Table by Diego Giacometti Makes Top Price at Bonhams

LONDON.- A table designed by Diego Giacometti sold for £106,000 at Bonhams, New Bond Street today (10 March 2010), as part of its Post War and Contemporary Art and Design sale. Entitled Table Torsade, and cast circa 1965, it had belonged to the late English actor James Mason (1909-1984) since the late1960s.

Austrian painter Arnulf Rainier’s Der Psychiatrist likewise far surpassed its estimate of £8,000 – 12,000, selling for a remarkable £54,000.

Gio Ponti 'Cabinet'. Photo: Courtesy Bonhams

Following a fierce bidding battle, David Hockney’s “Richard Neville Naked” sold for £27,600. The picture was used, alongside drawings of Neville’s co-editors of ‘Oz’ magazine, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis, to raise funds for the Oz obscenity trial in 1971, in which Neville, Anderson and Dennis were prosecuted for publishing a sexual Rupert Bear cartoon parody in an issue of the magazine edited by a group of school kids.

Other lots hotly contended for included Banksy’s “Lenin on Rollerblades”, 2003 which sold for £16,800, and Marc Quinn’s “Heliotrop Morphology”, 1997, which sold for £10,800.

An unrecorded fruitwood and vellum cabinet by one of the most important Italian architects and designers of the 20th century, Gio Ponti, sold for £14,400.

Meanwhile Richard Hamilton’s “The Release”, portraying Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, sold for £22,800 against a pre-sale estimate of £10,000 – 15,000 in the Pop and Op Art sale, also at Bonhams, New Bond Street.

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