would have seen or heard Rist’s plaintive cries coming from a miniscule screen embedded in the floor: ‘Help Me! Ayudame! Aidez moi!’, she screamed in various languages. ‘Selfless in the Bath of Lava’ shows the naked, leaping artist stuck in a private, fiery Hades, but her exuberance makes it a strangely welcoming and intimate encounter, one that can be shared simply by visiting PS1 in New York, where Rist is permanently holed up in the lobby’s floorboards.
‘Eyeball Massage’ at the Hayward Gallery ends on 8 January 2012.
Who's afraid of Andy Warhol?
Now that the Andy Warhol Authentication Board has announced it is to dissolve in January, will we suddenly see a flood of below par screenprints and pseudo-memorabilia flooding the market as newly discovered originals? And what of existing pieces in authentication limbo? ‘We need to do what Andy wanted us to do,’ was the Foundation’s reasoning, in continuing with the 20-year task of finishing his catalogue raisonné, rather than spending further sums on courtroom wranglings. The busy market for Warhol will have to self-regulate from now on, just as it always has been for the work of most other artists. Any piece being researched or bought needs to be carefully sourced and any provenance claims treated with due diligence – these are, of course, specialities of Seymours that our clients rely on before making any purchasing decisions. Just as important to remember is Warhol’s simple and telling reply, when asked what Pop art was all about: ‘It’s liking things’.
Market focus: don't dismiss prints
A lack of uniqueness combined with a seemingly endless supply might suggest that the market for limited-edition prints is a non-starter – merely a cost-efficient way of getting art on walls. However, when Picasso’s etching of ‘La Femme Qui Pleure I’ sold in a Christie’s evening sale in New York at the beginning of November for over $5m (over £3.2m) it wasn’t just an auction record that was broken, but a few longstanding collecting taboos went out of the window too. Although Picasso’s 4,000-strong print portfolio makes him a rare case (and the ‘Minotaur Machie’ being the only other work to command six-figures), the demand and scholarship for limited-editions should not be underestimated, nor should their ability to bring along new and younger buyers. Certainly, Seymours has helped clients to amass print portfolios as part of their collections.
One example of prints coming out of the shadows can be found at a new venue for exhibitions in Windsor near Miami in Florida, backed by the Weston family and curated for three years by London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The first show, opened during Art Basel Miami Beach, is dedicated to a series of screenprints by Beatriz Milhazes, who is better known as a painter. Their graphic shapes and dazzling colours, however, make them a perfect vehicle for the Brazilian artist’s evocations of Samba music and Tropicalia, while proving that editioned prints need not be relegated to the back rooms of shows. Further ground will be broken in this regard when David Hockney unveils his enormous iPad inkjet prints in the main galleries of the Royal Academy in January.
Preview: Nicholson/Mondrian in Parallel
Amid the brewing brouhaha of the Cultural Olympiad and all things 2012-related, a fascinating smaller show opening in February has yet to hit the headlines. ‘In Parallel’ at the Courtauld Institute looks to be an intriguing pairing of Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson, firm enough friends for the Dutchman to flee Paris and the rumblings of war in 1938, for the leafy artist’s suburb of Hampstead – where he joined the likes of Henry Moore, Naum Gabo and Nicholson’s future wife, Barbara Hepworth. The exhibition will aim to show a mutual push and pull of artistic influence between Mondrian and Nicholson, both of whose clean abstract lines and compositions paved the way for a refined style of high modernism in European painting. They also shared a love of jazz music, an obsession that would serve Mondrian well after he moved to New York, where he suddenly felt the ‘urge’ to move – coincidentally not long after an unexploded bomb landed perilously close to his beloved London studio. Had he stayed here more than those two years, however, he might not have died from pneumonia in 1944, neglected and alone in a faraway land.
‘Mondrian/Nicholson: In Parallel’ is at the Courtauld Institute, 16 Feb-20 May 2012
