Rogues and Scholars: A History of the London Art World: 1945–2000

The collapse of 300-plus years of British imperialism after World War II financially brought the British gentry to its knees. As a result, they sold a flood of artwork that made London’s art market ground zero during the postwar decades. Selling everything from Old Master paintings to looted antiquities, the “trade” projected itself as a bastion of effortless, double-breasted assurance when it in fact it was a combustible stew of eccentrics, émigrés, and grandees who created an international market for fine art with incredible bravado and skill. Stourton (Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation) focuses here on the dynamics between venerable British auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the galleries and dealers that fed them, and international collectors like J. Paul Getty. 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.