Alan Davie valuation
Jazz saxophonist, glider pilot, jeweller, and one of the first British painters to answer New York.
Alan Davie was born at Grangemouth in Scotland in 1920, played saxophone professionally in jazz bands, made jewellery for a living, and was flying gliders into his eighties.
What a work by Alan Davie is worth
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Bio
Alan Davie was born at Grangemouth in Scotland in 1920, played saxophone professionally in jazz bands, made jewellery for a living, and was flying gliders into his eighties. He saw Peggy Guggenheim's collection in Venice in 1948, encountered Pollock and Rothko there before almost anyone in Britain had, and became one of the first British painters to work with that scale and freedom. The paintings that followed pull in Zen, Native American and African imagery, magic symbols and improvisation, painted fast and without preliminary drawing. He worked between Hertfordshire, Cornwall and St Lucia until his death in 2014.
The 1950s and 1960s paintings — big, dark, gestural, often on unprimed board or canvas — are the strongest part of the market, with the brighter symbolic works of later decades forming a large and more affordable body. Davie was prolific and worked in oil, gouache and watercolour, and the works on paper are numerous. He signed and dated on the reverse and usually titled there too, so the back of a Davie carries most of the information. Prints exist in modest numbers.
Edinburgh, Venice and the Whitechapel
Davie studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1937 to 1941, and after the war played tenor saxophone in the Tommy Sampson Orchestra, which broadcast and toured in Europe. In Venice Peggy Guggenheim bought two of his paintings, and his 1956 exhibition in New York sold out, but recognition in Britain came only with his 1958 exhibitions at Wakefield Art Gallery and the Whitechapel.
He often painted with the canvas on the floor, standing over it, and built up layers until the first painting had been covered many times. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, Tate, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and the National Galleries of Scotland.
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