Beauty's Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America explores the critical and popular resurgence of portraiture in the United States during the period bounded by the close of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. As great fortunes were amassed in America, so too came the drive to document the wealthy with great portraiture. A brilliant generation of American and European artists rose to meet that demand.
This exhibition features fifty eight portraits selected from New-York Historical Society's outstanding holdings. The sitters — ranging from famous society beauties to powerful titans of business and industry — left lasting legacies that have contributed to the cultural and economic growth of the Nation.
Beauty's Legacy includes portraits of prominent Americans painted and sculpted by noted American artists such as James Carroll Beckwith, George Peter Alexander Healy, Daniel Huntington, John Singer Sargent, and John Quincy Adams Ward. But the exhibition also reveals the highly competitive nature of the portrait market, as these American portraitists found themselves in fierce rivalry for American patronage with their European counterparts, such as Léon Bonnat, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, Théobald Chartran, and Anders Zorn.
The exhibition also includes a selection of twenty-four exquisite portraits from Peter Marié's vast collection of miniatures, known by his contemporaries as his "Gallery of Beauty," underscoring the intersection of beauty, celebrity, and social prestige.
This exhibition has been organized by the New-York Historical Society.
George Peter Alexander Healy (American, 1813 –1894), Jeannie Ovington (1863-1926), 1887. Oil on canvas. New- York Historical Society. Gift of the Estate of Ina Love Thursby, through Walter M. Brown, 1944.18.
Beauty's Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published by the New-York Historical Society in association with D Giles Limited, London.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent (Belgium) (Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent) houses more than 60 Dutch paintings from the 17th century, a period known as ‘The Golden Age’ by its northern neighbors. On the occasion of ‘Gent Kleurt Oranje’, this rich collection comes under scrutiny: when was it established and how was it subsequently developed? What is the relationship between the North and South? And is everything really what it seems?
A new exhibition, The Golden Age Revisited, goes in search of answers to these questions and shine the spotlight upon this unique, sometimes curious, collection.
An outstanding collection
The Museum boasts one of the most remarkable collections of Dutch painting outside the Netherlands. It includes works by masters such as Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, Willem Claesz. Heda, Albert Cuyp and Roelant Savery. In addition, the museum owns some extremely rare pieces.
AE van Rabel, Stilleven, Nature Morte, 1653 Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gan
It possesses the only known work by AE van Rabel, (above)
while Almshouse in Utrecht by Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot is the only known image of that institution.
More images from the exhibition:
Melchior d'Hondecoeter, Water fowl (Watervogels), ca. 1686, Watervogels, Sauvagines, 17e eeuw- 17ème siècle Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Hendrick Andriessen, Vanitas, 17e eeuw- 17ème siècle Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Albert Jansz. van der Schoor, The smoker (De roker), ca. 1656, De roker, Le Fumeur, 17e eeuw- 17ème siècle Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem, Dieren (fragment uit groter geheel), Animaux, fragment, 17e eeuw- 17ème siècle, Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Cornelis de Heem, Stilleven, Nature Morte, 1670 Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Joost Cornelisz. Droochsloot, Dorpskermis, Kermesse du village, 17e eeuw- 17ème siècle Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Roelant Savery, Paradijselijk landschap, Paysage paradisiaque, 17e eeuw- 17ème siècle Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
Frans Hals, Portret van onbekende vrouw, Portrait d'une femme inconnue, 1640 Olieverf op doek, huile sur toile, Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, Musée des Beaux-Arts Gand
To mark its 40th anniversary, the Berlinische Galerie presents "Max Beckmann and Berlin“. This is the first major Beckmann exhibition in Berlin in 30 years, and the first devoted to the decisive role the city played in the artist ́s life and work. There are 50 exhibits from the period between 1905 and 1936, including numerous self-portraits and key works loaned by eminent institutions or drawn from the museum‘s own collection, including
“The Flood” (1908),
“Women’s Bath” (1919),
Alongside them hang paintings by celebrated contemporaries such as Edvard Munch, Max Lieberman, Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. “Max Beckmann is the new Berlin,” declared the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe in 1924. The exhibition illustrates Beckmann’s journey to become one oft he leading protagonistis of modern art. It recounts how the young and unknown artist fought off crises and failures in Berlin, developed a style of his own, and ultimately made his mark not only the city, but across the world. The works on display were produced in Berlin, are thematically associated with the city, or were chosen for its great exhibitions and set their stamp on its art scene. The self-portraits from very different creative periods reveal how the artist saw himself and his circumstances at the time.
Works by contemporaries cast spotlights of their own on Berlin’s vibrant and versatile artistic output from the turn oft he century until the 1920s.
Max Beckmann (1884 –1950) lived initally in Berlin for 10 years (1904 until 1914). After studying art in Weimar and a staying shortly in Paris, he obtained his first studio here in the autumn of 1904. At 20 years old, the ambitious artist tried to distinguish himself in the capital city, one of the most important modern centers.
“Young Men by the Sea” (1906) already brought him much attention and acknowledgements. Henceforth Beckmann was sponsored by the Weimar museum director and patron Harry Graf Kessler, whose portrait by Edvard Munch can be seen in the exhibition. “Young Men by the Sea”also impressed the gallery owner Paul Cassirer, who then included Beckmann in his program and promoted his works for many years. His works were regularly displayed in the Berliner Secession as well. To Beckmann’s disappointment, his trainedImpressionism style could not prevail over the newly emerged Expressionism.
It was in Berlin in 1919 that Max Beckmann’s lithographic series
Die Hölle (Hell) was published, one of the seminal print cycles of the early Weimar years. It was followed in 1922 by the portfolio
Berliner Reise 1922 (Trip to Berlin 1922), which the Berlinische Galerie has just acquired for its own collection. These two cycles were pictorial commentaries on recent history and they contain many references to Berlin.
The painter entered World War I as a medic, which unsettled him greatly. Backmann moved to Frankfurt am Main and stayed there for many years, mentally ailing and disappointed from the Berlin art scene. He gathered new strength and found a new style here. He wanted to conquer Berlin and the world, as stated in letters written in 1926: “Berlin, Dresden, Munich, and then Paris and New York.” It was in this year that Beckmann’s first important works found their way into the collection of the Berliner Nationalgalerie. Included was the painting
“Mardi gras parisino” (1930),
which a contemporary described in its first year as “one of the greatest achievements of contemporary art.”
A last, and for Beckmann overdue, success could be celebrated in Berlin in 1933: Ludwig Justi, the director of the Nationalgalerie Berlin, devoted him a room entirely to his work in the New Department of the Nationalgalerie. Shortly before, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of the Reich. Then unfortunately in the summer of 1933, the National Socialist Regime temporarily ordered to close the Kronprinzenpalais.
Beckmann’s works were found “entartet” (degenerate) and the artist was released from his office at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He moved with his second wife Mathilde, called “Quappi” from Frankfurt back to Berlin. There, prior to emigrating to Amsterdam in 1937, he produced motifs of the city, portraits of his wife,
“Quappi with Parrot” (1936), and also his earliest triptychs and mythologically inspired works like
“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man” (1935), and also – for the first time – sculptures. After leaving for Amsterdam in July 1937, Beckmann never returned to the country of his birth.
The exhibition is accompanied by a detailed catalogue in German and English reflecting the latest research on the theme of Max Beckmann and Berlin.
Straight away, you’re bound to get drawn into the first painting Beckmann made in Berlin, “Young Men by the Sea” (1906), (above) a large-scale, picturesque scene of nude, muscular men loitering on the beach, choppy waters and dramatic clouds in the distance. Right next to it is a very similar image,
Max Liebermann’s “Bathing Boys” (1907). The theme, use of colour modulation and similarities between the two make a great case for the influence German Impressionism (Liebermann’s camp) had on Beckmann as a young painter.
In the same room is a pairing that is stylistically dissimilar yet closely related:
Beckmann’s “Small Death Scene” (1906)
and Edvard Munch’s lithograph “The Death in the Sickroom” (1896), each depicting quietly distraught mourners, with their deceased loved ones in the background. Comparing the two is interesting in its own right, but make sure to glance back at “Young Men by the Sea,” painted the same year, yet astonishingly different. Beckmann’s artistic agility, employing diverse sets of colours, brushstrokes and compositions, is already vivid in the first room.
“The Flood” (1908) commands the second room of the exhibition, exemplary of his controversial push back against the burgeoning Expressionism of the day. This work could not be more different in style and mood than
“Girl with Cat II” (1912) by Franz Marc, who had a heated public debate with Beckmann over the new movement...
