LONDON.- Lyon & Turnbull’s two autumn London sales - Avant Garde: Art from 1890 to Now (October 26) and Modern Made: (October 27) feature works by important contemporary female artists, including Paula Rego and Susan Hiller, as well as by Queer artists, such as Keith Vaughan and Roy de Maistre, who made works referencing gay life at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK.
A selection of works from the estate of Anglo-Canadian painter Colette Morey de Morand (1934-2022) document the close personal and artistic friendship she had with the Anglo-Portuguese artist Paula Rego (1935-2022). Whilst they were very different practitioners - Morey de Morand’s work was typically abstract and ethereal whilst Rego’s was resolutely figurative, narrative and corporeal - they had life experience in common (relative newcomers to the UK, children the same age, both their husbands passing away in the same year). They were also women trying to make headway in a world where male artists held sway - and on top of that, painters at a time when paint was somewhat out of fashion. After meeting in the 1980s as part of a loose collective of artists working in Clerkenwell, they became firm friends and spoke daily.
As well as hand-coloured, dedicated prints that were birthday and Christmas gifts from Rego, the collection offered includes two original Rego works on paper. The pen and ink on card titled After Ernst is inscribed to the verso Happy Birthday Dear Colette, Much happiness and lots of love Paula (estimate £6,000-8,000). Similarly, an ink and wash on paper Sunday Afternoon (Fallen Woman with Young Child Observing 2000) is titled in pencil, dated for July 2000, and inscribed Dearest Colette Too late for a birthday card, but with much love Paula (estimate £2,000-3,000).
Morey de Morand’s own work was assembled from a melting pot of ideas and influences that included her early life in Canada, studies in New Zealand (where she met the doyen of Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg) and the years-long overland journey through India and the Far East that she took with her two young children before arriving in London in 1975.
Offered for sale alongside the Regos are two paintings by Morey de Morand, that provide just a glimpse into her wide-ranging and long-lasting career. Estimated at £800-1,200 is the large 1984 acrylic on canvas, Desert Distance.
Susan Hiller (1940-2019) is widely regarded as one of the most influential women artists of her generation, as well as a pioneer of installation and multimedia art. Born in the USA, she made London her home in the late 1960s, where she became a key voice in the nascent counterculture and feminist movements. Her practice spanned a broad range of media including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, artist's books and writing. Her work often took for its subject aspects of culture that were overlooked, marginalised, or disregarded – which in turn spoke to issues of gender, class and politics.
Gatwick Suite- Ascent/ Flight/ Descent 1983 (estimate £7,000-10,000) uses self-portraits taken in a photo-mat machine: a place that, before the age of digital photography, played a huge role in people’s lives, primarily as the only place to get photographs for official documents (especially passports), but also as somewhere private (albeit often in very public places) to record love, relationships, friendships. They were also places for the lonely and isolated, who could record that they existed, with no-one else’s intervention. Hiller has taken these everyday images, enlarged them to change their context, and then applied a form of automatic writing, lending the work an additional narrative. The calligraphic nature of the automatic writing inevitably reminds us of non-Roman (therefore non-European) script. Suddenly the woman in the picture is imbued with a ‘foreign-ness’. For the viewer today this work has become infused with a multiplicity of meaning – the title, the writing, the blurred image of a woman perhaps in crisis, seems to speak to the migration crisis, Hiller standing in for all those lost in transit.
The market for works relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ+) identities, has moved greatly in the past few years, reflecting a long-awaited correction within institutional collections - with the Queer British Art exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England, being a major impetus.
Included in the Avant Garde sale is an important and rare pre-World War Two painting by Keith Vaughan (1912-1977). Oils by Vaughan from the 1930s are scarce: at this stage he was still employed as a commercial layout designer and was slowly working up to taking the leap to become a full-time artist.
With its pared back palette and solidly rendered form, Seated Man c.1937-38 references the artist’s awareness of Picasso. It also marks the beginning of Vaughan’s mission to chart in paint his experience as a homosexual man in an era in which it was still against the law. It was at this time that Vaughan began to write his highly intimate journals that are now renowned as a searingly honest testimony to the gay experience in Britain in the mid-20th century.
Seated Man’s significant place in the story of Vaughan’s early career was demonstrated by its inclusion in the 2012 centenary retrospective of his work at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester - an exhibition that brought Vaughan’s achievements to a whole new audience. Its estimate is £30,000-50,000.
Two Figures, an oil on board of two unclothed men depicted in a moment of intimate relaxation, is an early work by Roy de Maistre (1894-1968). Estimated at £10,000-15,000, it is one of three paintings from different moments in the artist’s career offered as part of the Modern Made sale that follows Avant Garde at the Mall Galleries on October 27. They come by descent from Celia Broadbent (née Keogh), de Maistre’s cousin once removed, and his executor and friend; her mother, Camilla Margery Keogh, was the subject of ‘La Folie', considered one of de Maistre’s major works.
Once described as “the man who taught Francis Bacon to paint”, de Maistre moved from his native Australia to London in 1930. In his first year in the English capital, de Maistre had a solo show at the Beaux Arts Gallery and a joint exhibition of paintings and furniture with Bacon, held in the latter’s studio at 7 Queensberry Mews. The two men enjoyed a close friendship in the 1930s when Two Figures was painted. It is a rare survivor of its kind.. De Maistre’s instructions to his executors were that a large body of work, described as “fellas doing things to fellas” be destroyed following his death.
In contrast, Crucifixion of 1945 (estimate £4,000-6,000) was painted in response to the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By this point in his career, de Maistre was becoming known as a modernist religious painter and he formally converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1951.
Man and Tree of 1959 (estimate £4,000-6,000) is based on a work by Henri Matisse and dates from the period during which De Maistre was preparing his retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, which opened in May 1960.
Cedric Morris, of course, is also a key figure in the history of Queer Art in Britain. He and his partner, Arthur Lett Haines, made no apologies for who they were and whilst they didn’t flaunt their relationship, they didn’t hide it either. The art school that they founded in Suffolk in 1937 - whose pupils included Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling - was legendary as a haven for bohemian attitudes to life and art. Morris’s major painting, Crisis of 1938 is a highlight of the Avant Garde sale and is guided at £150,000-250,000.
