Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf has chosen her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A promising scenario lies hidden in the letters collected by novelist Bruce Chatwin, an up-and-coming specialist at Sotheby’s in London in the early 1960s. Chatwin, who arranged to sell Fra Angelico’s small panel at auction in 1960, advised the consignor to sell the other panels privately. Just switch from Sotheby’s letterhead to his own stationery and you’ll see he’s trying to lure his employer out of the deal.
That clever subterfuge was a symbol of greater freedom in the post-war art scene, as James Stolton describes with considerable wit and pacing in The Scoundrel and the Scholar. Mr Stoughton, a former Sotheby’s UK chairman and biographer of art historian Kenneth Clarke, details an area where conflicts of interest were as common as the mediocre watercolor. His book also serves as an origin story for the grave consequences and dubious conspiracies presented in today’s art world.
In the years immediately following World War II, London’s art market was still an unremarkable gentlemen’s club, a network of learned collectors, well-connected dealers, and the slow-moving professionals of Sotheby’s and Christie’s clearinghouses. was a frequent visitor. Things changed on the night of October 15, 1958, when Sotheby’s mysterious new chairman Peter Wilson presented the Goldschmidt Collection of seven Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings at a black-tie evening gala.・When it was sold at auction, Stourton explains.
The event featured an auction extravaganza, with Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and Margot Fontaine sitting in the audience. We also collected news headlines. Journalists lined up along New Bond Street alongside aristocrats and businessmen to watch the hammer go down on a series of auction records.
Galleries became prey to time wasters, lunatics, and scammers, some of whom simply wanted to say they had a better gallery at home.
Wilson was a trader with a perfect sense of the times and understood the value of marketing and celebrity endorsement. The former intelligence officer was rumored to be the inspiration for James Bond, as well as being the “fifth man” of the Cambridge spy ring, which is unlikely on both counts.
He is just one of many exciting characters in this fascinating history. Mr. Dent was a scruffy collector with a budget of two guineas and wandered around the saleroom handing out toffee apples to his staff. Meanwhile, Patrick Lindsay, head of Christie’s Old Masters division, liked to land his Spitfire on the lawn when arriving at country house sales.
While the rival duopoly of Sotheby’s and Christie’s forms the dramatic spine of Stourton’s story, it is the opacity of dealers and gallerists that reveals the psychology of those trapped in art and antiques. This is a chapter on a wide range of areas. “Galleries became prey to time wasters, lunatics, and scammers, some of whom simply wanted to say there was something better at home,” Stourton wrote. .
On Bond Street, Agnew and Colnaghi were the two big midcentury dealers who appear in traditional photographs. The former was run by Geoffrey Agnew, who was described as “a bluff man and a bit of a monster to boot.” His counterpart at Colnaghi was James Byam Shaw, who was considered the “ideal of the scholar-dealer”. The pair represented the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the masterpiece industry.
Around the corner on Cork Street, a market for modern paintings emerged promoting artists such as Henry Moore and Lucien Freud. The villain here was the Marlborough Gallery, notorious for poaching successful artists from other galleries. “It’s like stealing patents,” said one affected party. Meanwhile, tensions between dealers and auction houses continue to simmer, with auctioneers stealing bids for “chandeliers” from fictitious buyers and dealers colluding in a “ring” to undermine the auction process. Ta.
Stoughton traces the seismic shifts in taste over the decades, from the rise of Impressionism to the rise of modern art and the arrival of Young British Artists in the 1990s, through Victorian and antique trends. A detour to the silver, furniture, porcelain and tribal art collecting areas provides broader context to the photo market’s landmark sights.
Recommended
The author’s wry prose enlivens a difficult subject. His research is almost always enlightening, erudite and entertaining. The film’s one slight misstep is the final chapter, which discusses two scandals that occurred at Sotheby’s during his own tenure: the sale of smuggled art and the collusion in price-fixing with Christie’s that later nearly wiped out both companies. That’s when I brought it up. Be cautious here. There are no new revelations.
But Stourton manages to capture the enduring appeal of a largely unregulated, fickle market crowded with intermediaries and fixers and peppered with pretty things. A combination that has its charms and drawbacks.
Scoundrels and Scholars: The Booms and Busts of the London Art Market, 1945-2000 by James Stoughton Head of Zeus £30, 432 pages
Christian House worked as a staff writer at Sotheby’s from 2002 to 2014.
Join our online book group at FT Books Café on Facebook and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art anytime, anywhere