The third room is dedicated to the bustling metropolis Beckmann temporarily called home. Other paintings provide comparisons to the Berlin of today –
“Kaiserdamm” (1911), a peaceful, snowy European boulevard scene with a decadent purple sky
and “Tauentzienstraße” (1913), which offers a view of the pre-war Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, as if seen from the front door of the recently opened KaDeWe.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Nollendorfplatz” (1912) brings you back from the delight of studying the Berlin of the past, to considering the dramatic variations in depicting it....
Turning the corner out of the last room, you are met with Beckmann himself, in the form of several self-portraits made throughout his life, for which he is much celebrated. Here, too, a major jump occurs in
O’Keeffe in Process New Mexico Museum of Art Through January 17, 2016
Featuring 36 O'Keeffe oil paintings, 15 works on paper, and supporting materials from the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and private collections, this exhibition tells the story of the working technique of this twentieth-century New Mexico Master.
Artworks on view will span the artist's career from early student portraits of family members created in 1905, to paintings executed during stays at Lake George in the late teens and first half of the twenties, to her iconic depictions of flowers, bones, and New Mexico landscapes, to her discovery of the view from the sky.
In a rare opportunity to see some of these artworks together in one space, the exhibition brings related paintings from the two museum's collections into conversation. Preliminary sketches and photographs hung alongside finished works will reveal both the steps in O'Keeffe's creative process and her technical, art-making technique. Viewers will come to understand what makes an O'Keeffe artwork recognizable as an O'Keeffe.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Chama River, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico (Blue River), 1937, oil on canvas, 30 1/2 x 16 1/2 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of the Georgia O'Keeffe Estate, 1987 (1987.312.1)
An American Modernism New Mexico Museum of Art Through February 21, 2016
An American Modernism joins the exhibition O’Keeffe in Process, both at the New Mexico Museum of Art, in the “Fall of Modernism” cultural collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Drawn primarily from the museum’s rich collection of Modernist art, An American Modernism explores the quest by early twentieth-century artists to find a distinctive American voice and to define art for the modern age.
The international cultural movement known as Modernism resulted in radical new approaches to art making. This selection of more than fifty works from the museum’s collection explores how Modernists in the United States struggled to define modern art in terms of the American experience. Concentrating on the 1920s and 1930s, the selection of paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs illustrate the complexities of establishing a recognizable American style in the early years of the twentieth century. While some believed it should be defined by the precision and dynamism of the machine age, others rejected industrialization and commercialism for the perceived authenticity of nature and rural life. The tensions between these motives and the struggle to find a distinctively American visual vocabulary is demonstrated in works by Andrew Dasburg, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Cady Wells, Edward Weston, and many other modern masters.
From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks from the Vilcek Foundation Collection Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Through January 10, 2016
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum reveals its latest exhibition From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from the Vilcek Foundation Collection, an exhibition organized by Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa Oklahoma in cooperation with The Vilcek Foundation New York,
With more than 60 works, the exhibition represents one of the country’s finest collections of American modernism from the period 1910’s to the Post-war era.
Organized by the Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Philbrook Museum, Catherine Whitney, in cooperation with The Vilcek Foundation, New York City, this is the first time many of these noted Modernist works have been accessible to the public. Jan and Marica Vilcek, both immigrants to the United States from former Czechoslovakia, became interested in American modernism due in part to Marica’s art history career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dr. Jan Vilcek’s interest in collecting, and a shared desire to give back to the country that gave them so much as new immigrants.
The Vilcek Collection reunites three of four important still lifes by Stuart Davis—painted in 1922. The painter was responsible for the Vilcek’s initial foray into American modernism; when in 1990, they purchased a work by Davis entitled Tree (1921) on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Vilceks credit this acquisition with their “firm, yet not always easy,” commitment to Modernism.
The exhibition, which comprises paintings, sculptures and works-on-paper divides the collection into four parts. The first section, “Nature” includes the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Max Weber — the first generation of abstract artists to translate the transcendent qualities of nature into metaphors of color, geometry and line.
The second section of the exhibition, “Cubism” explores the aesthetics and philosophical constructs of Cubism as applied to American subjects. Highlights include the aforementioned Stuart Davis still lifes: Still Life with Dial,
Still Life, Brown,
and Still Life, Red, which the artist described as “rigorously...American.”
“Town and Country” the exhibition’s third section, examines modernist views of structure, industrialization and architecture.
Rockefeller Center (1939) by painter Ralston Crawford evidences the construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Finally “The Southwest” recognizes the importance of this region as the inspiration for many of the artworks in the collection. Nearly one third of the Vilcek collection’s paintings were painted in New Mexico. In the period after World War I, many New York artists spent time in New Mexico experiencing the landscape, investigating spiritualism, and taking up residence at the Mabel Dodge Luhan art and writer’s colony in Taos.
From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks from the Vilcek Foundation Collection captures the unique perspectives of the American modernism movement and provides insight into a group of artists defining American abstraction.
“The Vilcek Collection is one of the finest collections of American modernism ever gathered. It explores the emergence of America’s first truly homegrown, avant-garde art movement. We are pleased to feature this important exhibition that explores a generation of abstract artists who truly made the 20th century an American century,” said Cody Hartley, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
ADDISON ROWE GALLERY 229 East Marcy Street Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
John Marin The Tree, New Mexico 1929 Watercolor on paper 15 x 17 7⁄8 inches Signed and dated: lower right
John Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Weehawken. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, studying with Thomas Anshutz, then studied at the Art Students League in New York, and from 1905 to 1909, studied in Europe. In Paris, he associated with the Fauvist circle.
He had a long association in New York City with Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited his work, and in the 1930s, he developed interest in the human figure and marine subjects and oil painting.
In Taos, which he visited in 1929 and 1930, he was the guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and was unique because he was using a drybrush watercolor technique and vividly demonstrated how watercolor could capture the New Mexico landscape. Because he was so respected nationally, his use of watercolor in New Mexico set a precedent for others painting there.
Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and The West Harwood Museum of Art (Taos) Sunday, May 22 - Sunday, September 11, 2016
Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and The West is a traveling exhibition organized by the Harwood Museum of Art that focuses on the life and times of one of the early 20th century’s most significant cultural figures: Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962). Luhan brought modern art to Taos, New Mexico, putting Taos on the national and international map of the avant-garde and creating a “Paris West” in the American Southwest. From 1918-1947, Luhan influenced legions of European and American “movers and shakers” to find Northern New Mexico’s physical and cultural landscapes—new aesthetic, social, and cultural perspectives on modern life.
The exhibition will include 150 works of art and ephemera produced by the visual, literary, and performance artists who came to Taos at Mabel's behest. The works of Andrew Dasburg, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Ansel Adams, Agnes Pelton, and Georgia O'Keeffe will be displayed in conversation with the works of Pueblo and Hispano artists who inspired their modernist sensibilities.
Co-curated by a dynamic scholarly team, MaLin Wilson-Powell and Dr. Lois Rudnick, this project offers a transformative and multi-disciplinary contribution to the evolution of American Modernism as it expanded westward.
The Florence Griswold Museum New Exhibition Celebrates Statewide Digital Partnership Through January 31, 2016
The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, presents an innovative exhibition that uses a digital twist to highlight Connecticut’s role in shaping the history of American landscape painting over the past two centuries. The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape borrows the notion of the online keyword searches and organizes the 76 artworks into categories that cut across traditional chronology to illuminate the complex ways in which we find meaning in the Connecticut landscape.
The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape marks the completion of an expansive project, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, to contribute over 400 digital images of fine art to a decade-old collaborative digital library of over 15,000 drawings, prints, maps, and photographs depicting historic images of Connecticut. Re-launched in 2015 as Connecticut History Illustrated (connecticuthistoryillustrated.org), the virtual library offers a platform for searching across media and institutions to discover cultural treasures.
This exhibition draws from the collections of ten partner institutions to present some of the most renowned depictions of Connecticut in art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The works are from the collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, the Florence Griswold Museum, the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the Mattatuck Museum, the Mystic Arts Center, Mystic Seaport, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Slater Memorial Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.
By drawing on fine art collections from around the state, the exhibition reveals the surprising diversity of Connecticut’s landscape and the art that records it. Paintings of Connecticut’s terrain reflect a balance between rural scenery and urban vitality characteristic of a state whose small borders encompass a range of environments, from secluded woods, to clapboard barns, to towering smoke stacks, to panoramic shores.
Inspired by the digital library, The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape divides the paintings into eleven thematic categories that match keyword searches people might apply to the Connecticut landscape. The categories vary from colonial and countryside to factories and forest. As part of the exhibition planning, audience input on how various works of art should be categorized within the exhibition was sought through the Florence Griswold Museum’s social network.
