Rogues and Scholars

A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000

James Stourton

A colorful and fast-moving account of how postwar London became the global center of the art market—a story of Impressionist masterpieces, dodgy dealers, and ground-breaking financial transactions.

On October 15, 1958, Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an "event sale” of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh, and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for £781,000—at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world center of the art market and Sotheby's as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and paved the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years.

Sotheby's had pulled off a massive coup by capturing the Impressionist market from Paris and New York—and now began its inexorable rise, opening offices all over the world. A huge expansion of the market followed, accompanied by rocketing prices, colorful scandals, and legal dramas. London transformed itself from a fusty place of old master painting sales to a revitalized center of contemporary art, crowned by the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. The Tate Modern successfully united new (and mostly foreign) money in London with the art world, offering its patrons a ready-made sophisticated social milieu alongside dealers in contemporary art.

In a vibrant and briskly-paced style, James Stourton tells the story of the London art market from the immediate postwar period to the turn of the millennium. While Sotheby's is the lynchpin of this story, Stourton populates his narrative with a glorious rogue's gallery of eccentric scholars, clever amateurs, brilliant emigrés, and stylish grandees with a flair for the deal.

James Stourton is a British art historian, a former chairman of Sotheby's UK, and the author of Kenneth Clark and Great Houses of London. Stourton frequently lectures to Cambridge University's History of Art Faculty, Sotheby's Institute of Education, and The Art Fund. He also sits on the Heritage Memorial Fund, a government panel that meets to decide what constitutes heritage and should be saved for the Britain nation. He lives in London.

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Endorsements & Reviews

“James Stourton offers a roller-coaster ride through the post-war London art market, an almost breathless account of dizzying ascents and dramatic plunges. This pacy and entertaining narrative belies an insider’s deep understanding and astute analysis of his subject.” Apollo Magazine

"A remarkable story of a bygone world, well told by an insider. A former chairman of Sotheby’s UK, Stourton knowledgeably takes readers behind the scenes and describes the emptying of great British estates, London’s swinging ’60s, the rise of contemporary art, the overdue restitution of antiquities, and finally the market’s ultimate demise thanks to the internet." Library Journal

“Former Sotheby’s chairman James Stourton shares an insider’s glimpse into the murkier corners of a ‘gentlemanly’ world. Subtle subterfuge was indicative of a larger free-for-all in the postwar art scene, as James Stourton describes with considerable wit and pace in Rogues and Scholars. The author’s wry prose livens up an arcane subject. His survey is illuminating, as well as erudite and amusing. Stourton succeeds in capturing the enduring allure of a largely unregulated and mercurial market.” The Financial Times

“Stourton lucidly discusses various pivotal points, scandals, triumphs, booms, busts and disasters along the way. The lively pace and vast cast list may leave some readers breathless, but what a treat for art-market insiders.” Country Life

"It is hard to think of a person more qualified to write this book. As an overview of the London art market, Stourton's book cannot be bettered. Above all, he shows how the same person can be both a scholar with extraordinary depths of knowledge and, when there is a really good deal to be done, a rogue." Literary Review

"James Stourton is an excellent art historian and brilliant storyteller; a heady combination that makes Rogues & Scholars the must-read art book of the year.” Will Gompertz, author of See What You're Missing: New Ways of Looking at the World Through Art

“Stourton’s book acts as an origin story for the momentous results—and shady intrigues—of the art world today. The author’s wry prose livens up an arcane subject. His survey is illuminating as well as erudite and amusing. Stourton succeeds in capturing the allure of a largely unregulated, mercurial market, one populated with go-betweens and fixers and peppered with beautiful things.” Apollo: The International Art Magazine

"A perceptive, authoritative, and highly readable account of the golden age of the British art market.” Philip Hook, author of Modern: Genius, Madness, and One Tumultuous Decade that Changed Art Forever

"With panache and characteristically elegant narrative skill, James Stourton throws open the doors to a riveting chapter in the history of art in which glamorous eccentricities, serious scholarship and a good deal of swindling cohabit. It is a story of gentlemen and of crooks, told through witty firsthand accounts about colorful characters sailing dangerously close to the wind. Stourton brings us a gripping and thoroughly researched chronicle of the post-war art market, punctuated with the occasional ‘you couldn’t make this up’ moment. Rogues & Scholars is just as entertaining as it is educational.” Wolf Burchard, curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Praise for Kenneth Clark:

"A crisp and authoritative biography [told] with grace and wit. A pre-eminent figure of cultural life during the twentieth century, Clark recognized that in dark times there is a yearning for serious art, music and literature.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times