De Kooning and Richter hit the block at Phillips for £24mn

The French collector Marcel Brient is selling two of his big-ticket 20th-century abstract paintings at Phillips in London on March 2. An untitled 1984 oil by Willem de Kooning comes with an estimate of £7mn-£9mn and Gerhard Richter’s “Mathis” (1983) will be offered for between £10mn and £15mn.

Painted within a year of each other, each shows the artist’s trajectory at the time. “You have the bold, youthful exuberance of an artist at the beginning of his career [Richter] and the more elegiac or quietly poetic meditation of an artist approaching the end of his life [de Kooning],” Brient says.

Brient moved to Paris from Algeria when a young man, initially working as a mechanical apprentice, and started collecting art with modest means. He has sold work before, mostly to fund his art-buying habit and now, he says, he has “reached a certain age” when it is time to let go of other works. Not much is known about Brient’s collection, but Cheyenne Westphal, global chair of Phillips, confirms his 20th-century works focus on art from Germany and the US from the 1980s, while rare books and pieces of design also feature. Neither the de Kooning nor the Richter has a guarantee to sell, Westphal confirms.

A collection of more than 80 Modern and contemporary works from the Middle East, valued at about £1mn, comes to sale at Sotheby’s in London on April 25. Its seller is Abdulrahman Al Zayani, who runs a jewellery advisory service and who is from a prominent banking and investment family in Bahrain.

Al Zayani began buying art from several countries in the region in 2006, “when the market was nascent, and now it is mature”, says Ashkan Baghestani, Sotheby’s contemporary art specialist. He identifies a “rare mix” of 20th-century and more recent works, such as a 1959 painting by the Egyptian artist Gazbia Sirry — “The Garden”, bought for £81,250 in 2017 and estimated at the same “enticing” level in April — and the more recent “Disembodied 5” (2012) by the Baghdad-born Hayv Kahraman, estimated around £60,000.

Al Zayani says the sale is about “opening a new chapter”, though Baghestani confirms that the collector remains interested in Middle Eastern art. Highlights of the collection go on view in Dubai from February 28 to March 4.

Rebecca Ann Siegel, the previous director of Frieze in Los Angeles and New York, is launching a strategic consulting agency for cultural businesses, in partnership with another fair alum, Matt Holt, who as Frieze’s business development officer helped launch the LA and Seoul fairs. Siegel is based in New York and Holt in London, hence their new company is called Atlantic Arts Agency. The move is part of a trend to address the need for structures and partnerships that are futureproof, which have become more apparent since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. “This is a pivotal time and we’ve all seen that sometimes the best intentions are not sufficient,” Siegel says. She confirms that Atlantic already has five projects on the go, including supporting an international gallery’s expansion in New York and a London museum with its positioning and partnerships.

Is Bonhams for sale again? Reports that the auction house’s private equity owner, Epiris, has hired JPMorgan Chase bank to gauge buyer interest remain unconfirmed, despite enquiries. According to people familiar with the matter cited in a Bloomberg article, the owners are touting a $1bn valuation for the auction house. Epiris bought Bonhams in 2018 for an estimated (though never confirmed) £200mn. True or not, it seems a good time to start flushing out interest — after a string of acquisitions in the past two years, Bonhams reported its highest ever annual turnover of $1bn for 2022.

Two of the founders of the now-cancelled Masterpiece fair, antiques dealer Thomas Woodham-Smith and fair builder Harry Van der Hoorn, have taken a summer slot at the Chelsea Royal Hospital to launch a replacement multidisciplinary event. In 2017, Masterpiece was sold to Art Basel’s owners, MCH Group, which retains the Masterpiece brand.

The new, smaller and shorter event is rather prosaically called the London Summer Art Fair and will run from June 22-26. This year’s fair should benefit from the participation of the many dealers, particularly in the UK, who were sorry to see Masterpiece go.

MCH Group had cited the rising costs for service providers in the UK, coupled with a decline in exhibitors from Europe since Brexit, as reasons for its surprise cancellation of Masterpiece. Woodham-Smith says that while Masterpiece was conceived as a “no-expense-spared” event, it is time to look at fairs with fresh eyes and “still deliver something fantastic”, though he says that “neither of us expect to retire on the profits”.

The pair already run a Chelsea art fair: in 2019 they bought an 80 per cent stake in the annual event for middle-market dealers run by the British Antique Dealers’ Association and renamed it the Open Art Fair. At the time of writing, this was still due to run from April 19-23, but Woodham-Smith says he is struggling to get exhibitors to sign up this year.

Kamiar Maleki has become director of Photo London, taking over from Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, who co-founded the event in 2015. (Farshad is Maleki’s aunt by marriage.) They initially stepped down from directing the fair in 2019 and hired Roderick van der Lee, founder of Amsterdam’s Unseen Photo Fair, but he left when the London fair was postponed in 2020.

Maleki’s art-fair expertise is in the contemporary field — he was previously director of Volta and, before that, of Contemporary Istanbul. He says he wants to inject some “new-age tech” into Photo London, including NFTs and photography powered by artificial intelligence. Maleki, who joined this week, says: “I’m a hard worker and a hustler, and looking forward to the opportunity.” Photo London runs from May 10-14 at Somerset House.

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