Sybil Huntington May’s Haddam,
Sibyl Huntington May, Haddam, ca. 1758. Oil on wood panel, 27 7/8 x 52 5/8 in. Courtesy of the Connecticut Historical Society, chs.org
is thought to be the earliest painting of the Connecticut landscape in North America. Haddam is part of the “Colonial” section of the exhibition and adapts the conventions of leisurely British sporting scenes to the landscape surrounding the artist’s home on the banks of the Connecticut River. Also in this section are early-twentieth-century landscape paintings from some of the state’s art colonies, an example of the way that a keyword like “colonial” can bring materials together in surprising ways.
Categories or keyword searches such as “Roads,” “Factories,” or “Towns” bring up depictions of Connecticut’s towns and cities reflecting the growth of population and the hustle and bustle of commerce and manufacturing along streets and waterfronts.
George Henry Durrie’s Ithiel Town Truss Bridge,
George Henry Durrie, Ithiel Town Truss Bridge, 1853. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. The Mattatuck Museum
shows the 1823 truss bridge designed and patented by the New Haven architect Ithiel Town. The bridge had a 114-foot span crossing the Mill River between Hamden and Cheshire, Conn., in an area then called Whitneyville. Durrie included narrative elements in this landscape, showing the architect comparing the bridge to a sketch in his hands.
The Ledges, October in Old Lyme, 1907, by Childe Hassam
Childe Hassam, The Ledges, October in Old Lyme, 1907. Oil on canvas, 18 x 18 in. Florence Griswold Museum
is placed in the “Forest” category and explores how artists at the turn of the twentieth century hoped to immerse themselves in the beauties of nature as an antidote to urban life.
The Artist in the Connecticut Landscape offers audiences a chance to appreciate the breadth of scenery found in every corner of the state. The landscapes represented in the exhibition are treated as windows into the time and place of their creation, unlocking for contemporary visitors the shifting uses and meanings of Connecticut’s landscape over two hundred and fifty years. Combined with the photographs, maps, and other documents available on Connecticut History Illustrated, which visitors can peruse on a gallery kiosk or later at home, audiences will be able to consider their own perspectives on Connecticut’s landscape.
More images from thr exhibition:
Frederic E. Church, The Charter Oak at Hartford, c. 1846. Oil on canvas, 24 x 34.25 inches. Florence Griswold Museum
Milton Bellin, The Harvard-Yale Races, ca. 1939. Watercolor on paper, 14 3/4 x 17 inches. Collection of the Slater Memorial Museum
Beatrice Cuming, Saturday Night, New London, 1935–1943. Oil on canvas, 24 x 31 in. Lyman Allyn Art Museum
Ralph Earl, Houses Fronting New Milford Green. Oil on canvas, 48 x 54 1/8. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Florence Griswold Museum Today
Founded in 1936, the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme is a center for American art accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Museum’s site and grounds served as the center for the Lyme Art Colony, one of America’s most famous art colonies. The recipient of a Trip Advisor 2014 Certificate of Excellence, the Florence Griswold Museum has been called a “Giverny in Connecticut” by the Wall Street Journal, and a “must-see” by the Boston Globe. With an eye toward the integration of art, history and landscape in all that it does, the Museum has spent the last decade redefining itself as a central part of community life with an award-winning exhibition gallery for its collections and a thorough reinterpretation of its landmark Florence Griswold House as a boardinghouse for artists, c. 1910. Visit FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org for more information, including history, events and hours of operation.
On December 21, 1908, Max Weber, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian-born naturalized American, left Paris to return to New York where he would profoundly affect the course of American art as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, essayist, and teacher. Henri “le Douanier” Rousseau, the visionary genius of French modernism, accompanied him to the Gare St. Lazare and called out to his departing friend, “N’oubliez pas la nature, Weber.” As Rousseau advised, Weber did not forget nature, and the natural world informed his work throughout his impressive sixty-year career. Best known today for his monumental cubist and futurist images of Manhattan from the 1910s, Weber redefined traditional subjects of figures, still life, and landscape to reflect his twentieth-century sensibility and touched on virtually every phase of modernism prior to his death in 1961.
Sotheby's 2015
Max Weber TALMUDISTS Estimate 8,000 — 12,000 USD LOT SOLD. 18,750 USD
Max Weber RECITAL Estimate 10,000 — 15,000 USD LOT SOLD. 15,000 USD
Sotheby's 2013
Max Weber 1881 - 1961 SOLOIST AT WANAMAKER'S Estimate 15,000 — 20,000 USD LOT SOLD. 112,500 USD
Max Weber TWO PATRIARCHS Estimate 8,000 — 12,000 USD LOT SOLD. 8,750 USD (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)
Christy's 2014
MAX WEBER (1881-1961) Still Life Price Realized $12,500 Estimate $12,000 - $18,000
Explore the renaissance of etching from the late 1850s through the turn of the century in Europe and the United States with the new Cincinnati Art Museum exhibition The Etching Revival from Daubigny to Twachtman, on view February 13–May 8, 2016.
Featuring more than 100 monochromatic prints from dozens of artists, the exhibition also includes a wood etching press from the early 1900s, along with plates and tools used to create the etchings. Etching is one of the first original art movements in America and it played an important role in developing the public’s aesthetic appreciation of the graphic arts.
The Process
Etching involves using a substance to bite into metal surfaces with acid in order to create a design. Etching was attractive to painters because it allowed them to capture the fleeting effects of nature rapidly with freedom and spontaneity. The process coincided with artist’s desire to work directly from nature, to sketch en plein air to create landscapes and seascapes.
Ties to Cincinnati
Cincinnatians featured in the exhibition include early etching practitioners Mary Louise McLaughlin, Henry Farny, Lewis Henry Meakin and John Twachtman. Working abroad in the 1880s, Covington, Ky.-born Frank Duveneck and his students, known as the "Duveneck Boys,” pursued etching in Venice with James McNeill Whistler. Some of Duveneck’s gifts will also be featured in the exhibition.
The Cincinnati Etching Club, the second etching club in America after the New York Etching Club, was founded in 1879 and actually gifted a group of prints to the Art Museum in 1882. These etchings were among the first pieces of art acquired by the Art Museum.
The Artists and History
The American Etching Revival was inspired by the earlier French and British mid-century etching revivals by Barbizon artists, such as Charles François Daubigny, Camille Corot, and Jean-François Millet, who made preparatory drawings for etchings out of doors to capture natural landscapes and romanticized scenes of peasants at work at the time of the industrial revolution.
The etchings of Whistler and Sir Francis Seymour Haden influenced the next generation of artists. In 1862, the Society of Etchers organization in France inspired a new generation of independent etchers including Edouard Manet, Charles Meryon, and Maxine Lalanne, and Impressionists Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt. The success of this movement was fostered in both Europe and America by publishers, artistic printers and critics.
“It’s fascinating to look at these etchings and to learn the history behind them,” said Cincinnati Art Museum Curator of Prints Kristin Spangenberg. “They showcase an emerging art form and also the very beginnings of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s permanent collection.”
Denver Art Museum Wyeth: Andrew and Jamie in the Studio Through Feb. 7, 2016
This groundbreaking exhibition, organized by the Denver Art Museum (DAM), features more than 100 works created by Andrew Wyeth and his son Jamie Wyeth in a variety of media including pen and ink, graphite, charcoal, watercolor, dry brush, tempera, oil and mixed media. Never before has an exhibition displayed Andrew Wyeth's and Jamie Wyeth’s work on this scale and in the shared context of their autobiographies, studio practices and imaginations. Whether you are new to the work of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth or are familiar with it, this exhibition will allow you to see their art converge and diverge over the years as it explores the connection between two American artists who shared artistic habits of mind while maintaining their own unique artistic voices.
This groundbreaking publication takes a novel approach in exploring the Wyeths’ working methods and processes. Author Timothy J. Standring also provides the reader with a rare personal glimpse into the artists’ world by chronicling his visits to their studios in the Brandywine Valley and Midcoast Maine over the course of four years. With over 200 color illustrations showing works in a variety of media—including pen and ink, graphite, chalk, watercolor, dry brush, tempera, and oil—this handsome book situates each artist’s oeuvre in the context of their shared biographies, place, and artistic practices.
After closing Feb. 7 at the DAM, a selection of works from the exhibition will travel to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain.
This Jamie Wyeth oil portrait is of Helen Taussig. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)
Wyeth. Andrew and Jamie in the studio
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
From 01 March to 19 June 2016
Andrew Wyeth
Faraway 1952
Drybrush on paper 34.92 x 54.61 cm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
In conjunction with the Denver Art Museum, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting the first retrospective in Europe on Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, leading figures of 20th-century American realism.
Visitors will have the opportunity to learn about the work of these two father and son artists, their lives and creative abilities through more than 60 works loaned from public institutions and private collections, some of them never previously exhibited in public.
