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Metro
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
'I bought painting a for £35 - it was the find of a lifetime worth £50,000'
Art blogger Robjn bought more than 30 paintings during a 'trolley dash' at an auction house in the east of England back in 2020, hunting for lost treasures. Among his finds, he was particularly excited to pick up a painting by Vera Cunningham — which came bundled with another piece, a sort of by-product — for just £35. But on the latest episode of the BBC's Fake or Fortune, Robjn was stunned to discover that the so-called 'by-product' is actually a forgotten original by Frances Hodgkins, worth around £50,000. 'I did wonder if it was the painting of a schoolchild when I first saw it,' he told Metro. 'I didn't really think much of it, just shoved it into an air-conditioned barn, and it went into my storage area to be forgotten.' The picture in question is almost certainly a missing painting called October Landscape, once exhibited at London's Lefevre Gallery in 1943. It later became part of the Hertfordshire Pictures for Schools collection — an initiative aimed at displaying real works by real artists in schools, rather than reproductions or prints, to encourage a post-war generation to appreciate art and make it accessible to all children, not just the elite. Robjn writes a blog about the paintings he's purchased from this collection and had previously attributed the piece to Vera Cunningham, describing it simply as a 'garden scene.' Later, he received an email from a reader who insisted the painting was actually by Hodgkins and urged him to investigate. Luckily, Robjn took their advice. Fake or Fortune, hosted by Fiona Bruce and renowned art dealer Philip Mould, follows members of the public who suspect they might be sitting on a hidden treasure. It's a total lottery — some leave disappointed, while others, like Robjn, discover they own a valuable original, in this case, by one of the most revolutionary female artists of the 20th century, whose work was once exhibited alongside that of Pablo Picasso. Here are five top tips for any budding art dealers out there courtesy of Fake or Fortune's own Phillip Mould… The back can often tell you more than the front – I'm talking about labels, I'm talking about auction history, what people might have inscribed or written on something. That's one of the ways that you can be led to an interesting artist. Was your great-granddad known to have collected art? Was he someone with an eye? Or did he just pick up what was closest to him and bang it on the wall? I know it's an obvious thing to say, but all contributors have normally gone online and Googled the artist before they get to us. If you've got an artist's name or a potential artist name, look to see other works by that artist. Just use your own eye, compare what you're looking at with what you're seeing on the screen. Be aware that fakers will sometimes base a work exactly on a known painting in the public domain. Ask yourself that question, 'Am I actually being duped by a replica of something that the Faker or a faker has seen?' Get advice from someone who knows or ask a regional auction House. Regional houses are now doing better than they ever have before. You could always walk something around to a regional auction house and get a view. They might or might not be able to tell you the answer, but you're looking at people who've seen so much that they carry wisdom. Finally, once you think you might have something interesting, there is, of course, another way to find out, and that is to contact Fake or Fortune. For now, though, Robjn is adamant that his rare gem isn't for sale. In fact, it's not even on the wall. 'It's sat behind a pile of other pictures,' he says, slightly sheepish. 'The problem with buying things at auction is it's quite addictive. You find other pieces that interest you, and you just bounce from one level of interest to the next. So somewhere, behind a load of artists of the period, she's there — on the floor.' 'My walls are starting to resemble that old-fashioned Stella Artois ad set — just pictures everywhere. But it'll go up, eventually.' We're joined by Mould, who describes Robjn as a 'discerning hoarder'. 'You're not myopically hoarding, but you do it with discernment, and you have a great eye.' He tells Robjn. 'The reason that Robin has so many pictures is because he is a buyer who will take risks online and end up with just one painting in a knot, but a clutch.' As we speak, no one knew Robjn had embarked on such an extraordinary adventure — he hadn't told a soul about the discovery or the journey it took to get there. Authenticating the painting required an international team of investigators. Though largely forgotten in the UK, Hodgkins has seen a resurgence in her native New Zealand, where Mould notes she is considered 'one of their most important artists of the mid-20th century.' It was there that a copy of the painting was sent, and a team of experts confirmed emphatically that Robjn's find is indeed a genuine Hodgkins — and the long-lost October Landscape. Despite having uncovered many treasures in his time, Mould called this discovery particularly thrilling. 'I was licking my lips to get involved with an artist who already really excited me. This was bold and head-turning, technically skilled, clearly old — and all of that put together means I'm interested.' The process took weeks, but Robjn was so busy finishing a book about the Pictures for Schools scheme that he joked, 'A bomb could have gone off outside my house and I wouldn't have cared.' More Trending Even as the show's conclusion approached, Robjn remained cautious. 'I'm a pessimist by nature, so if you start with the idea that it's never going to work out, then you're never going to be disappointed,' he says. 'Since filming, I've forgotten about it, really. For many viewers, the show is all about wealth — but I bought the painting in 2020, and I've got to the end of this journey. To have it authenticated after trying for all those years is worth more than the value.' View More » Fake or Fortune? continues on August 11 at 9 pm on BBC1. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Strictly star investigated over drug use on show 'also suspected of drinking' MORE: Inside Jay Blades' career as The Repair Shop host charged with two counts of rape MORE: Chloe Ayling: 'The email that made me realise why people doubted my kidnapping'
New Statesman
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From the archive: Why Picasso?
