Modern British Art

STAYING topical but putting a comic slant on events, an exhibition of original artwork for cartoons relating to financial and political crises will be a feature of The Watercolour & Drawings Fair next February.

A Mary Fedden watercolour is among the items for sale on the philanthropic auction site www.buyoncegivetwice.co.uk

DESPITE falling stocks, banks freezing and now top-end contemporary art taking a tumble, Samuel John Peploe's (1871-1935) Roses sold at £440,000 hammer to a UK private buyer at Christie's Scottish art sale in Edinburgh. With premium included, this was a record for a Scottish Colourist, although not a hammer record.

The Lenkiewicz Foundation have exposed two fake Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002) portraits after they were seen advertised for sale on a dealer's website. The dealer immediately withdrew the two paintings, a self-portrait and Study of Lisa Stokes, once contacted by the foundation.

The largest ever retrospective exhibition of the work of popular Modern British painter Edward Seago (1910-1974) will be held from September 8-19 at the Bond Street dealers Colnaghi, who represented the artist in his heyday.

A MAJOR loan exhibition of early works by Lucian Freud (b.1922) will run from October 9 to December 12 at the St James’s gallery of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1.

SOME 13 telephone bidders made their presence felt at a recent sale at Lawrences in Crewkerne, Somerset, as they turned out to compete for seven iconic 20th century prints by artists from the Grosvenor School of Art.

If Bonhams' July 2 sale of 20th century British art is anything to go by, demand for the humorous art of Beryl Cook (1926-2008) has strengthened since she died in May.

Christie’s English furniture day on June 18 was marked by the £9m auction of a dozen pieces of top-flight examples and by the 369-lot £13.6m sale of the collection of the late Simon Sainsbury.

TWO very different scenes of cricket matches in progress sold recently at very different locations. The artists themselves could also hardly be more contrasting: Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and L.S. Lowry (1887-1976).

There was high drama at Christie's latest decorative arts sale in London, when half the £3.1m total came from this Glasgow school panel by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, which sold to an American collector for £1.5m (plus premium).

“THE high point of my career,” was how auctioneer John Anderson described his most recent sale. He had waited 30 years but finally got the chance to offer the Lionel Jacobson collection at Anderson & Garland on March 11-13.

Six works hooked off wall and reeled in through barred window

Scottish auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull started off their year on January 10 with the sale of the Deloitte Art Collection at The Royal Academy in London.

THE 102-year-old Welsh artist Stanley Lewis (b.1905) is trying to locate the current whereabouts of his painting of The Crosyceilliog Blacksmiths.

Gagosian’s bid gives Sotheby’s new heart

FOUR men have been bailed until Ferbruary 25 next year following the police investigation into the theft of five L.S. Lowry paintings.

Following the announcement in August of a newly-discovered 1938 fairground scene by Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976) scheduled to appear at Sotheby’s on December 13, it has emerged that the scene depicted is not, in fact, Beswick Fair, near Manchester, as had been mooted.

In 1914, Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was living in Cornwall and enjoying the most fertile period of her career.

Just a month after their most successful sale ever, thanks to the consignment of an archive of Francis Bacon’s work, Woking auctioneers Ewbank’s have won another Bacon collection.