Curated by Timothy Standring, curator of painting and sculpture at the Gates Foundation of the Denver Art Museum, the exhibition will also reveal how the respective work of these two artists has on occasions assumed parallel directions, with each enriching the other or generating mutual challenges. The large number of loans generously offered from the private collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth and that of Jamie Wyeth has allowed the curator to devise a comprehensive exhibition that includes major works by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) and Jamie Wyeth (born 1946), from all the periods within their careers.
Pushing the boundaries of traditional landscape painting, Charles François Daubigny (1817–78) was a vital touchstone and mentor for the subsequent generation of avant-garde artists now widely celebrated as the Impressionists. In the 1850s and 1860s, Daubigny routinely painted outdoors to directly capture qualities of light and atmosphere, launched a floating studio boat on French waterways that fundamentally changed the way artists could frame their compositions, employed radical painterly techniques and exhibited sketch-like works that critics assailed as “mere impressions.”
Though an inspiration to artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van Gogh, Daubigny is now relatively unknown. Until this year he has never been the subject of a major international exhibition, and no exhibition has previously examined Daubigny’s profound influence upon the Impressionists and in turn their influence on his late style.
Co-organized by the Taft Museum of Art, the Scottish National Gallery and the Van Gogh Museum, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape revises our understanding of the origins of Impressionism by reconsidering Daubigny as a central figure in the development of 19th-century French landscape painting, including Impressionism.
The groundbreaking exhibition will be on view at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, the sole U.S. venue, from Feb. 20 through May 29, 2016. It will travel to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdaml ater in 2016 and in early 2017.
In addition to one of the Taft’s Daubigny paintings, which prompted the exhibition, Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape will also feature spectacular loans from numerous North American and European museums—including the Art Institute of Chicago; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Bordeaux; Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam—and private collections.
“Conceived at the Taft, this very special exhibition reflects the museum’s strength in European art and its strong relationshipswith a host of distinguished international institutions,” said Taft Director and CEO Deborah Emont Scott.“ We are thrilled to bring this stellar group of European works of art to our greater Cincinnati, regional and national audiences.”
Of the 55 paintings in the exhibition, approximately 40 masterpieces by Daubigny will showcase the full range of the artist’s achievements over four decades, including both small easel paintings created outdoors and grand-scale paintings completed in the studio for exhibition.
The remainder of the works on view will offer ascinating and often surprising comparisons with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Vincent Van Gogh, revealing Daubigny’s impact on and importance for two subsequent generations of artists, the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionist Van Gogh.
“This exhibition stakes a claim for Daubigny’s inadequately recognized achievements as a powerful innovator and precursor to one of the most original art historical movements of all time,” said Lynne Ambrosini, Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of European Artat the Taft Museum of Art. Ambrosini is the initiating curator (and one of five curators) of the exhibition.
In the vanguard of artists who privileged and embraced the immediacy of open-air painting, Daubigny invented the studio boat and was the first to paint views surrounded by water instead of from the riverbanks. This pioneering compositional technique of stripping away conventional foregrounds to more directly observe nature and capture the effects of light, as well as his radically unfinished painting style and brighter palette, had a powerful influence on the young Impressionists.
Highlights of the exhibition include Daubigny’s images of silvery light and reflections along the Seine and Oise rivers, stormy atmospheric effects at the Normandy coast, dramatic moonlit landscapes, views of lush fields and scenes of blossoming orchards in the countryside outside Paris—the last another subject he invented. These subjects were soon taken up by Monet and Pissarro, whose similarly themed works will also be featured, for example
Pissarro’s The Banks of the Oise near Pontoise (1873, Indianapolis Museum of Art),
which echoes Daubigny’s compositions, and
Monet’s Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil, (1873, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia), which was painted from Monet’s emulative studio boat.
Daubigny’s panoramic views of the sunny grain-fields near Auvers were admired by Van Gogh, who adopted Daubigny’s then famous double-wide canvas formats for his own pictures of the plains near Auvers.
The final section of the exhibition presents five masterpieces by Van Gogh that reveal his debt to Daubigny, including
Daubigny’s Garden 1890, R. Staechelin Collection, Basel, Switzerland),
which exhibits Van Gogh’s signature swirling intensity.
(Daubigny's Garden, painted three times by Vincent van Gogh, depicts the enclosed garden of Charles-François Daubigny, a painter whom Van Gogh admired throughout his life. Van Gogh started with a small study of a section of the garden. Then he worked on two double-square paintings of the full walled garden. The paintings were made in Auvers between May and July 1890, during the last few months of his life. All three paintings are titled Daubigny's Garden and are distinguished by the museums they reside in: Kunstmuseum Basel, Hiroshima Museum of Art and Van Gogh Museum.)
About the Artist
From relatively humble beginnings in Paris, Daubigny rose over the course of a long and eventually acclaimed and successful career to help redefine French landscape painting. As a teenager he worked at the Louvre restoring paintings and subsequently began studies with artists Pierre-Asthasie-Théodore Sentièsand Paul Delaroche.
Daubigny’s travel to Italy and extensive working trips in France inspired his rural and river views of his country, which were exhibited and recognized at the annual Salons along with compositions by his peers, including Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet.
Publication
A fully illustrated176-page catalogue presenting significant new research about early Impressionism, Daubigny and Van Gogh by leading scholars in the field will accompany the exhibition. Essayists include the Taft’s Lynne Ambrosini, with two essays on Daubigny’s legacy andonthe market for his landscapes; Michael Clarke, Director of the Scottish National Gallery, who explores Daubigny’s river scenes; Maite van Dijk, Curator of Paintings, Van Gogh Museum (VGM), on Daubigny and Impressionists in the 1860s; Frances Fowle, Senior Curator of French Art, Scottish National Gallery, who considers Auvers-sur-Oise as a site of artistic production; Nienke Bakker, Curator of Paintings, VGM, who examines Van Gogh’s admiration of and responses to Daubigny; and René Boitelle, Senior Paintings Conservator, VGM, on Daubigny’s late painting techniques. The catalogue will be published by the National Galleries of Scotland and distributed by ACC Distribution, USA and UK.
More images from the exhibition:
Charles François Daubigny, The Beach at Villerville at Sunset, 1873, oil on canvas. Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Charles François Daubigny, Moonrise at Auvers or Return of the Flock, 1877, oil on canvas. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Lady Drummondin memory of her husband, Sir George A. Drummond
Charles François Daubigny, Orchard in Blossom, 1874, oil on canvas. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Charles François Daubigny, Sunset near Villerville, about 1876, oil on canvas. The Mesdag Collection, The Hague
Charles François Daubigny, The Village of Gloton, 1857, oil on panel. San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Mildred Anna Williams Collection
Claude Monet, Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil, 1873, oil on canvas. High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Purchase with funds from the Forward Arts Foundation, The Buisson Foundation, Eleanor McDonald Storza Estate, Frances Cheney Boggs Estate, Katherine John Murphy Foundation, and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund, 2000.205
Claude Monet, Houses on the Achterzaan, 1871, oil on canvas. Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.196)
Claude Monet, The Studio Boat, 1876, oil on canvas. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Neuchâtel Vincent van Gogh, Daubigny’s Garden, 1890, oil on canvas. The Rudolf Staechelin Collection
Vincent van Gogh, Orchard in Blossom, 1889, oil on canvas. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Fields after the Rain (The Plain of Auvers), 1890, oil on canvas. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Acquired through the generosity of the Sarah Mellon Scaife Family, 68.18
Charles François Daubigny, The Dunes at Camiers, 1871, oil on canvas. Lent by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of Wheelock Whitney, Wheelock Whitney III, Pennell Whitney Ballentine, Joseph Hixon Whitney, and Benson Kelley Whitney in memory of Irene Hixon Whitney
Charles François Daubigny - The Coming Storm, Early Spring circa 1865-1875 Walters Art Museum - Baltimore
Vincent van Gogh, The Banks of the Seine, 1887, oil on canvas. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Claude Monet, Scene at Bougival, Evening, 1869, oil on canvas, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Charles François Daubigny, Landscape with Harvesters, 1875, oil on canvas. Museum Gouda, The Netherlands
Charles François Daubigny, Ferryboat near Bonnières-sur-Seine, 1861, oil on canvas. Bequest of Charles Phelps and Anna Sinton Taft, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio
Surrealism: The Conjured Life presents more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate the deep currents that Surrealism sent through the international art world—and especially through Chicago—since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. A global movement that encompassed a wide number of art forms, including film, theater, poetry, and literature, Surrealism came of age with poet André Breton’s formal declaration in 1924. This deeply emotional and psychological art form flourished in the 1930s and 1940s—turbulent times of economic instability, rapidly changing social mores, and war.
