by Sylvanus Sydney Denton was a name among the students of the University of Oxford. For many years he earned his money that sold bicycles for students and at the same time developed a passion for modern and contemporary ceramic art. He collected a collection of over 220 examples, which he kept in a specially built kitchen extension.
Denton died last year at the age of 90 and his collection came to the fore at Sotheby’s this week before he was sold at the end of the month. It is estimated that it collects up to £ 1.7 million. It is not exactly known when Denton caught the ceramic bugs, but it was probably only in his late forties.
After his national service in Kenya, he found at home in Oxford to repair bicycles and renovate caravans before investing in a bicycle and toy business. He had four business until 1982 and showed his ingenuity, which he bought vintage bicycles from the 19th century, for which he posed for the local press.
Sotheby’s believes that his journey to ceramics with modern British art (Henry Moore, LS Lowry and Barbara Hepworth) began before refugees from Nazi Germany, Hans Coper and Lucy Rie, whose pots were regarded as visual art and superior.
According to the sales catalog, one of Denton’s earliest acquisitions was a work of the Kops, which he bought in 1988 in the trail blazing Oxford Gallery, which presented contemporary ceramics with avant -garde modern art by Terry Frost and Patrick Heron.
Two works that he bought there in the nineties came from Edmund de Waal, the ceramist and author of The Hare with Bern im Bernstein, long before he was torn opened by the upscale Gagosian contemporary art gallery. Denton also bought an auction and in 1997 bought a black cycladical arrow from Coper from Bonhams for around £ 9,000.
In order to give an idea of how the prices of the KOPS have moved, another cycladical formpot in the 1970s, which was sold by another collector in the 1970s for £ 250 for 381,000 GBP in 2018. Denton’s example at Sotheby’s is a comparatively tame £ 100,000 (check). Sotheby’s describes Denton’s collection as “one of the best collections of studio and contemporary ceramics in private hands”.
Apart from Coper, there are several sensitive works by Rie in the range of £ 25,000 to 50,000 and an outstanding work by Elizabeth Fritsch, which is currently enjoying a top -class exhibition in the Hepworth Wakefield Museum near Leeds. Denton bought Fritsch’s 20-inch pot (1998) lively colored colored for a double estimation record at Bonhams in 2004, since her record rose to 51,400 GBP last year. The estimate for Spout Pot has now doubled to £ 12,000 to £ 18,000.
Another auction purchase was a playfully twisted “monumental body pot” by Joanna Constantinidis, which Denton in 2002, two years after her death, bought a record of £ 1,600 in Bonhams. After their prices were increased up to £ 15,000 for another body pot in 2021, so that Denton’s example should be estimated at 4,000 to 6,000 GBP.
However, his preferred employment method was to buy directly from the artists; He was very popular with killing. One was Magdalene Odundo, the British Nigerian, who was the subject of an impressive exhibition in the Hepworth Wakefield in 2019.
Three burned terracotta pots from her in sales all date from 1990/91 before she was famous. There are no records of their costs, but at that time calculated art dealer £ 5,000 compared to 250 GBP in the 1970s. Since then, their prices have increased. At an auction from 2010, they sold £ 10,000 to £ 15,000, but after the Hepworth Wakefield Show had been announced and she was signed by the leading contemporary art dealer Thomas Dane, wealthy collectors such as the fashion designer Jonathan Anderson (which was announced as the new head designer) began.
The estimate of this work was 100,000 pounds, a record for Odundo at that time. Now Sotheby’s went one step further, with two from the collection of Denton, each estimated at 150,000 GBP. However, this is an accumulation of excess value. While most of the value is only concentrated on a handful of artists, the majority of lots are estimated at less than 3,000 GBP, some without a reserve minimum price.
Other artists are Janet and David Leach, the wife and son of the influential Potter Bernard Leach, and Richard Batterham, a student of Leach, who died in the same year in the same year that a few of his pots reached a record of 20,000 pounds at a auction. For young ceramic collectors, it is time to climb and offer their bikes.
How the art market deals with sanctions against Russia
The sanctions that Russian companies were imposed in 2022 in 2022 after the invasion of Putine in 2022 ended the regular art sales worth millions of pounds, which London mainly carried out for the benefit of Russian buyers. The Russian art auctions in London were nothing from more than £ 100 million a year.
But last year Sotheby’s was sold – unnoticed by the press – entitled Fabergé, Imperial & Revolutionary Works of Art, to which Russian paintings belonged, and it exceeded his estimate of £ 3.9 million. And in November they plan a repetition. So what’s going on?
According to the analysis, which is carried out by the Advisory Group Overstone Art Services, Russian art continues to appear, but in various sales categories – from the old master and the 19th century to modernity. Russian art can be bought and sold as long as the customer is not a Russian pass owner or on a sanction list.
In this April, for example, Sotheby’s two paintings by the artist Richard Zommer from the 19th century, who worked in Central Asia and had previously been sold in a Russian sale of art, was sold when it was sold together with a variety of European artists.
One of his paintings, a representation of a chaikhana (or a meeting point for travelers) on the Silk Road, was estimated at £ 20,000 and sold for a record of £ 114,300. Commercial sources believe that the Russian art market in Russia is alive, better than property, and that Russian buyers are still active in the West, but under a double nationality, as Ukrainian, or Belarusian, operate.
In an explanation that was published for the Telegraph last week, Sotheby’s said: “Today there is an important diaspora of Russians who collect. As always, we ensured that we comply with sanctions and other restrictions that have been excited about Russian customers, and property of Russian origin.”
The statement reflects the observation of Overstone that the amounts of sales, the average hammer prices for Russian artists, have increased, which has been pointed out that “growth is already taking place. If this trend continues, it seems likely that the accessibility of the market for Russian paintings can grow and thus grow the market again if the situation is better populated.”
