Lyon & Turnbull

Avant Garde : Art from 1890 to Now

Sale number: 743&nbsp; This dynamic new auction – combining paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photography and prints – seeks to encapsulate avant-garde spirit in art in the 20th &amp; 21st Centuries – from the beginnings of Modernism through to the incredibly diverse world of Contemporary Art today. &nbsp;The sale is truly global - featuring work from Britain, Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East – and includes works by both established names and new discoveries.&nbsp;The sale offered 63 works from some of the most progressive art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.&nbsp; The highlight of the sale was Mädchen Mit Katze (Girl with Cat) (1942) painted by Polish artist Jankel Adler (1895-1949) when he was in exile in Britain during the Second World War. Adler was very much part of the German avant-garde in the 20s and 30s, before his work was declared “degenerate” by the Nazis. His arrival in Britain injected real-world experience of European Modernism into a British art scene often reliant on catching the latest movements second-hand.&nbsp;&nbsp;Mädchen Mit Katze was selected for reproduction in Stanley William Hayter’s 1948 monograph on Adler, by which time it had been acquired by the collector Peter Watson, an important patron of the arts at a time when many artists struggled to make ends meet, whose collection of British and European Modern and Contemporary art was second to none. The painting had an estimate of £50,000 - 80,000 but led the series when it took £105,200*.&nbsp;&nbsp;One of the major ‘discoveries’ in this sale was a prime period work by British proto-Surrealist John Tunnard (1900-1971). The meticulously painted gouache on paper - Composition, 1947 - was acquired by the vendor’s father directly from the artist in the 1960s and had not been seen in public since. Likely painted during the Second World War and finished just after, this other-worldly landscape combining futuristic structures with ancient megaliths is one of just 13 known gouaches dated 1947. Of a similar style and quality to others held in American museum collections, it is generated plenty of interest at its guide of £30,000 - £50,000 and sold for £42,700*.&nbsp;&nbsp;Continuing the theme of ‘rediscoveries’, the sale also included a drawing by Amedeo Modigliani, on the market for the first time in 91 years – which sold for £50,200*. The delicate pencil sketch of a girl had all the hallmarks of Modigliani’s style – the face reduced to an elemental minimum, inspired by both African masks and Cycladic figures, with beautiful almond-shaped eyes, left empty. The drawing was originally in the collection of the Modern British painter Christopher ‘Kit’ Wood, who first visited Paris in 1920, just a few months after Modigliani had died. Wood later sold the drawing to his London dealer, Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery - at the time the place to go for contemporary European art. In 1932 the dealer sold this drawing to a private collector: it had remained in the same family ever since.&nbsp;

Simon Hucker | Modern British Art Auction Specialist

Buy & Sell at Modern British Art Auctions

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Art from 1890 to Now

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Lyon & Turnbull | Online Auction Specialists  

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The Bird

Les Toits, Gerberoy, August 1936

Paysage

Personnage autour de la cheminée, c.1912

Le Parc Vénitien, c.1890

La Mère de l’artiste tenant une bouteille et une carafe à bout de bras, c.1891-93

At the Races, c.1930

Head of a Girl 

Blast Furnace, 1948

Street in Auteuil

Premonition of Life, 1958

Portrait, 1960 

Abstract Composition (Opus 153), 1947

Mädchen mit Katze (Girl with Cat), 1942

Working Drawing for Four Standing Figures (Cramer 323), 1973

Trial Proof for Three Sculptural Forms, from La Poésie (Cramer, 320), 1973

Upright Motive, Maquette No. 1, 1955

Composition, 1947

In an Old Book (from Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from Constantine Cavafy), 1966-67 (Tokyo 52)

Untitled, c.1990s

Nude with Pitcher and Plant, c.1940s

Lovers, c.1950s

Liberty, 2008

Composizione, 1960

Linear Still Life Suite - Drawing IV, 1973

Marigold, Crimson and Ultramarine, September 1968, 1968

River Daemon, 1960

Fish Charm No. 3, 1965

Untitled, 1979

Watercolour II, 1992

Relief with Prisms, 1960

Composition No. 2, 1965

A Book of Silk Screen Prints: Multiple Panel Paintings, 1973-1976, 1992

The Clown [a], 1977

4 Flags for Organisations, 1978

Study with Yellow, 1969

Face Value, 2002

Linked Black Blocks, 2013

Parallel Curves, 1999

Raphael et la Fornarina - Plate 309 from series 347, 1968

Wally's Diner, 1982

New Ways in History 2, 1966

Tara, 2015

Three Mirrors, 2001/4

Not a Knot, 2001/2

We Live All Night, 1998/99

Ann Blinking, 2007

Swingeing London 67, 1968

Artist's Hand (A Study in Perspective), 2017

NYC 3 (My Brother's Garden), 2002

Tara, Wales, 1997 (printed 2000)

Untitled, 1999-2000

Avant Garde

Art from 1890 to Now | 743

Simon Hucker

Modern British Art

Jankel Adler