The photographer and artist Steve Lazarides, known for his decades-long working relationship with Banksy, has sold off the majority of his vast collection of the street artist’s prints and originals. The auction, called ‘Under Duress: the Banksy Collection of Steve Lazarides’, which took place yesterday, October 31, at Los Angeles-based auction house Julien’s Auctions, was predicted to make Lazarides over a million dollars. In the end, this figure was closer to $1.4 million.
Top-selling lots included an original proof print of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon, embossed with the P.O.W. (Pictures on Walls) (circa 2004) that sold for $104,000 (original estimate $60,000). The print garnered a lot of interest ahead of the start of the live auction, with several online bids (reaching $60,000) made hours before the auction began.
Fascinatingly, Lazarides had told the Guardian that he “can’t stand” the print, saying “everybody thinks this is a happy scene, and I’m like: ‘Nah, it’s a little girl losing her heart. Where do you see happiness in that?”
Banksy’s Hooded Figure, an original painting, was another highlight lot, selling for $78,000, nearly doubling its estimate of $40,000.
“Big Up to Julien’s and I’m now ready to give out Letters Of Providence for those out there who can’t get COAs [certificates of authenticity] from my old mate,” said Steve Lazarides, referring to the many unauthorized Banky works floating on the market.
The decision to sell the mammoth collection of artworks and ephemera associated with the street artist (a whopping 173 lots) came at a time when Lazarides, Banksy’s former manager and agent, wanted to focus on his own artistic career and return to his photography practice. “This has been a large part of my life for the last 25 years, whether I was working with him or not,” Lazarides told the Guardian in an interview published on October 31. “I just want it out of my in-tray and to go back to concentrating on taking photographs again.”
Steve Lazarides posing in front of Banksy’s portrait of Winston Churchill, at a press preview for the exhibition Banksy: The Unauthorised Retrospective, curated by Steve Lazarides, at S|2 Gallery in London. (Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images)
In an interview with Artnet News in 2014, Lazarides described his story with Banksy. “You look at what’s happened to Banksy and me and lots of other people,” he said. “If you’d sat down and written a script and taken it to Hollywood, we would have been thrown out of every single office for being too unbelievable.”
On his role in the street art legend’s success, Lazarides put it down to his job overseeing the commercial aspects of the art world that Banksy found uninteresting: “I think he always pursued his art as art. The sales really were only ever a secondary part of what he was doing. So he never had any interest in it whatsoever. It’s like the sales bit really was down to my side of things.”
Lazarides first met Banksy in Bristol in 1997 when he was assigned to interview the artist for the magazine Sleazenation, which was published monthly between 1999 and 2003. The pair hit it off and he went on to become the anonymous artist’s agent and gallerist. In 2019, Lazarides published a book of his behind-the-scenes photographs of life with Banksy, called Banksy Captured. The first edition of 5,000 books sold out within days and a second volume was published the next year.
Love Is In The Air by Banksy. Courtesy Julien’s Auctions
There were 15 “burner” cellphones (Motorola, Sony, and Nokia brands) that Lazarides used to covertly contact Banksy when necessary, which sold together for a cumulative $15,875.
Banksy and Lazarides’s relationship changed when Lazarides, who was working as a dealer and promoter, wanted to concentrate on other artists. He told the Guardian that “Banksy’s a full-time job, and I wanted to look after other artists, so he went his way, and I went mine.” He described that the commercialization of Banksy’s work was “the trouble with the whole art world at the moment,” and that Banksy “never went into it for money. We didn’t even know you could make money.”
Lazarides confirmed that this sale would not completely empty his Banksy trove. “I’ve kept a couple of bits that were directed at me, like angry notes that I’d find stuck to my computer screen in the morning with gaffer tape,” he said. “But I don’t need 1,000 prints to prove I worked with Banksy.”
An original proof print of Love Is In The Air (also known as the Flower Thrower), one of Banksy’s more recognizable images, sold for $45,500. Other notable sales included an original hand-cut stencil featuring Banksy’s name, which sold for $58,500, and a series of original sketches executed by Banksy on a manila envelope, featuring concept design variations for his “Paparazzi Rat” stencil series, which sold for $52,000.