Agnes Martin lithographs lead sale – Antique Collecting

Original prints by some of the best known Modern and Contemporary artists excelled at London auction house Chiswick Auctions’ Prints and Multiples sale on February 13. Signed and limited edition works by Banksy, Henri Matisse, Laurence Stephen Lowry, Sir Howard Hodgkin and Lucien Freud were among the best-selling lots.

Leading the sale at £27,500 (including buyer’s premium) was a portfolio of 10 delicate lithographs by the Canadian-American minimalist Agnes Martin (1912-2004). Variously titled Infant Response To Love; Innocent Love; Children Playing; Happiness-Glee; Lovely Life; I Love Love; Love; Happy Holiday; Innocence and Everyday Happiness, they were made late in life after the artist had moved from Manhattan to Taos in New Mexico and returned to painting after a hiatus of close to a decade. Published in 2000 by the artist’s New York Gallery (Pace Wildenstein), they are printed on translucent vellum, the artist’s favoured medium as it allowed for precise lines and full control of her subtle colour palette.

Martin said of her work: “These prints express innocence of mind. If you can go with them and hold your mind as empty and tranquil as they are and recognise your feelings at the same time, you will realise your full response to them”.

Accompanied by a certificate from the artist’s authentication body Pest Control, the Banksy screenprint Grannies sold for £16,250. From the unsigned edition of 500 published by Pictures on Walls in 2006, the work depicts a couple of elderly grandmothers knitting in their armchairs, accompanied by cups of tea and a chintz lampshade. On closer inspection, the garments they are making bear the unlikely slogans Punk’s Not Dead and Thug For Life.

Among the many original prints by some of the best known Modern British artists, After Chardin (Small Plate) by Lucian Freud (1922-2011) sold for £6,000. An artist’s proof aside from the edition of 80 published in 2000, the subject is Jean-Simeon Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress (c. 1737) in the National Gallery, London. Freud spent hours viewing the pictures there as a form of therapy, explaining that, “I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help.” He considered the ear of the teacher in The Young Schoolmistress, the best rendered in all of art history.

The Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017) intaglio etching Night Palm from a series issued by Waddington Graphics in 1990-91 was inspired by the loud, brightly coloured advertisements of French poster designers. The green over yellow brush stroke in Night Palm was applied by workshop assistant Jack Shirreff who was instructed to let the paint drip ‘spontaneously’. One of the 15 artist proofs created alongside the edition of 55, it is signed with initials, dated and inscribed AP 7/15 in pencil. With other copies of the edition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Tate, London, it carried an estimate of £6,000 – £8,000 and sold for £9,375.

Signed, titled, dated 2003 and numbered 61/250 in pencil, Two Blues by Bridget Riley (c.1931) took £11,250 while The Best is Yet to Come, a 2020 acrylic, varnish and mixed media work by James McQueen (b.1977) signed, dated and numbered 2/6 brought £10,625.

Prints by Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976), many of them issued in the last years of his life, are another perennial collecting favourite. Britain at Play from an edition of 850 published in the early 1970s, was signed by the artist in pencil. It sold for £5,000.

Examples of British Pop included the 1968 Gerald Laing (1936-2011) screenprint Tracy 1968 from the well-known Baby Baby Wild Things series, numbered 81/200 in pencil, and the 2013 Peter Blake triptych 3D Circus signed and numbered 44/60 in black ink. They sold for £4,250 and £5,000 respectively.

The sale included nine prints from the Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Jazz art book, commissioned by publisher Elf Teraide as Matisse recovered from surgery in 1942. Printed in 1947, they mark the beginning of the artist’s work with paper cut-outs that was such a key part of his later practice. Each pochoir print from the book was estimated at £3,000-5,000. Le Cirque (The Circus) from the unnumbered edition of 250 sold for £5,250.