Banksy always draws a crowd. Last night, some 500 people crammed into Sotheby’s to see how his 2005 painting, Crude Oil (Vettriano), would perform in the auction house’s annual March evening auction of Modern and contemporary works in London. Art world outsiders could have been forgiven for thinking the market was booming once again.
Banksy’s acerbic remix of Jack Vettriano's whimsical, limitlessly reproduced beach scene, The Singing Butler (the original painting of which Sotheby’s sold for £744,800 in 2004), with added hazmat-overalled figures dealing with an oil spill in the background, had been entered for sale by Mark Hoppus, the frontman of the American rock band blink-182. Coincidentally, Vettriano had died in Nice on the weekend prior to the sale, aged 73.
The audience’s hopes of seeing a Banksy auction fireworks moment didn’t really materialise. Despite Sotheby’s slick marketing campaign and the announcement that cryptocurrency payments would be accepted, three online bidders and at least one on the telephone were only prepared to push the price up to £4.3m (with fees), well within the estimate of £3m-£5m (estimates are calculated without fees). The result was met with muted applause.
Lisa Brice, After Embah
Courtesy of Sotheby's
Sotheby’s evening Modern and contemporary sale contained just 38 offered lots (a 1995 Gerhard Richter abstract estimated at £5m-£7m was one of three withdrawals). There was no “The Now” section, devoted to works by the market’s latest, most in-demand names and a shortage of high quality inventory was reflected in Sotheby’s blocking off some of its gallery space at the view.
Holding an international art auction during a global geopolitical crisis was clearly going to be a challenge. Sotheby’s final total of £62.5m (with fees), while containing some encouragingly bullish individual results and almost achieving its revised £66.6m (without fees) upper estimate, did little to suggest a significant mood-shift in a stubbornly bearish art market. The proceeds were 24% down on the £82.2m (with fees) Sotheby’s raised from the 60 lots of its equivalent Modern and contemporary sale in London last March and 54% lower than its sale in 2023.
“Sotheby's had an uphill battle to get consignments when faced with the fee structure situation. But all and any consignments are hard won in London these days,” says the London-based art adviser, Morgan Long, referring to the auction house’s recent attempt to introduce fixed sellers’ charges, which it has now revised, and the desire among many consignors to sell in New York or Paris, rather than London, in the aftermath of Brexit.
Max Ernst, Moonmad
Courtesy of Sotheby's
The monumental 2018 canvas, After Embah, by the admired London-based South African painter Lisa Brice was the surprise of the night. This surreal evocation of a seedy bar, mashing references to famous paintings of women by Édouard Manet with the image of the Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj in a defiant pose was a mesmerising challenge to the complacencies of the male gaze.
Estimated at £1m-£1.5m, this triggered a protracted bidding duel between a woman in the room and a telephone client, the latter finally prevailing at £5.4m (with fees), a record for the artist. Another version of the same Brice composition had sold for a record $3.2m in 2021.
“I could see it making £2.5m, but not £5.4m. It only takes two bidders,” says the London-based dealer Offer Waterman. ‘It’s daring. It deals with today’s issues and the 19th century’s issues. It’s a fantastic painting.”
Sotheby’s other stand-out was Yoshitomo Nara’s large 2005 painting, Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake), which was being offered in London three months before a major retrospective of the Japanese artist’s works at the Hayward Gallery. This eerily stylised image of a young girl semi-submerged in milk was distinguished by the spectacularly extra-terrestrial colouration of of the subject’s eyes. Estimated at £6m-£8m, this was pushed by two telephone bidders to a sale-topping price of £9m (with fees). According to Artprice, it was the 13th-highest auction price paid for Nara, who has been a long-standing staple of the top-end of the international art market.
“The galactic quality of those eyes stopped people in their tracks,” says Tom Eddison, Sotheby’s co-head of contemporary art in London. “People are still willing to buy great works of art.”
Yoshitomo Nara, Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake)
Courtesy of Sotheby's
Among the other works to attract sustained competition were the 1956 Max Ernst bronze sculpture, Moonmad, which, thanks to its market-freshness and distinguished provenance, was pursued by six bidders to £2.1m (with fees) against a low estimate of £600,000, and Alberto Burri‘s impressively large, prime-period Sacco e Nero 3 mixed media painting from 1955, which took £4.9m (with fees) against a low estimate of £2.5m after competition from at least three telephone bidders.
Eddison admits that sourcing high-quality works has become a challenge for international auctions in post-Brexit London. “You get thorns in your shoes, you grow callouses and crack on,” he says.
This week's London series of Modern and contemporary auctions continues with evening sales at Christie’s and Phillips. “If the geopolitical situation were more stable, these sales would be doing a lot better,” said Waterman, the London dealer, last night as he left Sotheby’s opening event.