Among the early sales reported was Life Drawing at Camberwell (1963), a chalk drawing on paper by Frank Auerbach, which was sold from Redfern Gallery.
Andy Warhol’s shoe portfolio, A La Recherche Du Shoe Perdu, which was priced at £200,000 from Peter Harrington Gallery, was snapped up by a London collector.
Issued in 1955 as a portfolio of 17 unbound sheets enclosed in a printed cover, each shoe portrait has its own character and is accompanied by a ‘shoe poem’ or caption by Ralph Pomery. The cover, hand-written by Warhol’s mother, misspells ‘Recherche’ (as ‘Pecherche’), suggesting that this may be one of his earlier portfolios. The lithographs were printed privately in New York.
Among other stand-out objects that have already found new homes are Hans Arp’s 1936 Cuillère et nombrils (Spoon and Navels), which was offered for a price in the region of €1.5m on the stand of Hauser & Wirth, and Wilfredo Lam’s Figures from 1936, which sold at Dickinson.
Old Masters specialist Lullo Pampoulides, meanwhile, sold an oil on canvas of Saint Anthony of Padua Preaching to the Fish painted by Alessandro Magnasco in c.1740. It was offered for a price in the region of £65,000.
Organisers told ATG that footfall for the preview on Wednesday was up around 25% on last year, with a total of 11,262 visitors.
