MODERN MADE

MODERN MADE Sees New Generation of Contemporary Craft Buyers 

Lyon & Turnbull

13 November 2024

A group of carefully assembled private collections brought the very best in 20th and 21st century art, design and crafts to our Autumn 2024  MODERN MADE auction at the Mall Galleries in London on 31 October 31 & 01 November. The Autumn staging of the popular mixed media sale boasted landmark prices in different collecting disciplines from post-war Italian design to paintings from the Modern British canon.

The sale consolidated our position as market leaders in sale of modern and contemporary crafts at auction. Co-Head of Sale Philip Smith was “particularly pleased to see a new generation of contemporary craft buyers engaging in the market.”

MODERN MADE: Modern, Post-War & Contemporary Art, Design, Craft and Studio Ceramics

Explore the results of our Autumn 2024 edition of MODERN MADE.

VIEW THE AUCTION RESULTS

CHAIN OF TEARS FOR 'WEEPING WOMAN' NECKLACE, 1998

Wendy Ramshaw

A seminal piece of jewellery by legendary British maker Wendy Ramshaw (1939-2018) sold at £3,780. The glass and steel Weeping Woman  necklace was one of a four jewels shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London in 1998 that were inspired by Picasso paintings of Dora Maar.

View the Lot

The necklace comes for sale at a time when Ramshaw’s pieces are attracting increasing attention on the secondary market. Her seven-piece silver ring set from 1973-81 including five rings set with cabochon hardstones raced away from the £700-1000 guide to bring £5,544.

The necklace was part of a selection of top-drawer contemporary crafts from the £48,000 collection of ‘A Private Aficionado’ that opened the sale. Turning the spotlight on the remarkable works of emerging British silversmiths, it included pieces by Kevin Grey (Sinew Black Vase, 2010 sold for £3,402) and Graham Stewart (Footed Bowl, 1993 sold for £2,520).

International competition drove a set of eight ‘Trine II’ armchairs by John Makepeace well over expectations to £32,701. Each numbered and inscribed under seat and named for the Makepeace craftsman James Ralph, these were fashioned in alternate laminated layers of yew and 5,000-year-old bog oak and had been acquired directly from the maker in July 2001.

GREEN STREET ARMCHAIR, DESIGNED 1984

Gaetano Pesce

A cache of works by the Italian architect, artist and designer Gaetano Pesce (1939-2024) came for sale from the photographer and graphic designer Steve Allison (b.1948). Allison, an integral part of Cardiff’s theatre, dance and music scene since the 1970s, has collected Pesce’s work for many years.

VIEW THE LOT

The first tranche of his collection was sold with great success in our Spring 2024 edition of MODERN MADE.

This Part II sale totalled a further £101,215 and included more of Pesce’s best-known interior furnishings from the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties. The injection moulded resin Green Street armchair designed in 1984 sold at £7,560 while a rare aluminium and resin prototype for a light by O Sole Mio took £8,190.

Italian post-war and contemporary design is a core element of Modern Made sales. Further highlights included a glass and nickel-plated brass model 2088 chandelier designed c.1959 by Max Ingrand for Fontana Arte (£13,860) and the eye-catching large Claire de Lune Totem, designed around 1988 for Mirabili by Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) sold for £17,640. Standing an impressive 1.90m high on its wooden base, the wood, metal and glazed ceramic sculpture was one made outside the original edition of 29.

A masterwork from the Scandinavian furniture movement, Finn Juhl’s 1945 teak and upholstery model no. NV45 armchair sold for £15,372, while sold for £20,160 was one of the best-known designs by Gerald Summers (1899-1967), his c.1933-34 armchair made from a single sheet of birch plywood.

ARMCHAIR, DESIGNED 1934

Gerald Summers for Makers of Simple Furniture

Summers had the ingenious vision to construct a chair that would require no joins and create very little waste, relying instead on simple incisions and mould bending.

VIEW THE LOT

Sold at £4,536 was a circular folding dining table made by Summers’ Simple Furniture workshop for the Modernist show home at the Frinton Park estate planned by the architect Oliver Hill. The piece was featured in the October 1935 issue of The English Home magazine.

Like so much of British inter-war design, Summers’ work was largely forgotten by the market until the advent of the 21st century. However, L&T’s sale of a £205,000 private collection of his work in 2023 has contributed to a change in both appreciation and commercial values.

Another currently ‘hot’ name is the French sculptor and goldsmith Goudji (1941-). On the heels of the artist’s first major Parisian retrospective held in 2023, a pair of silver candlesticks with several signature motifs – inlaid blue agate and zoomorphic decoration – raced away from estimate to sell for £18,900.

