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There is a telling scenario hidden in the collected letters of the novelist Bruce Chatwin, who in the early 1960s was a fresh-faced expert at Sotheby’s in London. Having arranged the sale of a small panel by Fra Angelico at auction in 1960, Chatwin then advises the consignor to sell his other panel privately. With a simple switch from Sotheby’s letterhead to his own stationery, we sense him shunting his employer out of the deal.
That subtle subterfuge was indicative of a larger free-for-all in the postwar art scene, as James Stourton describes with considerable wit and pace in Rogues and Scholars. Stourton, a former UK chair of Sotheby’s and the biographer of art historian Kenneth Clark, details an arena in which conflicts of interest were as common as mediocre watercolours. His book also acts as an origin story for the momentous results — and shady intrigues — exhibited in the art world today.
In the years immediately following the second world war, London’s art market was still an inconspicuous gentlemen’s club, frequented by learned collectors, a network of well-connected dealers and slow-moving specialists at the clearing houses of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. That all changed, explains Stourton, on the evening of October 15 1958, when Sotheby’s enigmatic new chair Peter Wilson auctioned the Goldschmidt Collection of seven Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in a gala black-tie evening auction.
The event made auctions glamorous — Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and Margot Fonteyn were sitting in the audience — and headline-grabbing: reporters queued down New Bond Street alongside aristocrats and tycoons to see the hammer fall on a series of auction records.
Wilson, a chancer with an impeccable feel for the times, understood the value of marketing and celebrity endorsement. A former intelligence officer, he was rumoured — improbably on both counts — to be the inspiration for James Bond as well as the “fifth man” in the Cambridge spy ring.
He is just one of many piquant characters in this fascinating history: Mr Dent, a scruffy collector with a two-guinea budget, strolled through salerooms offering toffee apples to staff; meanwhile Patrick Lindsay, head of Christie’s Old Masters department, liked to land his Spitfire on the lawn when arriving to take a country house sale.
While the warring duopoly of Sotheby’s and Christie’s forms the dramatic spine of Stourton’s narrative, it is the chapters on the opaque realm of dealers and gallerists that reveal the psychology of those in thrall to fine art and antiques. “Galleries were prey to timewasters, nutcases and fraudsters, some simply wanting to say they had a better one at home,” writes Stourton.
On Bond Street, the two mid-century grandee dealers in traditional pictures were Agnew’s and Colnaghi. The former was run by Geoffrey Agnew, described as a “bluff figure, and a bit of a monster to boot.” His counterpart at Colnaghi was James Byam Shaw, considered “the ideal of the scholar-dealer.” The pair represented the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the masterpiece trade.
Around the corner on Cork Street, a market in modern pictures emerged, promoting artists such as Henry Moore and Lucian Freud. Here the rogue was the Marlborough Gallery, notorious for poaching successful artists from other galleries. “It’s a bit like stealing a patent,” noted one aggrieved party. Meanwhile, a tense relationship between dealers and auction houses simmered, with auctioneers taking “chandelier” bids from imaginary buyers and dealers conspiring in “rings” to undermine the auction process.
Stourton traces several seismic shifts in taste over the decades, from the ascendancy of the Impressionists through to the rise of contemporary art and the arrival of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, via trends for Victoriana and antiquities. Detours into the collecting areas of silver, furniture, porcelain and tribal art provide a broader context for the landmark spectacles in the market for pictures.
The author’s wry prose livens up an arcane subject. His survey is illuminating — for the most part — as well as erudite and amusing. Its one slight failing comes in the final chapters when he addresses two scandals at Sotheby’s during his own tenure: the sale of smuggled artworks and, later, the price-fixing collusion with Christie’s that nearly destroyed both companies. The treading here is careful. There are no new revelations.
However, Stourton succeeds in capturing the enduring allure of a largely unregulated and mercurial market, one populated with go-betweens and fixers and peppered with beautiful things. A combination that is both its charm and its flaw.
Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945-2000 by James Stourton Head of Zeus £30, 432 pages
Christian House worked as a staff writer at Sotheby’s from 2002 to 2014
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