London, September 2016: Sotheby’s Made in Britain auction is a vibrant celebration of the diversity and creativity of British art from 1900 to the present day, across Fine Art, Prints, Sculpture, Photography, Studio Ceramics, and Design. The sale encompasses over 200 striking artworks by sought-after artists including Grayson Perry, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst to name but a handful. The eclectic exhibition goes on view to the public on 23 September - starring modern muses in Pop Art, photographs from the Swinging Sixties, colourful Post-War canvases and Contemporary prints perfect for a new buyer’s first foray into collecting - ahead of the auction on 28 September.

MODERN MUSES
The auction presents stunning images of the icons of style that have inspired photographers and artists throughout the 20th-century.
Chris Levine’s luminous photographs of Kate Moss are rare depictions of one of the greatest muses of a generation; the pulsating, meditative energy of Levine’s iconic style capturing the radiant glow of a cultural icon. Levine seeks to illuminate the power inherent in stillness and although his subjects are among the most photographed people in the world, he has a knack for capturing them at rest, as if in the calm of a storm. This work follows his celebrated photograph of The Queen with her eyes closing in 2004.
Reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s graphic celebrity portraiture, namely the Marilyn Monroe portfolio of 1967, Banksy’s Kate Moss, 2011 (illustrated p.1, est. £30,000-50,000) recreates an iconic Pop image. Banksy is renowned for critiquing contemporary society and questioning consumer culture through his art, and in this series he comments on how celebrity culture has changed and how public figures can become immortalised through art.

In the same year as Banksy’s depiction, Marc Quinn rendered the model in three dimensions in his spray-painted bronze multiple, Sleeping Beauty (est. £5,000-7,000). When asked what it was that drew him to sculpting celebrities, Quinn replied: ‘It's about wanting to make art about our time. If you were an artist in ancient Greece, you'd make a sculpture of Aphrodite. An artist now with the same idea would make one of Kate Moss. The sculpture of Kate Moss is not that of a real person, it’s a cultural hallucination, an image of perfection we live up to.' Lord Patrick Litchfield’s photograph captures the Queen off-duty on board the HMY Britannia (est. £800-1,200). Lichfield was a cousin of the Queen, and thus privy to far more private shots of her. In 1971, he was invited to join the royal party for a section of the Queen’s Far Eastern tour, in order to produce photographs to mark her Silver Wedding anniversary in November 1972. During the trip, Lichfield was dunked in the pool: ‘But’, he wrote, ‘I did have the wit to take a waterproof camera with me and when I came up for about the third time, I took a picture of The Queen up on the bridge laughing at me.’ Brian Duffy’s photograph of David Bowie (est. £8,000-12,000) was the result of a magical photographic shoot for the cover of Aladdin Sane, Bowie’s 1973 album – an iconic image of a man whose visual style influenced a generation. The sale also presents a plethora of images of Marilyn Monroe, from an oil and collage work by Pop Artist Sir Peter Blake (illustrated above right, est. £18,000-25,000) to photographs by Sir Cecil Beaton and Eve Arnold.
Arnold was the first woman to be admitted into the esteemed photo agency Magnum, photographing many of the iconic figures who shaped the second half of the 20th-century. Monroe only came to the UK once in her lifetime, for four months in the summer of 1956. In this photograph (est. £8,000-12,000) she is shown at a press meeting at the Ritz during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier.

SCHOOL OF LONDON & COLLECTION OF RAYMOND JONES
In 1976 the artist R.B. Kitaj coined the term ‘School of London’ to describe a group of artists working in London who pursued forms of figurative painting in the face of the ever-growing strength of avant-garde and abstract movements. At its heart stood Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Lucian Freud. A strong selection of works by these artists is led by Lucian Freud’s print Blond Girl from 1985 (est. £20,000-40,000).

In the 1960s, Freud’s portraits caught the eye of the fashionable interior decorator Raymond Jones, and Jones’ purchase of a Freud portrait of his lover George Dyer brought the pair into contact with each other. Freud was fascinated by Jones – his quirky, mischievous character and flowing Pre- Raphaelite hair – and he soon became the subject of a number of highly individual portraits, including Naked Man With Rat – his first depicting a male nude. Each day, the rat was dosed with sleeping tablets dissolved into a dog’s bowl of Veuve Cliquot, keeping it docile for nine months until the work was completed. It was because of this that Jones earned the nickname ‘Rat Man’, as seen in Rat Man (Portrait of Raymond) (illustrated left, est. £4,000- 6,000) – a gift to Jones drawn on a diary page from 1978, the year the artist painted Jones again in Naked Man With His Friend. The sale includes works given from Freud to Jones, including Mornington Crescent (est. £3,000-5,000) by Frank Auerbach.