Chicago collectors brought the European visual arts aspect of Surrealism to their hometown. Joseph and Jory Shapiro and Edwin and Lindy Bergman traveled to Europe, where they met members of the Surrealist group including Paul Delvaux, Matta, and Magritte, piquing their interest in this “art of the irrational.” Mary and Earle Ludgin collected in depth the works of eccentric American painter Forrest Bess. These arts patrons were among the founders of the MCA, and when the museum began collecting in the mid-1970s, they donated major works by those we now consider “classical” Surrealists, forming an early and continuing collection strength.
These artworks also proved inspirational to generations of Chicago-based artists, from the immediate postwar group dubbed the Monster Roster to the Hairy Who and others, a further expression of the continuing lure of “the conjured life” that results in strange, often magical, and sometimes disturbing, imagery.
Though often framed as a largely historical movement, the freedom afforded by Surrealism to explore both formal issues—including experimenting with new materials and techniques—and personal expression has continued to inspire artists to the present day. Thus besides presenting works by the founders of the movement, the surrealist tendency is traced in two other groupings: Surrealist-related works from the 1950s to the present, and Chicago connections.
Artists including Balthus, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning round out the presentation of the classical Surrealists. Major international contemporary artists such as Lee Bontecou, Mark Grotjahn, Wangechi Mutu, Cindy Sherman, and Francesca Woodman represent the stylistically diverse Surrealist-related grouping. Chicago-based artists on view include Gertrude Abercrombie, Leon Golub, Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, and H. C. Westermann.
The exhibition highlights one of the most traditional values in the visual arts: looking. All of the artworks that populate The Conjured Life bear close scrutiny, both in observing and exploring the subject matter and noting the various visual strategies and formal means, from the straightforward representation of Magritte to the low-relief plaster technique of Max Ernst; from the shamanistic deer skin, wood, and felt used by Jimmie Durham to the full-size rubber life raft cast in bronze by Jeff Koons.
The exhibition is curated by Lynne Warren, Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Work and Leisure in American Art comprises over 60 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper that explore the universal themes of labor and leisure in America from the 18th century to the present day. The works on view range chronologically from Benjamin West’s exposure of political corruption in the painting
Oliver Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament (1782)
to scenes of industrial and urban labor in the 20th century by Thomas Hart Benton, Stuyvesant Van Veen, and others. Their rural counterparts are seen in the wood engravings of Winslow Homer from the 1870s, as well as the prints of Clare Leighton in the 1930s, the cotton pickers of William Gropper in 1952, and others. In her three prints entitled Executive Tower, West Plaza, 1982, Ida Applebroog features self-absorbed business people, as she explored issues of contemporary urban identity in terms of isolation, alienation, and dehumanization.
Images of leisure in the exhibition encompass children at play, with Eastman Johnson’s Sketch for In the Hayloft,” c. 1877–78,
Homer’s See Saw, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1874,
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
Seesaw – Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1874
Wood engraving
Sheet: 9 x 14 in. (22.9 x 35.6 cm)
Montclair Art Museum: Gift of Elaine and Julian Hyman, 2002.18.4
and Currier and Ives’ American Homestead-Spring (1869),
Currier & Ives
Ives, James Merritt, American, 1824-1895
Currier, Nathaniel, American, 1813-1888
American Homestead – Spring, 1869
Hand-colored lithograph
Montclair Art Museum: Gift of George Raimes Beach, 1989.52
and Montclair art colony artist Lawrence Earle’s version of the popular string game Cat in the Cradle (1891).
Lawrence Earle
Cat In The Cradle Media: Watercolor Signed: Lower Left L C EARLE '91 Size: 25 1/2" x 18"
Collection of the Montclair Art Museum
The theme of sports is represented by various works, including images of horse racing at Saratoga by Winslow Homer, as well as Jon Corbino’s Race Track (1936) and golf in 1932 by Orrin White, based in Pasadena, California.
The beach and bodies of water as the locus for leisure activities is featured in the 19th-century work of Winslow Homer, as well as the early 20th-century artists Jane Peterson and Hayley Lever, with Justine Kurland providing a contemporary perspective in her photograph
Frog Swamp(Covington, Louisiana), 2001.
Justine Kurland (b. 1969)
Frog Swamp (Covington, Louisiana), 2001
Satin laminated C-print, Ed. 4/6
Montclair Art Museum: Gift of Patricia A. Bell, 2004.17.1
Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Another section of the exhibition is devoted to images of music and dance, ranging from late 19th-century works by Arthur B. Davies and Charles E. Proctor to the era of the 1940s as seen in Hilde Kayn’s Swingtime (1945) and Weegee’s photograph Calypso (At a Club in Harlem) (ca. 1944).
Irving Couse’s early 20th-century painting Indian Courtship featuring a flute-playing Native American also relates to the themes of friendship and romance,
as evidenced in other works in the exhibition, including Navajo painter Harrison Begay’s (1917–2012) Old Friends Meeting (n.d.), John Ahearn’s monumental sculpture of a man from the Bronx and his dog, Toby and Raymond (1986), as well as Andy Warhol’s small 1972 photo album of his friends and associates, some of whom starred in his movies.
Photographs of urban life and leisure range from John Sloan’s Bonfire Snow (ca. 1919)
to works by Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz in the 1960s, to Faith Ringgold’s monumental quilt Tar Beach 2 (1990) and Dawoud Bey’s beer-drinking Smokey, 2001. Their more suburban, domestic counterparts can be found in the works of
Will Barnet (Old Man’s Afternoon, 1947),
Roger Brown’s print of television-watching people, Talk Show Addicts (1993),
Nolde visited Hamburg regularly on his travels around Germany. He was fascinated by the bustling activity of the harbour and was also impressed by the wind and weather in the Hanseatic city, which for him represented the primal forces of life and nature. In 1910 he spent several weeks here, staying at the modest hotel Unter den Vorsetzen in the St. Pauli district. Nolde captured his immediate impressions of his surroundings in over a hundred works produced in rapid succession during this time. The majority of these are in the collection of the Nolde Foundation Seebüll, and are now being presented in the city where they were created, alongside works from the holdings of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and loans from a number of public and private collections.
Exhibitions of Emil Nolde’s work have been held in Hamburg since 1907, and it was here that he also found his first supporters: private individuals and museums began to collect his work. Nolde and his wife Ada established close relationships with important figures in the city’s art scene such as Gustav and Luise Schiefler, Paul and Martha Rauert, Rosa Schapire, Alfred Lichtwark and Gustav Pauli. The current exhibition also examines the close relationship between work, life, art and society at that time, the impact of which can still be felt today.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue includes scholarly essays and a foreword by Helmut Schmidt, the patron of this notable exhibition.
Nolde in Hamburg has been organised in collaboration with the Nolde Foundation Seebüll and will only be shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Curator: Dr Karin Schick; curatorial assistance: Anna Heinze.
"Venetian Painting in Honor of David Rosand,” will open on January 11th, 2016 at the Otto Naumann Gallery, 22 East 80th Street in New York. More than thirty important works of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods -- many never before seen publicly-- will be on view for this milestone event.
Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian (Pieve di Cadore, ca. 1488- Venice 1576) St. Sebastian Oil on Canvas, 74 3/4 x 37 3/4 inches (190x96 cm) Robert Simon Fine Art
While the exhibition will feature paintings from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the focus will be on the 1500s, the period most studied by Professor Rosand in his many books and publications. Featured artists include Carpaccio, Giovanni Bellini, Palma il Vecchio, Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and Jacopo Bassano.
Tintoretto's "Allegory of Music"
Other sixteenth-century paintings to be exhibited are by Palma il Giovane, the subject of Professor Rosand’s doctoral dissertation, Bonifazio Veronese, and Paris Bordone. Later Venetian paintings include significant works by Amigoni, Bambini, Guardi, Diziani, and Bernardo Bellotto. All paintings will be for sale.
Bernardo Bellotto (Venice 1722-1780 Warsaw) Architectural Capriccio with a Self-portrait in the Costume of a Venetian Nobleman, c. 1762-65 Oil on canvas, 61 1/2 x 44 1/4 inches Otto Naumann, Ltd.
David Rosand received his undergraduate and graduate education at Columbia, earning his Ph.D. in 1965. He was on the faculty there from that time until his death in August 2014, when he held the title of Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History Emeritus. His impact on students at Columbia and in the field of Venetian Studies has been enormous –through his teaching, his groundbreaking publications on Venetian art, and his studies on the making of art spanning all periods.
Palma il Vecchio (Bergamo, ca. 1480 - 1528 Venice) A Shepherd and Two Women Oil on panel, 27 1/4 x 37 1/4 inches (Robert Simon Fine Art, New York)
The exhibition will be held at Otto Naumann, Ltd., 22 East 80th Street, in New York City. Gallery hours during the exhibition will be Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with special Saturday openings from 11 to 4 on January 16, 23, and 30.
