Lark Mason Associates is pleased to presents: Strictly Private: A Collection of Erotic Works by Duncan Grant which are available for bidding on www.iGavelAuctions.com from October 29th through November 19th, 2020.  Over 60 works of homoerotic drawings and paintings by Duncan Grant, from the private collection of Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, are now on sale for the first time. These intimate works provide an insight into the artist’s life and his famed Bloomsbury circle of artists, writers, philosophers and intellectuals including Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes, among others.

Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, author of Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group, as well a dance impresario, is 91 and lives in New York. He was introduced to Grant by Paul Roche, the critically acclaimed British poet and translator of the Greek classics who was the artist’s lover and confidante for 36 years.  He admired Grant’s work and through mutual friends was set to meet him in Charleston, England. On his first visit there he purchased several male erotic drawings and three oil paintings.

Grant’s homoerotic drawings were kept private between his lovers and close friends and Angelica Garnett–who was his daughter from a previous liaison with Vanessa Bell–was keen to keep it that way. After her father’s death, she sought to destroy the drawings, but Turnbaugh fought her in court, won the case, and secured ownership of the drawings and paintings.

Duncan’s appreciation for the male anatomy was inspired by Ancient Greek mythology and art. This sale includes a work based on the tumultuous battle between Hercules and Diomedes, memorialized by the statue by Vincenzo de‘Rossi in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Grant’s vertical composition of entwined figures bursts with emotion and physicality

Best known as a figurative painter, he never lost interest in abstraction, whether in art or design. This sale includes an important abstract composition of shapes and colors, in which Grant experimented with different textures of paint and areas of glitter in the pigments, as well as textile designs commissioned by Macy’s Department Store, Grant’s childhood drawings done in Burma, an oil painting of two nude dancers and a nude drawing of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Says Charlene Wang, the fine arts expert in charge of the sale: “Lark Mason Associates is pleased to present this important oeuvre by the renowned British artist Duncan Grant, whose intimate portraits of human sexuality reveal his inner life and artistic expression which was heavily influenced by his association with the Bloomsbury Group."

Among the highlights are:     

Duncan Grant, Large Drawing of Nude Lying on Side, Graphite on Paper (Estimate: $70,000- $100,000), reserve: $35,000

Duncan Grant, Steam Bathers, Oil on Board, (Estimate: $70,000-100,000), reserve: $35,000

Duncan Grant, Abstract (Last Work), Ink, Watercolor and Oil on Paper, 1978 (Estimate: $48,000-80,000), reserve: $24,000

Duncan Grant, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West, Ink on Paper (Estimate: $3,000-5000), reserve: $1,500

Duncan Grant, Paul Roche Lying on His Back, Crayon and Pencil on Paper (Estimate: $4,000-6,000), reserve: $2,000

Duncan Grant, Hercules and Diomede, Charcoal and Gouache on Paper (Estimate: $4,000-6,000), reserve: $2,000

About Lark Mason

With locations in New Braunfels, Texas and New York City, Lark Mason Associates, the eponymous, auction house specializing in Asian, ethnographic, and ancient works of art, was founded by Lark Mason after many years as an expert at Sotheby's New York.

Mason served as a General Appraiser from 1979 until 1985, and as a Senior Vice President and specialist in Chinese art with Sotheby's Chinese Works of Art Department from 1985-2003.  From 2000-2003 he concurrently was a Director of Online Auctions for Sothebys.com. He also served as a consulting curator at the Trammel and Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art in Dallas, Texas from 2003-2009. He is a generalist in American and European works of art and paintings, as well as an expert in the field of Chinese art and has valued and advised many private collectors and institutions.

Lark Mason Associates regularly hosts auctions on the iGavel Auctions platform and has an established history of record sales of Chinese and other works of art and holds the record for the highest price achieved for any work of art in an online sale, for a painting sold in May 2014 that realized close to $4.2m. Mason, the owner and CEO of iGavel Auctions, is noted for his regular appearances on "The Antiques Road Show."