Photo by Robert DOISNEAU/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images In 1954, the art critic John Berger went to the Lefevre Gallery, which then stood on London's King Street, to review a new exhibition of Picasso's work. Why is Picasso the most famous living artist in the world? Why does everything he does have such news value? Why do even those of us who are more seriously interested than the sensational press, go to a new Picasso exhibition hoping to be surprised? And why do we never come away disappointed? Take the present Picasso show at the Lefevre. It contains two jokes cast in bronze. One is an ape with a toy model car for a head, a vase for a belly and a piece of an iron bracket for a tail. The other is a bird with a head and plume made from a gas-tap, a tail from the blade of a small shovel and legs and feet from two kitchen forks. The fifteen paintings include some recent (1953) sketches of women's heads in which profile and full-face are dislocated and re-assembled together, a flippant canvas of a dog and a woman wrestling hammer and tongs on the floor, and two small pictures from the tragic series of women in hats painted during the German occupation – their faces brutally wrenched into shapes reminiscent of gas masks. There are no important works in the show. Yet it remains intensely memorable. Why? The easy answer is to say: because Picasso is a great artist – because he can set a model car in clay and somehow make it convincing as a head of an ape – because he can draw a goat's skull (No 20) with such finesse that one can feel every twist and turn worn away by the muscles. But to answer like that is to beg the question. It doesn't explain why the scrappiest work by Picasso is so disproportionately compelling, or why all his work is so much more immediately arresting than that of, say Matisse or Léger who in the long run will probably be seen to possess equal or even greater genius as painters. Those who petulantly and sceptically say 'You only admire it because it's been done by Picasso,' are in a way quite right. In front of Picasso's work one pays tribute above all to his personal spirit. The old argument about his political opinions on one hand and his art on the other is quite false. As Picasso himself admits, he has, as an artist, discovered nothing. What makes him great are not his individual works but his existence, his personality. That may sound obscure and perverse, but less so, I think, if one inquires further into the nature of his personality. Picasso is essentially an improviser. And if the word improvisation conjures up amongst other things, associations of the clown and the mimic – they also apply. Living through a period of colossal confusion in which so many values both human and cultural have disintegrated, Picasso has seized upon the bits, the fragments, the smithereens, and with magnificent defiance and vitality made something of them to amuse us, shock us, but primarily to demonstrate to us by the example of his spirit that within the confusion, out of the debris, new ideas, new values, new ways of looking at the world can and will develop. His achievement is not that he himself has developed these things, but that he has always been irrepressible, has never been at a loss. The romanticism of Toulouse-Lautrec, the classicism of Ingres, the crude energy of Negro sculpture, the heart searchings of Cézanne towards the truth about structure, the exposures of Freud – all these he has recognised, welcomed, pushed to bizarre conclusions, improvised on, sung through, in order to make us recognise our contemporary environment, in order (and here his role is very much like that of a clown) to make us recognise ourselves in the parody of a distorting mirror. In Guernica the parody was tragic; there, angrily and passionately, he improvised with the bits left over from a massacre: as in other paintings, also tragically, he improvises with features and limbs dislocated and made fragmentary by the dilemmas of our time. But the process, the way he works – not by sustained creative research but by picking up whatever is in front of him and turning it to account, the account of human ingenuity – is always the same. Even when as now he makes a bird from the scrap metal found in some cupboard. Obviously this shorthand view of Picasso oversimplifies, but it does, I think, answer the questions I began by asking. And also goes some way to explaining other facts about him: the element of caricature in all his work; the extraordinary confidence behind every mark he makes – it is the confidence of the born performer; the failure of all his disciples – if he were a profoundly constructive artist this would not be so; the amazing multiplicity of his styles; the sense that, by comparison with any other great artist, any single work by Picasso seems unfinished; the truth behind many of his enigmatic statements: 'In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing!' 'To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all!' Or, 'when I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The conclusions one can draw are these: that it is Picasso's simple and incredible vitality that is his secret – and here it is significant that I of all his works it is those that deal with animals that are most complete and profound in sympathy; that to future generations our estimate of Picasso, judged on the evidence of his works themselves, will seem exaggerated; and that we are absolutely right to hold this exaggerated view because it is the present existence of this spirit that we celebrate. [Further reading: From the archive: Empty rhetoric] Related
