The story of how London grew to become an artwork capital can’t be advised, critic John Berger as soon as wrote, as a result of “there are too many well-kept secrets.” That quote marks the start of ex-Sotheby’s chairman James Stourton’s guide Rogues and Students: A Historical past of the London Artwork World: 1945-2000 (2025), which takes us inside an business famously performed by way of interpersonal relationships, drive of persona, and so-called “gentlemen’s agreements.”
Stourton’s try and create a complete historical past of this era is due to this fact largely oral and unverifiable. It was constructed by interviewing gallery and public sale employees previous and current; concrete proof is strictly restricted to documented gross sales and auctions, and areas opening and shutting on X or Y road. Amongst dozens of names listed within the acknowledgments, Stourton expresses gratitude to Jonathan Harris specifically for opening his (bulging) black guide of contacts. What follows is a litany of eccentric, peculiarly British caricatures. Impossibly named individuals like Ridley Cromwell Leadbeater ran the entrance counter of Christie’s, described as a “mixture of club hall porter and family butler,” and shoppers like a sure Mr. Dent gave items comparable to a toffee apple to Sotheby’s Chairman Peter Wilson. And, sure, the late artwork critic Brian Sewell actually did speak like that.
E book cowl of James Stourton, Rogues and ScholarsA Historical past of the London Artwork World: 1945-2000 (2025), revealed by Pegasus Books
The guide tells purely anecdotal accounts of how sellers acquired the higher of each other. Within the late Fifties, upon listening to rumor of a Corot supplied at a home sale in Somerset, Monty Bernart — whom Stourton describes as “a lovable and respected rogue” — apparently bribed the driving force of a prepare carrying himself and different sellers to bypass a cease in order that he might hop off the automobile and arrive first. These seeking to actually get a really feel for the period will discover these anecdotes exhilarating, like illicit gossip exchanged over a pint — and finally exhausting. Oral historical past by nature is honed over a number of tellings (or a number of pints, for enterprise additionally occurred on the pub or restaurant). The ensuing tales make for tantalizing tales, however can generally stretch credulity. Are we actually to consider, as an illustration, that an unnamed feminine auctioneer at Robson Lowe within the Fifties advised a “revered” shopper to cease speaking throughout a sale by “hitting him very hard on the nose with her auctioneer’s hammer?”
For all of the voices quoted, Stourton is loudly absent. Maybe it’s his prior position as Sotheby’s chairman, or his assumed position of artwork historian, that retains him from commenting, apart from the odd — and really noticeable — interjection, comparable to calling Dede Brooks, the CEO of Sotheby’s New York within the Nineties, a “despot.” Certainly, we might detect a latent bias on this guide: He spends the majority of his narrative describing the duopoly of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and doesn’t even introduce Bonhams as an public sale home till two-thirds of the best way into the guide, after chapters on the commerce of furnishings, silverware, and Victoriana.
Antony Armstrong-Jones, {photograph} of the administrators of Agnew’s public sale home in 1963, with Sir Geoffrey Agnew second from the proper
Stourton additionally betrays a reluctance to dig deeper into impropriety. Sewell, who labored at Christie’s, described twin economies: the glamour of upstairs salesrooms, and the downstairs “black economy” of employees paid so poorly they relied on ideas and bribes. Stourton dwells on this declare solely so long as it takes to deflect it, writing: “There is no doubt that Sotheby’s and other auction houses were similar in this respect.” Many anecdotes are advised with the air of a shrug and an implied rationalization that “it was another era,” such because the seller who referred to as his Benin bronze “bulgy eyes.” To his credit score, nonetheless, Stourton does commit a chapter to the collusion scandal between Sotheby’s and Christie’s in 1997.
Most illuminatingly, the best existential menace to the public sale homes seems to not come up from impropriety — even after the 1997 scandal, Stourton factors out, “recovery was remarkably fast … with little long-term damage” — however from regulation and compelled transparency. It speaks volumes, as an illustration, that each Christie’s and Sotheby’s tried to suppress the reporting of Occasions gross sales author Geraldine Norman for calling into query practices public sale homes stay by: utilizing faux names to put bids; asserting the value for every lot no matter whether or not it bought or not; or, most prevalent right now, eradicating unsold heaps from public sale home web sites.
This historical past, with its unverifiable accounts, goes some solution to impart the flavour of how public sale homes function, a results of traditions cast in again rooms and between phrases of honor (or not). But to name it “Rogues and Scholars” reduces an immeasurably advanced beast right into a binary, virtually trivializing “good” and “bad” — for all its riotously colourful characters, it stays a murky business certainly.
Left: Geraldine Norman (undated); proper: John Kasmin at his London gallery (undated)
The sale of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1887) at Christie’s in 1987, which grew to become the costliest portray on the earth on the time when it bought for £24,750,000
Rogues and Students: A Historical past of the London Artwork World: 1945-2000 (2025), written by James Stourton and revealed by Pegasus Books, is accessible for on-line and in bookstores.