Once, sales from the Saatchi collection like Tracey Emin’s £2.5 million pounds bed made big news at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Nowadays, disposals tend to take place at smaller salerooms with less profit involved. 

One of these is Roseberys in west Norwood which last March sold remnants of the Saatchi & Saatchi collection – the corporate collection which had acquired some of the works from Charles Saatchi. Among those were 1980s sculptures by artists represented by the Lisson Gallery which promoted the fashionable “new British sculpture” that monopolised the Turner Prize at the time. But now they looked dated and sold for just a few thousand pounds each. Similarly dated were four cut metal sculptures by Bill Woodrow that would have sold for over £20,000 in their day and were estimated at just £1,000. Perhaps fortunately for the artist they were withdrawn before the sale. 

Next week, works of a different kind from the Saatchi collection take their bow at Roseberys, but without the Saatchi provenance being identified. One is a larger-than-life painting made by the celebrity kitchen sink artist, John Bratby, in 1956, the year he was in the Venice Biennale, depicting his wife, the painter Jean Cooke, holding a baby. Saatchi bought it in 2003 when it was priced at £15,000, a big price at the time; it is now estimated at £3,000. 

Another Bratby, a 12-foot-wide 1958 painting of a model repeated six times, had been bought by Saatchi for his spacious County Hall gallery with a £20,000 asking price and is now estimated at £6,000. Bratby’s best prices are for paintings with celebrity connections – a portrait of Michael Caine (£31,000) and a painting of a Venetian Canal from David Bowie’s collection (£30,000). Whether an unpublished Saatchi provenance can play that role remains to be seen. 

A third work, bought by Saatchi but not promoted as such by Roseberys, is a painting of Princess Diana by the former stripper turned artist, Stella Vine. “Hi Paul,” she wrote on the painting referring to Paul Burrell, the Princess’s butler, “Can you come over, I’m really frightened.” It cost Saatchi a reported £600 pounds in 2004 and is estimated to fetch no more now. Vine’s paintings shot up to £10,000 at auction after the sale to Saatchi, with buyers like pop star Florence Welch in the mix. But fashion fluctuates and recently prices under £1,000 for Vine at auction have been the norm. 

International influences on modern British art

An exhibition at this month’s British Art Fair in the Saatchi Gallery will look at over fifty artists who arrived in Britain from all points of the compass during the 20^th century, transforming the country’s cultural identity into one of the most diverse in the world. 

The narrative begins in the late nineteenth century as Jewish families escaped antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, among them those of Alfred Wolmark, Mark Gertler, Clara Klinghoffer and David Bomberg. The best known of these is Bomberg, who became a leading modernist before World War I and an inspirational teacher to the likes of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Bomberg has hit £1.4 million at auction and a vertiginous view of a street in Spain by him in this exhibition will be priced nearer £150,000. 

Auerbach, who arrived from Nazi Germany aged 8, reportedly via the child rescue operation, kinderstransport, has just had a sell-out exhibition of his latest paintings and hit a record £5.6 million at auction this summer. The exhibition will have less expensive prints and drawings of his.   

Commercially underrated artists in the show who escaped from Nazi overrun Europe as children in the late 1930s were Peter Kinley, who arrived on his own aged 12, and Peter Schmidt who was just 7 when he fled Germany with his mother, later becoming musical director of the groundbreaking Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968. 

From India in 1949 came one of the leading post war artists, sometimes referred to as “the Indian Picasso”, Francis Newton Souza. Well represented in British museum collections, the market for his expressive figuration was next to zero when he died in 2002 but has since been backed by wealthy Indian collectors who have driven his prices into the millions of pounds. 

Two of the liveliest markets here are for Pakistani artists Anwar Shemza  and Rasheed Araeen who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s. Shemza came to study at the Slade but didn’t like the way Islamic art was regarded as purely functional and sought inspiration from the Islamic rooms in the British Museum instead. Now his work is the subject of a special display there, “a reminder,” says the museum, “of the role of South Asian artists in British art history.” In the market, Shemza’s prices have shot up to six figures in the last three years. 

Araeen has been more important as a polemicist, curating the seminal Hayward Gallery 1989 exhibition The Other Story,  which highlighted the work of racially and aesthetically marginalised artists in Britain. Rarely appearing at auction, his  small constructions reach 25,000 pounds and large early works, such as one in this exhibition which relates to his recent installation in the Turbine Hall, can sell for six figure sums at international art fairs.    

The Windrush generation of artists from the Caribbean has been highlighted recently in the Tate Show, Life Between Islands, from which the abstract expressionist, Aubrey Williams is clearly one to watch. Williams is the subject of a solo display currently at Tate Britain and in the last few years his auction prices have been rising consistently,  commanding prices nearer £70,000 on the private market.  

Also in Life Between Islands and in this exhibition are many lesser-known Caribbean British artists with little auction history like Tam Joseph, whose paintings can sell for six figures privately, Paul Dash, whose work has recently entered the Tate collection, and can sell for similar amounts, and John Lyons, who won the Arts Council Windrush Arts Achievement Award this year. 

Turning south and east, there are artists on the up, driven largely by demand from their home countries. Richard Lin, for instance, who was sent to public school in England from Taiwan and painted in a restrained minimalist style, enjoyed  limited commercial success until shortly before his death in 2011 when he had returned to Taiwan and Taiwanese collectors decided to repatriate his work sending prices from four to seven figures by 2018. 

Then there are others who have barely started the ascent to market recognition. The outstanding example is Denis Bowen. Born in South Africa in 1921 he was brought up in England and studied at the Royal College of Art. In 1955 he set up the New Vision Centre Gallery in London that promoted artists of Asian and African origin who struggled with discrimination, such as Souza and Williams. His own art, influenced by French tachism and absorbed by a fascination with cosmology, took a back seat, from which it is still waiting to emerge.   

Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, co-curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen and Colin Gleadell is at the British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery 28 Sept – 1 Oct