雅思（阅读）模拟试卷129
综合题
Affordable Art
Art prices have fallen drastically. The art market is being flooded with good material, much of it from big-name artists, including Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. Many pieces sell for less than you might expect, with items that would have made £20,000 two years ago fetching only £5,000 to £10,000 this autumn, according to Philip Hoffman, chief executive of the Fine Art Fund. Here, we round up what is looking cheap now, with a focus on works in the range of £500 to £10,000.
Picasso is one of the most iconic names in art, yet some of his ceramics and lithographs fetched less than £1,000 each at Bonhams on Thursday. The low prices are because he produced so many of them. However, their value has increased steadily and his works will only become scarcer as examples are lost.
Nic McElhatton, the chairman of Christie\’s South Kensington, says that the biggest \’affordable\’ category for top artists is \’multiples\’ — prints such as screen prints or lithographs in limited editions. In a Christie\’s sale this month, examples by Picasso, Matisse, Miro and Steinlen sold for less than £5,000 each.
Alexandra Gill, the head of prints at the auction house, says that some prints are heavily hand-worked, or often coloured, by the artist, making them personalised. \’Howard Hodgkin\’s are a good example,\’ she says. \’There\’s still prejudice against prints, but for the artist it was another, equal, medium.\’
Mr Hoffman believes that these types of works are currently about as \’cheap as they can get\’ and will hold their value in the long nm — though he admits that their sheer number means prices are unlikely to rise any time soon.
It can be smarter to buy really good one-offs from lesser-known artists, he adds. A limited budget will not run to the blockbuster names you can obtain with multiples, but it will buy you work by Royal Academicians (RAs) and others whose pieces are held in national collections and who are given long write-ups in the art history books. For example, the Christie\’s sale of art from the Lehman Brothers collection on Wednesday will include Valley with cornflowers in oil by Anthony Gross (22 of whose works are held by the Tate), at £1,000 to £1,500. There is no reserve on items with estimates of £1,000 or less, and William Porter, who is in charge of the sale, expects some lots to go for \’very little\’. The sale also has oils by the popular Mary Fedden (whose works are often reproduced on greetings cards), including Spanish House and The White Hyacinth, at £7,000 to £10,000 each.
Large works by important Victorian painters are available in this sort of price range, too. These are affordable because their style has come to be considered \’uncool\’, but they please a large traditionalist following nonetheless. For example, the sale of 19th-century paintings at Bonhams on Wednesday has a Hampstead landscape by Frederick William Watts at £6,000 to £8,000 and a study of three Spanish girls by John Bagnold Burgess at £4,000 to £6,000. There are proto-social realist works depicting poverty, too, such as Uncared For by Augustus Edwin Mulready, at £10,000 to £15,000.
Smaller auction houses offer a mix of periods and media. Tuesday\’s sale at Chiswick Auctions
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