London's June Auctions Highlight Portraiture

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The face is the place for London auction houses this month.

The three leading auction houses have all emphasised portraiture in their London sales, building on interest in the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery on Thursday 22 June.

Sotheby’s will lead with their Contemporary Evening Auction on 28 June with a selection of works called Face to Face: A Celebration of Portraiture. The star here is Gustav Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) (1917–18) (estimate on request).

Other artists featured in Sotheby’s London auctions include modern painters René Magritte and Claude Monet, post-war artists Barbara Hepworth and Frank Auerbach, and contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and Cindy Sherman.

Ahead of their 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 June, Christie’s spotlighted Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s Untitled (Pablo Picasso) (1984) (£4.5–6.5 million), Picasso‘s Tête de femme (Dora Maar) (1939) (£500,000–800,000), and Lucian Freud‘s Portrait of a Man (Self-portrait) (1944) (£1.5–2 million).

Phillips, meanwhile, drew attention to Elizabeth Peyton‘s Prince Harry, September 1998 (1998) (£400,000–600,000) in their ​​London 20th Century to Now sale on 30 June. Other portraits in their sale include works by Sarah Ball, Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise, Andy Warhol, Ellen Berkenblit, and Brian Calvin.

While the auction houses have all paid lip service to portraiture in promoting their auctions, Phillips is actually leading with Lucio Fontana‘s slashed canvas Concetto spaziale, Attese, 1967 (1967) (£1.8–2.5 million).

And Christie’s is leading with two landscape paintings: Paul Signac‘s Calanque des Canoubiers (Pointe de Bamer), Saint-Tropez (1896) (£5.5–8 million) and Gerhard Richter’s Grünes Feld (Green Field) (1969) (£4-6 million). —[O]

Main image: Lucian Freud, Night Interior (1968-70). Oil on canvas. 50.8 by 50.8 cm. Courtesy Sotheby's.