Picasso, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Joan Miro, Camille Pisarro, Francis Bacon and Roy Lichtenstein rub shoulders with Roderic O'Connor and Jack Butler Yeats in de Vere's forthcoming art auction at the RHA Gallagher Gallery on March 6th. The first major sale of the year for de Vere's, it brings together a marvellous assortment of paintings, drawings and other artworks by a range of modern artists.
Many of the international works are from a single collection in Northern Ireland, including Roy Lichtenstein's Red Lamps, a colour lithograph of an interior (£15,000-£20,000) and Andy Warhol's 1984 limited edition screenprint of Grace Kelly, estimated at £10,000 to £12,000. Francis Bacon is represented by a lithograph entitled Bullfight, which is in good condition with a rich palette of ochres and greens, and valued at £5,000 to £7,000.
A powerful Louis le Brocquy floating head - Ulterior Image of Picasso - has a guide price of £50,000 to £70,000 while a Picasso lithograph of his wife Josephine carries an estimate of £35,000 to £45,000. This picture last appeared at auction in 1990 in Christies' London auction rooms, when the estimate was £40,000 to £50,000. Around this time the international art market went into a slump that lasted for almost a decade.
The most important painting in the sale is Roderic O'Connor's Personnages avec Cheval which hung for five years through the late 1990s in the Roderic O'Connor room in the Hugh Lane Gallery. One of a group of symbolist paintings produced by O'Connor towards the end of the 19th century, it's an intensely coloured, heavily impasted work based on the parable of the Good Samaritan. It has a top estimate of £220,000.
At the other end of the price scale, a collection of paintings and smaller works by Stella Steyn, with estimates from £300 to £3,500, is likely to sell well. Steyn, born in Dublin 1907 of Russian and German parents, studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare Street and went on to study in Paris where she was friendly with the Joyces and with Samuel Beckett. In 1931 she went to Germany to study at the Bauhaus under Kandinsky and Paul Klee before it was shut down by the Nazis. Her paintings have a jazz-age, European jauntiness about them.
The sale will be divided into two parts with less expensive works sold in the afternoon session. Here, £400 to £600 will buy you a set of prints by William Orpen; a Muriel Brandt watercolour of Clogher Head; a small Evie Hone gouache, or a drawing of a young boy by Sean Keating (lot 79), while £600 to £1,500 should be enough to secure typical Markey Robinsons, a pierrot by Graham Knuttel or, for a little more, Patrick Leonard's Dublin Bay from Ringsend, Dawn (Lot 113).
The sale is at the RHA Gallery in Dublin on March 6th, The works will be on view from next Saturday, March 3rd and for the following three days
