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Gormley joins Monet for a record art sale season
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent17 Jun 2008
More than £200 million worth of art, including a large model of Antony Gormley's Angel Of The North, goes on view at Sotheby's in London today before sales in the coming weeks.
Masterpieces by Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and Paul Cézanne are set to make it the most valuable summer the auction house has seen.
The Gormley maquette is expected to make up to £800,000, which would be almost double the current record for the artist at auction.
Modelled by the 6ft 2in artist and lifesize, it is the first of an edition of five produced in the mid-Nineties at the same time as the giant sculpture in Gateshead.
Alexander Branczic, Sotheby's contemporary art expert, said: "This is without question Gormley's most iconic work and it's the first time the Angel Of The North in any form has come to auction. It's an incredible thing."
The estimate showed how important the work was, he added.
Other British artists who could set records on 1 July include Anish Kapoor and Bridget Riley. The sale includes Chant 2, described as the most important of Riley's paintings to come to market as it marks the point when she moved from black and white to colour with works for the Venice Biennale in 1968.
The sales will be part of a run of auctions set to make a total of about £500million.
A new band of buyers in markets from Russia to south-east Asia mean an even wider range of artists than usual are being tipped for top prices. A highlight of the Impressionist and modern art sale on Wednesday next week will be Danseuse by the Italian Gino Severini.
It was exhibited in the first Futurist exhibition in Paris in 1916, was later owned by the Guggenheim Museum in New York and has been in private hands for the last 20 years. The work, which has not been seen in Britain before, is expected to make up to £10million.
Other key pieces include La Plage A Trouville by Monet, which was seen recently in the Royal Academy's Impressionists By The Sea exhibition.
Helena Newman, vice-chairwoman of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art department, said there was a lot to appeal to collectors.
She said the Monet was a " quintessential early Impressionist" work that anyone building a collection would want and the Severini was "a really topquality work" by an artist whose bold style was much in demand.
