While sales from the businessman's collection used to be big news in the art world, nowadays his disposals are much more understated affairs Once, sales from the Saatchi collection like Tracey Emin's £2.5 million pounds bed made big news at Sotheby's and Christie's. Nowadays, disposals tend to take place at smaller salerooms with less profit involved. One of these is Roseberys in west Norwood which last March sold remnants of the Saatchi & Saatchi collection - the corporate collection which had acquired some of the works from Charles Saatchi. Among those were 1980s sculptures by artists represented by the Lisson Gallery which promoted the fashionable "new British sculpture" that monopolised the Turner Prize at the time. But now they looked dated and sold for just a few thousand pounds each. Similarly dated were four cut metal sculptures by Bill Woodrow that would have sold for over £20,000 in their day and were estimated at just £1,000. Perhaps fortunately for the artist they were withdrawn before the sale. Next week, works of a different kind from the Saatchi collection take their bow at Roseberys, but without the Saatchi provenance being identified. One is a larger-than-life painting made by the celebrity kitchen sink artist, John Bratby, in 1956, the year he was in the Venice Biennale, depicting his wife, the painter Jean Cooke, holding a baby. Saatchi bought it in 2003 when it was priced at £15,000, a big price at the time; it is now estimated at £3,000. Another Bratby, a 12-foot-wide 1958 painting of a model repeated six times, had been bought by Saatchi for his spacious County Hall gallery with a £20,000 asking price and is now estimated at £6,000. Bratby's best prices are for paintings with celebrity connections - a portrait of Michael Caine (£31,000) and a painting of a Venetian Canal from David Bowie's collection (£30,000). Whether an unpublished Saatchi provenance can play that role remains to be seen. A third work, bought by Saatchi but not promoted as such by Roseberys, is a painting of Princess Diana by the former stripper turned artist, Stella Vine. "Hi Paul," she wrote on the painting referring to Paul Burrell, the Princess's butler, "Can you come over, I'm really frightened." It cost Saatchi a reported £600 pounds in 2004 and is estimated to fetch no more now. Vine's paintings shot up to £10,000 at auction after the sale to Saatchi, with buyers like pop star Florence Welch in the mix. But fashion fluctuates and recently prices under £1,000 for Vine at auction have been the norm. International influences on modern British art An exhibition at this month's British Art Fair in the Saatchi Gallery, which I have co-created, will look at over 50 artists who arrived in Britain from all points of the compass during the 20th century, transforming the country's cultural identity into one of the most diverse in the world. Alongside familiar names, such as David Bomberg and Frank Auerbach, who fled the Nazi Germany, there is a focus on artists from outside Europe, too. The "Indian Picasso", Francis Newton Souza, one of the leading post-war artists, will appear. As will Pakistani artists Anwar Shemza and Rasheed Araeen - both of whom command lively markets for their work. Meanwhile, the Windrush generation of Caribbean artists - recently highlighted by the Tate Show Life Between Islands - are on the up. Among them, Aubrey Williams is clearly one to watch, his works commanding prices close to £70,000 on the private market. Indeed, artists with little auction history such as Tam Joseph are selling for six figures privately. Taiwanese artist Richard Lin, has seen a boost, with collectors in his home country, raising prices up to seven figures. Then there are others who have barely started the ascent to market recognition. The outstanding example is Denis Bowen. In 1955 he set up the New Vision Centre Gallery in London that promoted artists of Asian and African origin who struggled with discrimination. His own art, influenced by French Tachisme and absorbed by a fascination with cosmology, took a back seat, from which it is still waiting to emerge. Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, co-curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen and Colin Gleadell is at the British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery 28 Sept - 1 Oct
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