The story of how London became an art capital cannot be told, critic John Berger once wrote, because “there are too many well-kept secrets.” That quote marks the beginning of ex-Sotheby’s chairman James Stourton’s book Rogues and Scholars: A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000 (2025), which takes us inside an industry famously conducted via interpersonal relationships, force of personality, and so-called “gentlemen’s agreements.”
Stourton’s attempt to create a comprehensive history of this period is therefore largely oral and unverifiable. It was constructed by interviewing gallery and auction staff past and present; concrete evidence is strictly limited to documented sales and auctions, and spaces opening and closing on X or Y street. Amongst dozens of names listed in the acknowledgments, Stourton expresses gratitude to Jonathan Harris in particular for opening his (bulging) black book of contacts. What follows is a litany of eccentric, peculiarly British caricatures. Impossibly named people like Ridley Cromwell Leadbeater ran the front counter of Christie’s, described as a “mixture of club hall porter and family butler,” and clients like a certain Mr. Dent gave gifts such as a toffee apple to Sotheby’s Chairman Peter Wilson. And, yes, the late art critic Brian Sewell really did talk like that.
A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000 (2025), published by Pegasus Books
The book tells purely anecdotal accounts of how dealers got the better of one another. In the late 1950s, upon hearing rumor of a Corot offered at a house sale in Somerset, Monty Bernart — whom Stourton describes as “a lovable and respected rogue” — apparently bribed the driver of a train carrying himself and other dealers to bypass a stop so that he could hop off the vehicle and arrive first. Those looking to really get a feel for the era will find these anecdotes exhilarating, like illicit gossip exchanged over a pint — and eventually exhausting. Oral history by nature is honed over multiple tellings (or multiple pints, for business also happened at the pub or restaurant). The resulting tales make for tantalizing stories, but can sometimes stretch credulity. Are we really to believe, for instance, that an unnamed female auctioneer at Robson Lowe in the 1950s told a “revered” client to stop talking during a sale by “hitting him very hard on the nose with her auctioneer’s hammer?”
For all the voices quoted, Stourton is loudly absent. Perhaps it is his prior role as Sotheby’s chairman, or his assumed role of art historian, that keeps him from commenting, except for the odd — and very noticeable — interjection, such as calling Dede Brooks, the CEO of Sotheby’s New York in the 1990s, a “despot.” Indeed, we may detect a latent bias in this book: He spends the bulk of his narrative describing the duopoly of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and does not even introduce Bonhams as an auction house until two-thirds of the way into the book, after chapters on the trade of furniture, silverware, and Victoriana.
Stourton also betrays a reluctance to dig deeper into impropriety. Sewell, who worked at Christie’s, described dual economies: the glamour of upstairs salesrooms, and the downstairs “black economy” of staff paid so poorly they relied on tips and bribes. Stourton dwells on this claim only as long as it takes to deflect it, writing: “There is no doubt that Sotheby’s and other auction houses were similar in this respect.” Many anecdotes are told with the air of a shrug and an implied explanation that “it was another era,” such as the dealer who called his Benin bronze “bulgy eyes.” To his credit, however, Stourton does devote a chapter to the collusion scandal between Sotheby’s and Christie’s in 1997.
Most illuminatingly, the greatest existential threat to the auction houses appears not to arise from impropriety — even after the 1997 scandal, Stourton points out, “recovery was remarkably fast … with little long-term damage” — but from regulation and forced transparency. It speaks volumes, for instance, that both Christie’s and Sotheby’s tried to suppress the reporting of Times sales writer Geraldine Norman for calling into question practices auction houses live by: using fake names to place bids; announcing the price for each lot regardless of whether it sold or not; or, most prevalent today, removing unsold lots from auction house websites.
This history, with its unverifiable accounts, goes some way to impart the flavor of how auction houses operate, a result of traditions forged in back rooms and between words of honor (or not). Yet to call it “Rogues and Scholars” reduces an immeasurably complex beast into a binary, almost trivializing “good” and “bad” — for all its riotously colorful characters, it remains a murky industry indeed.
Rogues and Scholars: A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000 (2025), written by James Stourton and published by Pegasus Books, is available for online and in bookstores.
