Hong Kong Collector Makes 154% in 2 Years as the demand for the light hearted paintings of Indian figurative artist Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003, has continued to bubble up to the eve of his Tate Modern retrospective exhibition, which opens this week. In March, we pinpointed Khakhar as an artist to watch just before his 1970 painting, Church Gardener, was offered in New York with a £140,000 estimate. It sold for £346,000. Then last week, a smaller painting from 1986, At New Jersey, appeared at Christie’s in South Kensington with a £50,000 estimate and sold for £134,500. The seller, a collector from Hong Kong, may have sensed how Khakhar’s market was going a little earlier. They bought this painting at auction in New York in 2014 for £53,000; that’s a mark- up of 154 per cent in less than two years.
A portrait that has been hanging in a Cambridge town house for over 100 years has been identified as a portrait of Jane Seymour, the Queen of England from 1536-1537, by a follower of the famous court painter, Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein’s very similar portrait, painted shortly after the sitter’s marriage to the king, hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and a preparatory drawing is in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle. In each, the sitter wears a pear-shaped pendant of rubies and pearls, later seen in portraits of Catherine Howard, Henry VII’s fifth wife. Another very similar portrait, which used to be in the Royal Collection, is now in the Mauritshuis in Holland. The Cambridge portrait was shown by local auctioneer, Cheffins, to art consultant, John Somerville, who confirmed the identity of the sitter and dated it to the 16th century. A dendrochronological test then found that the tree from which the panel was taken was felled in about 1532, increasing the possibility that the portrait was painted in Holbein’s studio during his lifetime. Cheffins, which will be selling the portrait in June, has estimated it to fetch between £20,000 and £30,000.
Demand for the playful paintings of Indian figurative artist Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003, has continued to bubble away right up to the eve of his Tate Modern retrospective exhibition, which opens this week. In March, we pinpointed Khakhar as an artist to watch just before his 1970 painting, Church Gardener, was offered in New York with a £140,000 estimate. It sold for £346,000. Then last week, a smaller painting from 1986, At New Jersey, appeared at Christie’s in South Kensington with a £50,000 estimate and sold for £134,500. The seller, a collector from Hong Kong, may have sensed how Khakhar’s market was going a little earlier. They bought this painting at auction in New York in 2014 for £53,000; that’s a mark- up of 154 per cent in less than two years.
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Khakhar had his first exhibition in London in 1979 with the gallerists Anthony Stokes and Hester van Royen who found it difficult to sell anything. Riding to Stokes’s aid was Marlborough Gallery director, James Kirkman, who worked closely with Henry Moore and later, Lucian Freud. Kirkman bought a classic Khakhar painting from him, Man Eating a Jalebi, which graces Tate’s catalogue cover. Dealers say the painting could now be worth a million dollars. Meanwhile, a selling exhibition of work by Khakhar and other figurative artists from the Baroda school, India’s first post-Independence art school, has opened at the Grosvenor Vadehra Gallery in St James’s to coincide with the Tate show. Needless to say the paintings by Khakhar have already been sold, but they do not outshine the others. This selective show includes paintings by Kakhar’s widely feted contemporary, Arpita Singh, as well as younger practitioners who have both honoured and extended traditional Indian painting methods into the modern era, Atul Dodiya and Shibu Natesan. Prices range from £2,000 to £250,000.
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In a delightful coincidence, or rather merger of circumstances, the Dora Maurer exhibition at White Cube referred to in my piece on Russian art is curated by Katharine Kostyal, formerly Katharine Burton, of Christie’s and the Simon Lee Gallery, who went to White Cube to conduct secondary market (i.e., second hand as opposed to fresh from the studio) sales. At the same time, her husband, Karl Kostyal, a financial entrepreneur who got the art bug and opened his own small gallery in Savile Row in 2010, is showing work by Maurer’s husband, Hungarian artist, Tibor Gayor, with whom she shares a studio in Budapest. Karl Kostyal is of Hungarian origin and is a member of Tate’s acquisition committee, helping to broaden its holdings of Eastern European art by neglected artists. This must be one of the first incidences of a husband and wife working with different galleries and exhibiting husband and wife artists simultaneously at each of them. Good team work from one of the art world’s new power couples.