Works by Ivon Hitchens, David Jones and Winifred Nicholson meant this year’s autumn sale turned the spotlight on the influential Seven and Five Society. The London based group, created in 1919 by seven painters and five sculptors, was originally intended to encompass conservative artistic sensibilities. Instead, ‘hijacked’ by a coterie of young artists, it became the most exciting British art group of its day.

SUMMER'S DAY, 1925

David Jones

Two prime period works by David Jones (1895-1974) came from a UK private collection. Jones is best known as a writer - his magnum opus, In Parenthesis is one of the most important texts inspired by the First World War – but considered himself as an artist first.

VIEW THE LOT

Both in his chosen medium of pencil and watercolour on paper, On the Tow Path (1926) and Summer’s Day (1925) date from the period when the artist was an active participant in Seven and Five exhibitions. They sold at £11,970 and £25,200 respectively with Summer’s Day secured by Brecknock Museum, y Gaer run by Powys County Council. The purchase was fully funded by Brecknock Art Trust and the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund. 

Two paintings by Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) – a key member of the group in its most fertile years – were completed three decades apart on the Hebridean island of Eigg. Both come by descent from the artist’s oldest son, the designer Jake (Jacob) Nicholson (1927-2003).

Winifred painted Sound of Rum from Bay of Laig, Isle of Eigg (£18,900) shortly after her first visit to the island with the poet Kathleen Raine in 1950. The bay on Eigg’s west coast commands fine views over the sea to Rum, whose Cuillin peaks are painted here emerging from diaphanous clouds.

RHODODENDRONS, EIGG (PINK RHODODENDRONS), 1980

Winifred Nicholson

Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) Rhododendrons, Eigg (Pink Rhododendrons), (£31,451) was a product of Winifred’s final working trip to Eigg taken with her daughter, the artist Kate Nicholson (1929-2019) in May 1980. They stayed in the Gamekeeper’s Cottage, the highest house on the island, with panoramic views across the sea to the mainland. This flower painting, infused with colour and joy, is one of a series of prismatic oils, painted with the aid of a glass prism Nicholson had recently acquired.

VIEW THE LOT

Both Eigg paintings were included in the National Galleries of Scotland touring exhibition Winifred Nicholson in Scotland (2003-04) and were recently on long-loan to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney.

BLUE RIVER, 1932

Ivon Hitchens

Founder member Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979), who stayed with the society until it disbanded in 1935, transformed his art during this period. Sold at £35,201, Blue River from 1932 perfectly encapsulates Hitchens’ work of the early 1930s: a painting with many references to European modernism that hints at his more abstracted vision of the English landscape that would arrive at the end of the decade.

VIEW THE LOT

The painting came for sale from the Hampstead flat of influential photographer Dorothy Bohm (1924-2023) who died last year at the age of 98. Her collection sold for a total of £82,000.

Examples of Bohm’s own work spanned more than half a century of observing and experimentation from Approach to the Castle, Lisbon, 1963 (£1,386) to the poetic works made from the 1980s when Bohm returned to colour photography. Sold at £882 each were Marseilles, Window in the Musee Des Beaux Arts, October 1989 and Provence, November 1991.

STILL LIFE - PEBBLES, c.1980-82

Dorothy Bohm

Still life – Pebbles c. 1980-82 will be joining the Kettle's Yard collection in Cambridge after selling for £630. This still life shows the first of many careful constellations of objects in the house that was the home of Jim and Helen Ede between 1957 and 1973.

VIEW THE LOT

As key figure in the founding of The Photographer’s Gallery in London in 1971 - Britain’s first public gallery dedicated to the medium – Bohm was able to form a substantial collection of the work of others she admired. Her considerable holdings included prints of Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s 1933 study of the girl in traditional Mexican costume, Daughter of the Dancers(£4,536) and Andre Kertesz’s 1939 Melancholic Tulip, New York (£5,544).

AN EGYPTIAN PERSPECTIVE, 1936-39

Lee Miller

Bohm also owned one of only three presentation sets of An Egyptian Perspective by the US photojournalist Lee Miller (1907-1977). Taken in 1936-39 and published in 2007 by her son Anthony Penrose, these six gelatin silver prints sold for £5,040.

VIEW THE LOT

Having arrived on these shores as a 14-year-old refugee from Lithuania in 1939, Bohm belonged to the generation of artists and writers who lit up British culture in the post-war period.

Among her contemporaries was the doyenne of the British studio ceramics movement Lucie Rie (1902-95). Two textbook porcelain pieces from a UK private collection led the contemporary ceramics: a footed bowl, c. 1980 decorated in a yellow glaze with manganese rim sold at £25,200 while a manganese and blue vase with two bands of sgraffito achieved £12,600.

31 October & 01 November 2024

MODERN MADE

VIEW THE AUCTION RESULTS