Dealers are offering an estimated 100 million pounds of works. Stephen Ongpin is asking 190,000 pounds for Alberto Giacometti's 1954 pencil drawing of the writer James Lord. Colnaghi has priced a 1768 George Stubbs painting of an unidentified man with a horse in river landscape at 1 million euros ($1.26 million).
Masterpiece Sale
Elsewhere, a Rodin bronze of "The Kiss" has been snapped up at the Masterpiece London fair as dealers and auction houses offer more than $313 million of works in the final week of summer art sales in the U.K. capital.
Now in its third year, Masterpiece is billed as the U.K. capital's equivalent of the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, with the addition of luxury brands such as Rolls- Royce cars, Ruinart champagne and Vacheron Constantin watches. Catering is by the Caprice Group.
More than 160 dealers are exhibiting in a 100,000-square- foot (9,290 square meters) temporary structure on the Chelsea Embankment. Sheikh Saud al Thani of Qatar and Charles Saatchi were among 5,175 VIP visitors at the June 27 preview of the weeklong fair.
"It looked beautiful," Morgan Long, director of art investment at the London-based Fine Art Fund, said in an interview. "It's still a bit more glitz than substance, though. I'd seen quite a lot of the paintings before. The fair isn't yet drawing international people in the way that Maastricht does."
London-based Sladmore Gallery sold a bronze of "The Kiss," cast during Rodin's lifetime, to a Swiss collector for $2 million. A Middle East client bought a pair of diamond and emerald earrings by the bespoke Parisian jeweler JAR from Symbolic & Chase of Bond Street for $500,000.
A hand-signed 1895 lithograph of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" -- one of just 26 made -- is being offered by the Oslo- based dealer Kaare Berntsen, priced at 1.7 million pounds ($2.7 million). The fair runs through tomorrow.
Pace Space
Pace Gallery is the latest New York contemporary-art dealership to announce that it's opening a space in London to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair in October.
Pace has commissioned the U.K. architect David Chipperfield to renovate a 9,000-square-foot gallery in the west wing of 6 Burlington Gardens, part of the Royal Academy of Arts. The space was previously occupied by Christie's dealership, Haunch of Venison.