A lot of money is made from sports memorabilia. Think of Michael Jordan’s Nikes, which sold for $1.4 million, or Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ shirt ($9 million). It also yields smaller amounts, in quantities. Specialist auctioneers Graham Budd in Northamptonshire today have a sale of more than 1,000 items, ranging from a 1958 West Ham vs Manchester United program for £30 to a silver salver presented to football legend Billy Wright, estimated at £30,000.
But what about art that represents sports? There’s nothing to talk about at Budd’s auction, and on the contemporary front, the most memorable work I’ve seen before at Art Basel was a 2006 film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno about Zinedine Zidane and his famous headbutt (a edition purchased by the National Gallery of Scotland for £200,000 in 2006). In fact, until now there has never been a single collection of football-related art at auction.
In a first of its kind, a collection of more than 100 paintings and cartoons inspired by the beautiful game has just gone on display at Bonhams, where online bidding has begun. The collection was almost purchased by the National Football Museum in Manchester in 2018, but funding could not be found. Last year it was offered in its entirety by the Chris Beetles Gallery for a reported £1.5 million, but individuals only wanted parts so it did not sell. Not wanting to keep it in storage, the elderly owner decided to scatter it to the wind so that more people can enjoy the parts. Estimates range from £100 to £100,000, so almost anyone can enter until December 13 at noon when bidding closes.
The collection’s story begins 25 years ago in the fashionable, chic London eatery Le Caprice, when St James’s art dealer Chris Beetles went to lunch with a wealthy client who, like him, was a football fan. Beetles has supported Spurs since he was eleven. The only clue he gives as to his client’s identity is that he is from the Midlands and had been chairman of a Premier League club. The two decided to purchase original works of art with football as the subject.
They would not, it was agreed, go for sporting ephemera; just the art. And they would focus on the history of the sport, and the social involvement that came with it – the public and supporters as well as the players. But where was the art to be found? As Beetles says: “Until recent decades, when football became the nation’s favorite sport and the democracy of wealth had given it superstar status, football was always considered the working man’s pastime. Previously, therefore, artists have not routinely succeeded in attracting customers and patrons to the works of art with as much enthusiasm as arts depicting upper-class sports such as cricket, horse racing, motor racing, rugby, tennis, croquet and shooting.”
A good starting point was Beetles’ own gallery, where he specialized in original cartoons and illustrations for magazines and newspapers for regular illustrator exhibitions in which sports was a regular category.
These were not expensive and Beetles managed to scoop up the best examples that came up for auction. One of their earlier purchases was a Giles cartoon of a lonely reveler near a snowbound field, made for the Sunday Express in 1969, bought for £750 at Sotheby’s in 1998. In 2001 a Ronald Searle drawing of the schoolboy Molesworth, with a football, them a treble estimate £3,290.
Other cartoonists they bought who turned their hand to football included Reg Wootton, whose round dynamo, Sporting Sam, graced the pages of the Sunday Express in the 1940s, Norman Thelwell, better known for his ponies, Louis Wain for his cats, and Roy Ullyett. from the Daily Express, and Larry from Punch and Private Eye. They all saw the funny side of football.
At the same time, Beetles and his collector were looking at more serious art. A favorite provenance they discovered was the Football Association’s first prize for a football painting in 1953, won by LS Lowry’s Going to the Match (recently sold for £7.8 million). They attempted another Lowry football painting in 2007 but were outbid by the Professional Footballers’ Association for £1.1 million. But the collection contains other works from this competition by Bernard Dunstan, Stanley Roy Badmin and Michael Bernard Critchlow.
Badmin’s watercolor – inscribed “Here They Come! The Valley, referring to the home ground of Charlton Athletic, shows the crowd, stadium and players during a match between Charlton and Arsenal in the early 1950s. Bought in 1998 for a record sum of £ 8,800, it is now valued at a tempting £7,000. Also on display at the 1953 exhibition was Bernard Critchlow’s vision of a match between the stands of Fulham’s Craven Cottage, which doubled the estimate at Christie’s in 2005 to a record £30,000, and now has a modest estimate of £15,000.
Further records were set when they bought a panoramic image of a match between Aston Villa and Sunderland from little-known Birmingham artist Henry Cotterill Deykin in the 1950s for £5,300, for which only £7,000 is expected; and a beautifully observed view of the crowd, climbing some trees to watch a third round FA Cup match between Manchester City and the popular Corinthians in 1926 at Charles Cundall’s Crystal Palace. Bought at Christie’s in 2003 for triple the estimate of £49,350, it is now expected to fetch double that.
Although the number of cartoons in this sale outnumbers the number of paintings by 10:1, they can be purchased for just £100 each. In terms of prices, it is the more serious paintings that will prevail.
Where Rembrandt collaborates with Damien Hirst
As the traveling contemporary art circus lands in Florida this week for the Art Basel Miami Beach fair, London maintains its traditional winter focus on historic art as dealers stage a panoply of exhibitions known as London Art Week. Viewings are already underway, and special mention deserves Eros, a new gallery in St James’s where, for the first time, sculptures by Rodin stand side by side with his lesser-known contemporary Aime-Jules Dalou. Colnaghi’s, now in Spanish hands, has also curated a rare solo exhibition by Spanish modern master Joaquin Sorolla, as a valuable postscript to the 2019 exhibition at the National Gallery.
This sets the tone for London’s Old Master auctions, which are estimated to fetch around £60 million this week. Sotheby’s is pricing the highest value lot in a rediscovered Rembrandt at £10 to £15 million, but Christie’s may have the last laugh with the highest value sales. A few years ago, in light of declining sales totals for Old Master paintings, Christie’s rebranded, calling their series “Classic Art Week” to make it sound leaner and sexier. In addition to the routine Old Master sales – led this year by a sumptuous pair of rediscovered Canaletto paintings from Venice (£8 to £12 million) – there is a £5 million sale devoted to the Josefowitz collection of Rembrandt prints, the largest private collection ever assembled, including no fewer than six etched self-portraits. Dating from his earliest in 1629 to his largest in 1639, each is packed with character. They are estimated to be worth between £15,000 and £120,000 each.
Less expected will be the sight of contemporary works by Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst, whose golden The severed head of Medusa (2013) was part of his imagined shipwreck of ancient treasures displayed at two Francois Pinault Foundation sites in Venice in 2017, and is now valued at £500,000. The contemporary works are part of a series of sales from the £7.5 million collection of Christian Levett, known for combining Old Masters and antiques with modern and contemporary art. He turned it into a museum near Cannes, as a model for collectors to explore within their borders. own collections. But after twelve years he decided to empty the museum and instead fill it with work exclusively by female artists, especially abstract expressionists. With the boom of rediscovered female artists of the 20e century goes well, you might wonder how far that £7.5 million will go.
Art Market Focus takes place on the first Tuesday of every month