You may remember that quite a few posts ago I wrote that Texan model Jerry Hall (ex Mrs Jagger) had decided to put some of her art collection up for auction last month (the post is here). The collection which included paintings by Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and Warhol were sold at auction on the 16th October at Sotheby’s auction house London and Jerry cleaned up!
‘Eight Month Gone’, a portrait of Hall painted by Lucien Freud when Hall was 8 months pregnant with her 4th child sold for £601.250 (the original estimate being £300,000-£400,000).
A Frank Auerbach painting, ‘Head of Helen Gillespie’ was bought by Hall in 1997, estimated at between £700,000 and £900,000 actually went for £1,071,650 – $1.76 million) (proved to be a good investment indeed!
Another picture by the artist entitled Quinces took £313,250 against a forecast of £150,000-£200,000.
Hall was given an acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas Dollar sign by Warhol in 1982. It has the inscription ‘To Jerry’ and was estimated to be worth between 120,000 pounds to 150,000 pounds. Of the 14 pieces of art offered by Hall for auction – four remained unsold, but I can’t find any information to what they were.
Jerry has famously said that her reason for selling the paintings was to ‘move on’ from that particular episode of her life and put the past behind her. She calls it ‘movin on’ in the auction’s catalogue, “At a certain age you just want to get rid of things,” she says. I suppose by parting with these – she really does mean what she says!
Echostains Blog 
WOW! Guess I will just have to be satidfied by staring at my Lucien Freud book and seeing his art in a traveling show sometime….Love his work!
Hhehe! I wonder who bought that portrait? and I wonder which four paintings weren’t sold (and why?)
Hmm. I guess I’m on the outside of enjoying any of these. Not my idea of eye candy. To be frank, I find these ‘repulsive’–LOL–sorry, that’s the truth! No accounting for subjective taste though, right?
I like them- especially the Freud portrait one. The thing about Auerbach is that his work does not translate to print or screen at all well. ‘The head of Gerda Boehm’ http://tinyurl.com/385h6lh
is one of favorite paintings and you really have to see it in real life to appreciate what Auerbach is trying to do. It is more than an ‘essence’, it is quite remarkable. My least favorite is Freud’s Quinces – they do nothing for me. Yeah art is down to subjective taste – but thats a good thing 😉
I know that seeing work in person does change one’s perspective, so I’ll keep that in mind, Lynda, if the opportunity to view any of these presents itself. Thanks.
Hheh to each his own – and I wouldn’t have it any other way:-) Art makes the world go round (a bit more scenically!)
Good for Jerry for moving on. Having expensive and important art sounds like such a responsibility. I remember seeing an Auerbach exhibition and enjoyed how thickly they were painted. Her choice of artists is so reflective of a particular era.
You saw Auerbach! I don’t know which you saw, but when I saw The Head of Gerda Boehm I burst into tears. That woman was BENEATH the paint – I could actually feel what he did. I’ll never forget it – it was a very moving experience.
You have put your finger on the nub of the matter – the era, art of that era – the era she was getting away from……. I suppose the money might come in handy too:-) though I don’t doubt her reason for getting rid of these memories.
We should all buy paintings for each year of our life – then get rid if we’ve had a bad year:-) this could be very thereputic – and maybe lucretive!
Lynda, the Auerbach show I saw was at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978 which coincided with a Jasper Johns retrospective. Two good shows for the price of one! I was unfamiliar with Auerbach’s work prior to that and I can remember thinking at the time that I had never seen an artist paint so thickly!
This is his respective I attended at The Royal Academy in 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/sep/15/arts.highereducation1
Auerbach’s sitters sit sometimes hundreds of times for him. Each time he will scrape the paint right back and start again. He must either do this a lot – or just decide to go for it, to get to this thickness 😀
He has been known to buy back and destroy any painting that he isn’t happy with:-0 plus he works every day and allows himself one days holiday a year. dedication eh:-)