Financial Times review:
Of particular note is a stunning Bellotto for $12m. “Bellotto is one of the greatest proponents of the vedute, or view paintings, who ever lived,” says Otto Naumann. “He literally greets us in the painting itself and graciously presents us with the product of his vivid mind and deft hand.”
Other works include a saucy Vecchio entitled Shepherd and Two Women ($3m, third picture) and a portrait of Saint Sebastian by Titian ($4.5m).
There is also a glorious Niccolò Bambini ($385,000) of the three Graces that “offers an abundance of flesh and decorative zip,” says Naumann. “According to ancient myth, all charity and pleasantry came to mortals with the aid of the singing, frolicking Graces. By way of Bambini’s brush their presence imparts benevolence and gracefulness to the ordinary pleasures of life.”
After enthralling visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the last two years,
Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë will grace Sotheby’s New York to lead the Master Paintings Evening Sale on 28 January 2016 (estimate $25/35 million). This undisputed masterpiece is one of the most important Italian Baroque paintings to come to market since World War II, and Sotheby’s is honored to have the privilege to handle a work of this magnitude. The painting will be exhibited in New York 30 October – 11 November, followed by exhibitions this fall in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and London.
Commissioned in 1621 by the nobleman Giovanni Antonio Sauli for his palazzo in Genoa, this fantastic oil on canvas captures a scene from the myth of Danaë in which the daughter of King Acrisius of Argo is spirited away to a secret chamber to dissuade all male suitors from falling in love and impregnating the beauty. While mere mortals are deterred, Jupiter, God of the Sky and Thunder, is not — he catches a glimpse and promptly falls in love with the princess, materializing in her bedroom as a shower of gold coins. In Gentileschi’s rendering, Jupiter’s arrival is announced by Cupid who pulls back the curtains to reveal Danaë in all her exquisiteness.
The Sauli series was amongst Gentileschi’s most important commissions and also includes a Penitent Magdalene, in a New York private collection, and a Lot and his Daughters, in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.
A figurehead of the Italian Baroque period, Orazio Gentileschi began his career in Rome where he, like many others of his time, worked in close proximity with Roman and visiting artists. By 1600, a young artist by the name of Caravaggio was a constant companion, whose friendship translated to great artistic influence. In his later years, Gentileschi became known as one of the most talented and distinct Caravaggesque painters, a trait that he passed along to his daughter, the most celebrated female artist of the 17th century, Artemesia Gentileschi. The use of color, sensuality and splendor portrayed in Danaë draws together the Caravaggesque naturalism and Gentileschi’s masterful skill as a Baroque painter.
While the subject matter is not one unique to Gentileschi, the variance in textures showcases the artist’s extraordinary ability to depict beauty and light. The nuanced treatment of the satin, linen and metals, combined with the refined composition of the overall setting, results in a sumptuous work of art and a dynamic representation of one of the defining moments of early seventeenth-century painting. A true highlight of Gentileschi’s oeuvre, Danaë is one of — if not the most — important Baroque paintings to come to public auction in decades.
Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on Tuesday 2 February 2016 will present works by leading artists of the late 19th and 20th century. The saleincludes 50 lots which trace the rich variety and breadth of revolutionary movements from the period, from Impressionism, to early Modernism, Cubism, Colourist works and Expressionism; presenting a selection of celebrated, museum quality works - many of which are coming to the market for the first time in generations - with attractive estimates at all price ranges. This sale opens a week of five Impressionist, Modern and Surreal art sales at Christie’s King Street and South Kensington. With estimates starting from £300 up to £10 million, the auctions present new and established collectors with a wealth of opportunities to acquire rare and seminal examples by masters of the period.
The Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale is led by a self-portrait by Egon Schiele painted when the artist reached creative maturity in 1909 (estimate: £6-8 million); one of Marc Chagall’s most romantic paintings of the 1920s, Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (estimate: £4.8-6.8 million); the largest of a series of four works Paul Cézanne created at the home of legendary Impressionist collector Victor Chocquet (estimate: £4.5-6.5 million); Le moteur, 1918, which dates to one the most important periods of Fernand Léger’s career (estimate: £4-6 million); a still life by Pablo Picasso from 1937, painted on the eve of Guernica (estimate £4-6 million); a rare oil Chrysanthemum by Piet Mondrian (estimate: £1.6-2.4 million); and Bahnhof Königstein, 1916, a major painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from the artist’s last truly expressionist period, from the collection of the industrial chemist Dr Carl Hagemann (estimate: £1.5-2 million).
Ferme en Normandie, été (Hattenville), 1882, by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is being offered at auction for the first time in almost 20 years, having been acquired by the present owner in 1997 (estimate: £4.5-6.5 million). This is the largest of a series of four works that Cézanne created during a summer break at the home of his friend, the legendary impressionist collector Victor Chocquet, in Hattenville, Normandy. Chocquet, one of the first champions and earliest collectors of Impressionism, was also the first owner of this painting; it remained in his collection until his death. Painted at a time when Cézanne was reaching artistic maturity, this work exemplifies a crucial moment in the artist’s career, illustrating his move from Impressionism towards his own distinctive and highly influential ‘constructed’ style. Rather than a fleeting depiction of a transitory moment, this is a carefully considered and constructed composition, which transforms the landscape into a timeless, enduring image, qualities which lay at the very heart of Cézanne’s artistic practice. Constantly striving for the best means to capture the beauty, grandeur and structure of the world around him, Cézanne invented a whole new way of looking and painting nature, opening the door for a generation of subsequent artists.
Selbstbildnis mit gespreizten Fingern(Self-Portrait with Spread Fingers) by Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was painted in 1909, a breakthrough year when Schiele reached creative maturity (estimate: £6-8 million). Although only nineteen years old, Schiele’s prodigious talent had already asserted itself to the point where he had become recognised by Gustav Klimt among others, as one of the greatest hopes for the future of Austrian art. An important early work, this painting reveals Schiele already beginning to move beyond the dominant influence of his mentor Klimt towards a new, more existentially aware expressionist art. With its self-conscious depiction of the artist’s features emerging from a typical gold-ground Secessionist background this work was an announcement of Schiele’s arrival into the contemporary art world of Vienna - a new character taking the stage. Schiele’s first self-portrait oil made for public display, it is a clear statement of how Schiele saw himself as working ‘through’ or ‘by way’ of Klimt and the Seccession, towards a newer more transcendent style of his own. Previous sale: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/AAA/AAA-4860121-details.aspx
Offered from the collection ofthe industrial chemist Dr Carl Hagemann, Bahnhof Königstein, 1916, is a major painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) deriving from the artist’s very last truly expressionist period shortly before he left Germany for good, in 1917, to convalesce in Switzerland (estimate: £1.5-2 million). This is one of a rare and important group of paintings that Kirchner made in and of the landscape around Königstein in the Taunus region near Frankfurt, where he had been ordered to enter a sanatorium after being discharged from the army in September 1915. Bahnhof Königstein is one of the first of Kirchner’s paintings to have been bought by Carl Hagemann, an important friend, patron and life-long supporter of the artist and his work. Priced originally at 600 marks, this painting was the most highly priced oil that Kirchner sold to his new patron in 1916. A letter from Kirchner to Hagemann written in September 1916 reveals in what high regard Kirchner held this particular painting and how important Hagemann’s patronage was during this critical time of upheaval for the artist.
Dating from one of the most important periods of Fernand Léger’s (1881-1955) career, Le moteur was painted in May 1918, just months after the artist had resumed painting following his discharge from the army (estimate: £4-6 million). Taking as its subject a gleaming, multipartite, modern engine, Le moteur is one of the first of a group of visionary works that marks the beginning of Léger’s renowned ‘mechanical period’, which would come to define his art of the years following the First World War. Keen to embrace modernity in all its varied forms, Léger deified the machine during this period, using a fragmented, dynamic pictorial vocabulary with which to depict it. With its riotous explosion of bold colour, frenzied interlocking and overlapping forms and jubilant patterns and texture, Le moteur is a glorious example of this series of works: a vibrant emblem of the industrialised and modernised post-war era that so enthralled the artist.
