The price was comfortably over the auctioneers’ £20,000-25,000 estimate, and as such gave a welcome boost to an event where the mood was distinctly selective with only a little over half the lots finding buyers (although the fact that buyers responded with more warmth to the higher valued pieces pushed the selling rate in money terms up to a more comfortable 71 per cent).
While no section of the sale could be said to have enjoyed a clean sweep, certain areas met with a more lack-lustre response than others. They included the British ceramics; French art glass by Daum and other smaller names and Icart prints. Christie’s post-sale feeling was that buyers were going for the big names and the obviously commercial pieces and eschewing the less familiar or the less typical entries.
Among the pieces that found significant favour, for example, were Caryatids, a Lalique clear and frosted glass lamp moulded with stylised figural motifs along streamlined geometric lines that fetched £9800; a Preiss bronze and ivory Sunshade Girl with bobbed hair, thirties swimsuit and parasol at £8000 and a 147-piece, 12-place flatware service by Puiforcat given to the vendors as a wedding present in 1933, that fetched £8000. A small selection of stylish patinated bronze metalwares by Claudius Linossier whose work is currently doing well in Paris shared the same success here topped at £7500 by an 11in (27cm) high vase decorated with triangular and spiralling bands.
One other buoyant section of the sale was the British furniture where there were strong prices for stylish streamlined pieces in well figured burr woods.
Deco dancer’s classic boost
Art Deco UK: DANCER of Kapurthala, this 22in (56cm) high Chiparus bronze and ivory cat-suited agile performer atop a marble base, provided the highlight of Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) fourth Classic Art Deco sale on February 15 when it sold for £32,000 to a British collector.
