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17th December 2011
london selection Posters prove solid, reliable
■ Toulouse-Lautrec leads the way, but Mucha and others also hold up strongly
Gabriel Berner reports
FROM the charm of a Cotswolds village pictured on a 1948 British Railways advertisement to the ruggedness of the Wild West on an original 1960s Western film poster, there was a wide range of subjects among the hundreds of posters offered at Christie’s South Kensington (25/20/12% buyer's premium) in November.
The first of two sales, on November
3, was the 269-lot offering of travel and vintage posters, an auction packed out with the customary private buyers who helped shift 76 per cent of the lots – 89 per cent by value – to the tune of £395,040. Topping the sale was an 1895 Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) lithograph of the Irish singer May Belfort, who came to Paris via the London music halls and performed at the café-concert des Décadents. Although Belfort appeared in several works by the French artist, the posters of her in a red dress are generally considered the most valuable and CSK’s 2ft 7in x 2ft (80 x 61cm) example with an A condition mark sold just under the bottom estimate for £17,000 to one of the international bidders who made up
Left: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s May Belfort fetched £17,000 at CSK’s travel and vintage posters sale on November 3. Above: a design from Mucha’s 72-plate sourcebook which made £14,000.
45 per cent of the buyers. Another pioneer in poster design was
Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) whose greatest Art Nouveau posters, often depicting Belle Epoque young women, have fetched six-figure sums in the past. Christie’s offered several lots by the Czech artist but the pick of them was a complete set of 72 plates containing designs for posters, book illustrations and jewellery, in addition to studies of nudes, flowers and decorative patterns. Each measuring 18 x 13in (47 x 34cm) and graded B+, they were snapped up by a UK buyer for £14,000 against a £8000- 12,000 estimate.
A rare and early, 4ft 2in x 2ft 11in
(1.27m x 89cm) work by the English artist Edward Alexander Wadsworth (1889-1949) entitled, Englische Graphik, promoting a loan exhibition of British prints in Zurich in 1923, sold towards the upper end of its estimate for £16,000. Following on from the £18,000 paid at Christie’s in May for another example of the same poster, specialist Sophie Churcher noted that “providing they are in good condition, they will often sell at this level”. Swiss posters, which are usually
associated with CSK’s January ski sale, performed well thanks, in part, to a
private collection which made up the majority of the 44-lot section. The group included the catalogue cover lot by Niklaus Stoecklin (1896-1982) advertising Switzerland’s first large- scale men’s clothing firm PKZ. Through the first half of the 20th century, PKZ commissioned many of Switzerland’s leading designers to contribute to a series of posters which have become increasingly collectable. Of the 13 PKZ designs offered, only two failed to find buyers. The example illustrated on the facing page, measuring 4ft 2in x 2ft 11in (1.28m x 90cm) and in good condition (A-), attracted plenty of interest, selling
How Delia devised the perfect Stones recipe
ORIGINAL cover artwork for the 1969 album Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones will headline Bonhams’ entertainment memorabilia sale on December 15 in Knightsbridge. Keith Richards’ close friend Robert
Brownjohn designed the famous cover which consists of the Let It Bleed record being played by the tone-arm of an old-style phonograph below a plate stacked with a tape canister, clock face, pizza, tyre and an elaborately iced cake topped with figurines of the band (made by then-unknown cookery writer Delia Smith). The reverse of the LP sleeve shows the same ”record-stack” mix in a state of disarray. Estimated at £30,000- 40,000, the lot will include two 8 x 9in (20 x
25cm) felt tip concept sketches, two colour negatives of the final front and back covers and five January 2010 British postage stamps featuring the album, among other items. The sale will also feature an array of
props from well-known films and TV shows, including Obi-Wan Kenobi’s light sabre used by Ewan McGregor in the 1999 Star Wars film, The Phantom Menace (£18,000-20,000), Indiana Jones’ trademark bullwhip used during the filming of Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) by Harrison Ford (£30,000- 35,000) and more than 30 lots of Doctor Who costumes.
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