Acquired over 30 years ago, Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel by Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is one of the artist’s most romantic paintings of the 1920s, celebrating the love between the artist and his wife, Bella, as they entered a new phase of security and contentment in their lives (estimate: £4.8-6.8 million). Painted in 1928, the work features a double portrait of the couple as they tenderly embrace in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Their daughter Ida floats through an open window, which acts as a fluid boundary between the interior and exterior world, as she delivers a bouquet of flowers to the pair. Around the figures, a panoramic view of Paris reveals the gaiety of the city in the 1920s. Executed during a period of professional prosperity and personal comfort, the painting celebrates the strength of the familial bond between Chagall, his wife and their daughter, and the joy they felt together, as a family, in the pulsating and dynamic city of Paris in the twenties. The artist’s renewed happiness is reflected in the vivid, radiant hues employed, introducing sparkling shades of violet, green, mauve, blue, red and yellow to the composition, to achieve a complex interplay of colours across the canvas.
Painted in oil, Chrysanthemum by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), is a particularly rare example of the artist’s floral studies which were predominantly executed in watercolour, gouache, charcoal or pencil (estimate: £1.6-2.4 million). Hailed as one of the most pioneering artists in the development of nonrepresentational geometric abstraction, Mondrian also painted naturalistic flower paintings throughout his career, from as early as 1898 and continuing until 1938. Mondrian’s poetic and representational depiction of solitary flowers form a fascinating visual counterpart to his works of pure abstraction. Depicting one of Mondrian’s favourite flowers, Chrysanthemum is rendered with exquisite and delicate detail. For Mondrian, flowers not only provided an opportunity for the scrupulous observation of form, but with their symbolic iconography, also served as a means for the artist to explore a range of deeper spiritual concerns.
Nature morte by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was painted in 1937 (estimate £4-6 million), on 26 April, the very day that the Basque town of Guernica was bombed, killing over a thousand people; an atrocity which fuelled Picasso’s outrage over war and inspired his iconic mural Guernica. An angular, sophisticated and poetic still life, the apparent whimsy of Nature morte, which only hints at Picasso’s anxieties of war, marks the end of an entire period of Picasso’s work before a change of direction that would leave its mark on the artist for a long time. Stars are glowing in the night sky, while in the foreground a pipe and book lie alongside a drink and a candelabra, hinting at the passing of an evening of solitary pleasures, both of the mind and of the body. Christie’s Impressionist, Modern and Surreal Evening sales in February 2016 will present a wealth of 9 works by Picasso, spanning almost every period of his oeuvre, from his Blue Period, to Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, Surrealism in the 1920s, alongside works from war period and later.
Christie’s TheArt of the Surreal Evening Sale on Tuesday 2 February 2016 comprises 42 lots by a total of 16 different artists, the broadest array to be offered to date. The sale is led by The Stolen Mirror a technical tour-de-force by Max Ernst and one of the artist's finest works (estimate: £7-10 million). Now in its 16th year, this much anticipated and unique annual standalone surreal sale features further highlights by Pablo Picasso, Wilfredo Lam, René Magritte, Joan Miró and Salvador Dali. Christie’s overall evening of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist Art on 2 February has a total pre-sale estimate of £87.3 million to £129.1 million. These Evening sales open a week of five Impressionist, Modern and Surreal art sales at Christie’s King Street and South Kensington, across media and price points. With estimates starting from £300 up to £10 million the sales present new and established collectors with a wealth of opportunities to acquire and celebrate examples by masters of the period.
A museum quality work and the cover lot of the sale, The Stolen Mirror by Max Ernst (1891-1976) is a surrealist technical tour-de-force, highly autobiographical and one of the artist's finest works (estimate: £7-10 million). This dream-like landscape was painted in 1941 at the pinnacle of Ernst’s oeuvre, when he was using the decalcomania technique of manipulating paint which he picked up from Oscar Dominguez. Many Surrealists tried the technique though Ernst was the only one to adapt decalcomania in a sustained manner to painting in oils on canvas. Rarely employing it as an end in itself, but rather as a means to create the unexpected, he became a master of the technique and achieved a remarkable degree of control over a fundamentally unpredictable process. The current record for a work by the artist, realising £10,283,175/ $16,322,500 at Christie’s in 2011, this painting once belonged to Edward James, one of the foremost early collectors of Surrealist art; it was later re-acquired by Ernst’s son Jimmy Ernst and descended through the family to the estate of Edith Dallas Ernst, from which it was last sold. Previous sale: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/max-ernst-the-stolen-mirror-5493627-details.aspx
Infused with a sense of drama and mystery, Chant de la Forêt by Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) captures the dark and enigmatic power of the Cuban landscape and stimulates the imagination in its suggestion of the presence of unseen forces, hidden in the depths of the forest (estimate: £1.3-1.8 million). Fusing vegetative forms with sharply angled shapes, the artist creates a hybrid creature, part animal, part plant and part mystical being. Its hybridity simultaneously referencing Surrealist thought, the indigenous landscape of Lam’s homeland, and the unique elements of the Afro-Cuban culture which survived there. Painted in 1946, Chant de la Forêt was created following Lam’s return to Cuba after almost two decades living in Europe. This homecoming prompted an extraordinary breakthrough in the artist’s work, as he reconnected with his cultural roots. Hinting at a presence beyond the conscious world, this work elegantly fuses the unique spiritual elements of the Cuban culture with its distinctively lush landscapes to achieve a bold new approach to Surrealism.
Throughout much of 1928 Salvador Dali was greatly preoccupied with ideas about anti-art, the establishing of a new-objectivity and the exploration of what his new Catalan friend Joan Miró had recently defined as ‘the assassination of painting’. Fishermen in the Sun is the finest of a unique, distinctive and very rare series of six relief-paintings made during this period in which Dali pioneered a completely new stylistic direction in his work; of these six paintings, four now reside in museums including the Fundación Gala-Salvador Dal, Figueras and the Reina Sofía, Madrid (estimate: £700,000-£1,000,000). In 1928, Dali embarked on a unique series of works that made use of real, tactile, three-dimensional materials and reduced his already amorphous and anamorphic forms to two-dimensional semi-abstract cyphers that simultaneously suggested many different things at once. His aim was to move beyond all the old ideas of painting while widening the revelatory potential of his art to speak directly to man’s unconscious mind. As Fishermen in the Sun highlights, Dali forged a series of radically new psychic landscapes that, with their suggestions of an atemporal sandy plain of strange hallucinatory possibility stretching out beneath a strip of empty blue sky, lay the foundations for the dramatic, hyper-realist paintings that he began his Surrealist career with in 1929.
Painted in 1942, Mesdemoiselles de l'Isle Adam by René Magritte (1898-1967) showcases the layers of wit, beauty, mystery and subversion that characterised the greatest of his pictures from the period (estimate: £2-3 million). It is telling that this picture has had such a distinguished history: after remaining in Magritte's hands for around a decade, it was acquired by his friend Justin Rakofsky, before entering the collection of Gustave Nellens, the owner of the casino at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, which was decorated with monumental murals by Magritte. As with the greatest of Magritte's works, this paintingplays with the viewer's preconceptions of art, and therefore of life. Mesdemoiselles de l'Isle Adam dates from a crucial watershed in Magritte's life when, in a bold response to the Second World War which had engulfed Magritte, his work moved toward a lighter and brighter approach.
Painted in March 1968, Femme et oiseaux dans la nuit (Woman and Birds in the Night) by Joan Miró (1893-1983) is a major large-scale painting of one of the artist’s favourite subjects, made for an important travelling retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu in Barcelona and the Haus der Kunst in Munich between 1968 and 1969 (estimate: £3-5 million). Of all these venues, it was Miró’s exhibition in Barcelona, his first in Spain for over fifty years, which was to prove the most lastingly important as it led directly to the establishment of the Miró Foundation there seven years later. Femme et oiseaux dans la nuit is one of several paintings on the poetic theme of women, birds and the night that Miró made in the mid-1960s, at a time when he was pursuing the joint influences of recent American painting and of Japanese calligraphy on his own uniquely poetic, instinctive and gestural style of painting.
At auction for the very first time, having been hidden in a distinguished private collection for over half a century, Fleurs coquilles sur fond marin, 1928, by Max Ernst (1891-1976) is a large red and black ‘shell-flower’ painting in which the artist presents a mysterious but also distinctly natural landscape of the kind that had distinguished his early frottage works in his famous graphic series Histoire Naturelle (estimate: £600,000-900,000). A colourful and also highly painterly combination of flat, abstract and geometric form with broad grattage scrapings of paint used to form two amorphous but strangely organic structures reminiscent of shells, flowers and geological rock formations, Fleurs coquilles sur fond marin is a work that invokes a strange, abstract world full of biological magic and possibility.
