Yahoo Finance Outsider art makes its mark in Newcastle
Newcastle auctioneers, Anderson & Garland, stole a march on the big London auction rooms last week by selling the ‘Outsider’ art collection of Christian-Leopold Heppe for a double estimate £650,000, setting several records in the process. In a clever marketing exercise, they distributed the catalogue to every exhibitor at last week’s Outsider Art Fair in Paris.
Heppe, a Hampshire-based polo-playing collector who sold the natural spring water (which he named Hildon) from his garden, died last year.
The 200-strong collection, which focussed on artists who underwent psychiatric therapy at the Maria Gugging clinic near Vienna, did not attract much local attention; there were barely fifteen people in the room when as many telephone bidders from Europe, Argentina and North America contested ‘Raven Food’, a drawing by Louis Soutter whose eccentric behaviour landed him in an asylum in Switzerland. It sold well above the £3,000 estimate for £54,600.
Comparisons could be made with last year’s David Bowie sale where Outsider artists made record prices, but the Heppe sale held its own. A coloured crayon drawing of figures against a narrative text background by Johann Fischer, a baker-turned artist, was very similar to an example in Bowie’s collection which had been acquired in 1997 for approximately £1,000 and sold last year for £8,750 . The upward price momentum continued in Newcastle as the Heppe example sold for £11,440 – a record for a single drawing by the artist at auction.
Another intern at the Gugging Clinic who had caught Bowie’s eye was the schizophrenic Oswald Tschirtner. Heppe owned twenty of his works, including several Lowry-like elongated figures, which all sold above estimate, a two-metre high example fetching a record £10,140 for a drawing. Also collected by both was August Walla, a schizophrenic whose mother had dressed him as a girl from childhood to escape the military draft. Heppe’s coloured crayon self-portrait of Walla as a Russian girl, raced above a £1,000 estimate to sell for £10,140 – a record for a work on paper by Walla.
Other records were set for a painting by the former tailor and Dubuffet protege, Michel Nedjar, and Gugging interns Philipp Schopke, Otto Prinz, and Franz Kerbeis.
There are still, however, unpredictable elements in this young market. Bidding was global but was dominated by five or six buyers, said auctioneer, John Anderson. This resulted in a certain inconsistency. Two expected highlights by Gugging artist, Ida Buchmann, only made half their estimate. Half of the 26 paintings by psychiatrist’s son, Walter Navratil, who grew up in Gugging, went unsold as did all of Gugging artist, Arnold Schmidt’s drawings.
The sale total also benefitted from non-Outsiders whom Heppe collected. Several bronze (not brick) sculptures by Danish artist Per Kirkeby, for example, all sold above inviting estimates, a large head seemingly for an auction record £67,600. So how much of a general endorsement of ‘Outsider’ art values the sale represents is difficult to quantify.
