Jeune Femme en Rouge by Moïse Kisling, £92,000 at Dore & Rees.
The Australian-born dental surgeon-turned property developer was apparently reluctant to spend money if he perceived it inessential or a luxury. But, after being introduced to auctions by his wife Betty, he soon found the bidding exciting and it satisfied his desire for a bargain. He started purchasing jewellery, furniture and paintings.
In the mid-1990s he encountered the work of the Polish-French painter Moïse Kisling (1891-1953) and began seeking out examples of her highly stylised portraits and still-lifes from Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Indeed, he thought Kisling’s models resembled his wife – although it appears Betty didn’t share his enthusiasm and denied the likeness.
Topping the group that came to Somerset auction house Dore & Rees (25% buyer’s premium) on November 15 was Jeune Femme en Rouge, a 2ft 5in x 20in (74 x 51cm) signed oil on canvas from c.1930. Bateman bought it at Sotheby’s in 1998 for £45,000.
With the market for Kisling having grown internationally over the last few decades – a good number of works have fetched six-figure sums in Poland, France and the US, as well as in the UK – here it was pitched at £50,000-70,000 and met with a good reaction, selling at £92,000.
The price was the highest for the artist at a UK auction held outside London, according to Artprice.com.
Another painting of a female figure by Kisling at the same sale was Nu Debout, a smaller oil on canvas from 1927 that was also signed but showed a topless model. Bateman had bid £18,000 for it at Christie’s in October 1998 but in this Frome auction it sold at £54,000 against a £25,000-35,000 estimate.
At that same Christie’s sale, Bateman had also acquired another portrait titled L’Arlesienne from 1953. Back then it made £15,000 but here in Somerset it took an above-estimate £34,000.
All bar two of the 17 lots from the Bateman collection sold for a £271,890 hammer total.
Schiele’s sister
Egon Schiele’s drawing of his sister Melanie, £65,000 at Chiswick Auctions.
Another Impressionist and Modern saleroom highlight in the same month was an original drawing by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890- 1918) that appeared at auction for the first time on November 22.
Offered at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium), the well-documented 1908 pencil on paper sketch of the artist’s older sister Melanie was expected to sell for £50,000-70,000 and took £65,000 as part of the sale titled 20th Century Art: Paintings and Original Works on Paper.
Schiele was a prolific draughtsman. In his most active years, he easily averaged a drawing a day. His early works (Schiele had his first exhibition in the town of Klosterneuburg in 1908) contain strong similarities with those of Klimt as well as influences from Art Nouveau.
The highest prices for his drawings today tend to come for erotically charged examples which are generally six-figure propositions, although the picture here had significant appeal due to the intimacy of the sketch and its personal connection to the artist.
The drawing of Melanie Schiele Schuster features in the artist’s catalogue raisonné and, marked with Schiele’s estate stamp on the reverse, it had previously been in the collection of the sitter’s nephew and heir Norbert Gradisch. It appears to have been first exhibited in London in 1975 at Fischer Fine Art, the firm founded by Austria-born dealers Harry and Wolfang Georg Fischer who organised Schiele’s first one-man show in London at Marlborough Fine Art in 1964.
