Kate Moss's lipstick self-portrait: Art market news
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 22/09/2008
Colin Gleadell rounds up the latest news from the art market, including the details of the sale of Kate Moss's first ever painting
The first painting by Kate Moss ever to be sold at auction will be offered by Lyon & Turnbull in London on Saturday.
Artistic debut: Kate Moss's self-portrait 'Who needs blood when you've got lipstick?'
Painted in 2005-2006, it is a self-portrait in lipstick marked with her own lip prints and stains of her former boyfriend Pete Doherty's blood.
Estimated to fetch between £30,000 and £40,000, the painting is not signed, but is inscribed by Doherty "Who needs blood when you've got lipstick?", and comes with a receipt of sale made out on a Soho House napkin from Doherty, who originally owned the painting.
Also for sale is a self-portrait print by Doherty, "Look what they have done to the boy", which is signed in blood and estimated at £8,000 to £10,000. Robin Barton of the Bankrobber gallery in west London, who published the Doherty print, remembers supplying the canvas for Moss. "It was just a cheap canvas from Portobello Road that cost about £15. I don't know of any other paintings she did."
There were grim faces in New York after the collapse of Lehman Brothers last week. The bank is a major sponsor of the arts there, as it is in the UK, but its substantial corporate art collection, owned by its profit-making asset management unit Neuberger Berman, will remain intact. Several private equity firms have expressed interest in buying Neuberger along with its art collection.
Sotheby's held its final sale of contemporary Asian art in New York last week which made a disappointing $8.5 million against an estimate of $11 million to $16 million. In future, all the company's contemporary Asian art sales will be held in Hong Kong.
Gallery Pangolin, which makes Damien Hirst's bronze sculptures in its foundry in Gloucestershire, is to open a new space in London as part of Kings Place, a massive new arts and entertainment complex on Regent's Canal next to King's Cross and St Pancras stations.
The space will be the largest specialised sculpture gallery in London and is being run by Polly Bielecka, who used to work at the Fleming Collection of Scottish art. For her first show, which opens to the public on October 1, Bielecka has mounted an exhibition of sculptures by Peter Randall-Page called Rock Music Rock Art inspired by the ancient megalithic rock formations on the remote Lolui Island in Lake Victoria, Uganda. Prints by Randall-Page start from £100 each, while the sculptures sell for up to £50,000 each. In the gardens outside is an array of sculptures by gallery artists including Lynn Chadwick, whose largest works are priced at £700,000 each.
A star-studded crowd of celebrities and Russian oligarchs attended the opening of the Gagosian Gallery's latest exhibition in Moscow held at the imposing Chocolate Factory last Wednesday. Diana Picasso, the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso; Stavros Niarchos Jr and Eugenie Niarchos, grandchildren of the shipping tycoon and art collector Stavros Niarchos; and Charlotte Sarkozy, sister-in-law of the French President, joined with some of Russia's richest art collectors - Lev Blavatnik, Mikhail Fridman and Viktor Pinchuk - to sip champagne, watch a motorcycle performance, eat dinner and listen to music by DJ Paul Sevigny.
Roman Abramovich was not there but his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova posed happily for photographers on the arm of Larry Gagosian whose former director, Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, now works as a consultant for Miss Zhukova's art projects. Details of any sales, however, were kept very much under wraps.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/09/22/banews122.xml