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Market News: A suitcase full of Dine

A once-in-a-lifetime haul of Jim Dine artworks goes on sale while Fairground art comes under the spotlight as Colin Gleadell rounds up this week’s art market news

BY COLIN GLEADELL

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014 07:30

The contents of a suitcase full of artworks by American artist Jim Dine, found in a dustbin in upmarket Chester Square, in London’s Belgravia, in 1970, is to go on sale at the Lapada Art & Antiques fair in nearby Berkeley Square next week. The case was rescued by the artist’s then landlady, Princess Sylvia Guirey and put into storage, where it stayed until 2012 when it was rediscovered and purchased by antiques dealer Peter Woodward.

“This collection is a once-in-a-lifetime find,” says Woodward. “It allows us to look behind the scenes, not at finished works on gallery walls, but at Dine’s working practices, his thought processes and his life in a wider sense.”

Departing from some of the styles and subjects that characterise Dine’s earlier output, the works – mainly working sketches for print blocks – represent a turning point in the artist’s career, moving towards the quieter more controlled techniques seen in the Sixties and Seventies. Included is an initialled sketch believed to be a working drawing relating to Dine’s infamous London exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in 1966 which was raided by police who deemed the artworks “indecent”.

There will also be photographs, letters and postcards, poems and manuscripts personally dedicated to Dine from poets Adrian Henri and Ron Padgett, as well as objects such as used brushes and pencils. The suitcase and its contents are to be offered for £100,000.

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/colin-gleadell/