As curving planes and facets of flattened monochrome colour collide and coalesce across the surface of the canvas, a surreal visage emerges in the striking Arlequin by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) from 1926 (estimate: £1.5-2.5 million). Depicting two profiles of a face simultaneously, Arlequin is one of a series of split, biomorphic portraits that Picasso created while spending the summer on the French Riviera, and marks a major shift in the artist’s style as he left behind the rotund Neo-Classical goddesses that had graced his work of the early 1920s, and began painting darker, psychologically intense and dramatic subjects that exude a surreal, often disquieting quality. Painted with a stark palette, Arlequin has a compelling intensity, portraying with a striking economy of means, a labyrinthine depiction of the human face. Picasso’s art at this time appeared in some ways to align with the aims of the Surrealists; he shunned reality in his painting and unleashed his emotions to convey a psychological, subconscious and dramatic raw emotional response to life.
Overall, the sale presents surrealist works by a total of 16 artists, including further works by: Andre Masson; Giorgio de Chirico; Hans Bellmer; Man Ray; Oscar Dominguez; Paul Klee; Peter Rose Pulham; Victor Brauner; Wols; and Yves Tanguy.
Christie’s The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale on Tuesday 2 February 2016
Infused with a sense of drama and mystery, Chant de la Forêt by Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) captures the dark and enigmatic power of the Cuban landscape and stimulates the imagination in its suggestion of the presence of unseen forces, hidden in the depths of the forest (estimate: £1.3-1.8 million). Fusing vegetative forms with sharply angled shapes, the artist creates a hybrid creature, part animal, part plant and part mystical being. Its hybridity simultaneously referencing Surrealist thought, the indigenous landscape of Lam’s homeland, and the unique elements of the Afro-Cuban culture which survived there. Painted in 1946, Chant de la Forêt was created following Lam’s return to Cuba after almost two decades living in Europe. This homecoming prompted an extraordinary breakthrough in the artist’s work, as he reconnected with his cultural roots. Hinting at a presence beyond the conscious world, this work elegantly fuses the unique spiritual elements of the Cuban culture with its distinctively lush landscapes to achieve a bold new approach to Surrealism.
The Cloisters, New York City January 20–April 17, 2016
Only three decks of European hand-painted playing cards are known to have survived from the late Middle Ages—two made in Germany and one in the Burgundian Netherlands, all dating from the early to late 15th century. The only complete set of these luxury cards—The Cloisters Playing Cards, from the southern Netherlands—and representative examples from the other two decks will be featured in the exhibition The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540, opening January 20 at The Cloisters.
The earliest surviving deck of hand-painted woodcut cards—and the finest example of such work from the German Renaissance—will also be included in the exhibition, where contextual background will be provided by 15th-century engraved and woodcut playing cards from Germany and tarot cards from North Italy. Among the works on view will be examples by the Basel painter Konrad Witz (1400–1445) and two other artists of the period who were known as Master E. S. and Master of the Playing Cards.
The Cloisters is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum dedicated to the art and architecture of medieval Europe.
Card games originated in China in the ninth century and were later taken up in India and the Middle East. Playing cards first appeared in Europe around the late 14th century, probably through trade. Because card games often involved gambling, clerical and civilian authorities in Europe banned cards. Early European decks were not standardized and featured diverse suit pictures as well as variety in the number of suits and the number of cards.
Exhibition Overview
The three hand-painted decks represented in the exhibition—the Stuttgart Cards (ca. 1430), the Ambras Courtly Hunt Cards (ca. 1440), and The Cloisters Playing Cards (ca. 1470–80)—were made over a span of some 50 years by different artists in different locations. Although each of these decks is unique, all feature images related to hunting, a favorite leisure activity of medieval nobility. The high quality of the paintings and excellent condition of the cards suggest that the luxury sets were never played. Rather, they may have served as engaging collectors’ items, like portfolios of prints or drawings, for the private enjoyment of their owners.
Representing the earliest known deck of cards is the incomplete Stuttgart Cards (12 of the 49 remaining cards in this deck will be on view at The Cloisters). Although the theme is the hunt, no actual hunt is shown. Rather, the imagery of the Stuttgart Cards serves as a metaphor for the patron’s view of the world, evoking a chivalric past in which man exists in harmony with nature. The deck’s four suits are falcons, hounds, ducks, and stags.
On the basis of overall style and the treatment of landscapes, the Ambras Courtly Hunt Cards are attributed to the workshop of the noted German painter Konrad Witz. The suits are lures, falcons, herons, and hounds. Six cards from this deck will be displayed.
The Cloisters Playing Cards are the earliest complete set of cards, and are among the more intriguing works of secular art in the collection of The Cloisters. The exhibition marks the first time that all 52 cards will be displayed at The Cloisters at the same time. (Because works on paper are sensitive to light, normally only a small number of the cards have been shown at one time.) The suits in The Cloisters deck are nooses, collars, leashes, and hunting horns.
Six examples from the 16th-century Courtly Household cards—the earliest deck of printed cards—will provide a fascinating glimpse into the organization of a late medieval princely court. The four suits correspond to the kingdoms of Germany, France, Bohemia, and Hungary. The hand-colored cards in this set are embellished in silver and gold leaf and represent the varied ranks at court: king, queen, marshal, chaplain, physician, chancellor, court mistress, barber, herald, fishmonger, and fool. Some occupations are depicted in all four suits, others appear only once. The deck represents some of the earliest German woodblock prints in existence.
A later set of woodblock printed cards from Nuremburg around 1540, by German sculptor, designer, and printmaker Peter Flötner, is distinguished by the musical notations that appear on the back of each card. The cards from this deck—all of which will be shown in the exhibition—are hand colored, with silver and gold embellishments. The suit pictures—acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells—had by this time become standard in Germany.
Under Knave of Ducks, from The Stuttgart Playing Cards (Das Stuttgarter Kartenspiel) German, Upper Rhineland, ca. 1430 Paper (six layers in pasteboard) with gold ground and opaque paint over pen and ink 7 1⁄2 × 4 3⁄4 in. (19.1 × 12.1 cm)
Encompassing works by artists including Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Paul Delvaux and René Magritte, to name but a few, the 54 lots in the evening salesare estimated to fetch a combined total of £97,630,000-138,370,000.
Claude Monet Le Palais Ducal vu de Saint-Georges Majeur (1908) Estimate: £12,000,000-18,000,000
Monet’s spectacular view of the Palazzo Ducale on the Grand Canal belongs to the extraordinary series he completed during his first visit to Venice in the autumn of 1908.He paints a Venice transfigured by light–conveying the famous Venetian haze in the interplay between the ornate Byzantine façadeand the rhythmic expanse of water. Other examples of the artist’s views of Le Palais Ducal painted in the same year are now held by prestigious museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sotheby’s has sold each of the three highest-priced paintings of Venice by Monet, including
Le Grand Canal of 1908 in February 2015 for £23.7m, a record price for a Venice painting by the artistand
Le Palais Ducalof 1908 in May 2015 for $23m.
Henri Matisse La Leçon de piano (1923) Estimate: £12,000,000-18,000,000
An exceptional painting by Matisse, La Leçon de piano has emerged after 89years in a private British collection. Combining music and art, two of the artist’s greatpassions, this intimate work is one of the finest interior compositions from Matisse’s early Nice period, which rank among the boldest and most life-affirming in Matisse’s œuvre.The vibrantly coloured and highly patterned fabrics that make up the interior have become synonymous with his art from the 1920s, and in this painting they are complemented by the piano on the left, while the composition is centred around the figures of Henriette Darricarrère, Matisse’s favourite model of this era, and her two younger brothers.The painting was acquired by the late Royan Middleton, whose collection is one of the least known and most fascinating of all those formed in Britain from the 1920s onwards.
Pablo Picasso Tête de femme (1935) Estimate: £16,000,000-20,000,000
Instantly recognisable as a portrait of Picasso’s ‘golden muse’ Marie-Thérèse Walter, this elegant and radiant composition is one of the most geometrically complex renderings of the artist’s beloved mistress.The work, full of erotic love for the woman who was pregnant with his child at the time of painting, features a crescent moon across her face, a symbol of Diana, god of fertility. The linear forms of the composition contrast with the more cubist aesthetic which is achieved through the crosshatching of the background.The image of Marie-Thérèse in Tête de femme inspired a creative synthesis of the most radical aspects of Picasso's production,as he was able to incorporate elements from various different parts of his career into one work –the voluminous treatment characteristic of his plastic work, the grid-like background reminiscent of his ground-breaking collages, and the sharp, linear distortions borrowed from the Cubist canon.
Created shortly after the end of the First World War, Eléments mécaniques is a celebration of technological progress in anage of rapid industrialisation. The piece also marks a return to the simple purity of abstraction and bright palette, which Léger had abandoned whilst serving in the French army. He transforms the composition with a fragmentation of the objects and space to reflect the frenetic simultaneity of modern life.
Sotheby's 2015 Fernand Léger LES HOMMES DANS LA VILLE. 1919 LOT SOLD. 5,626,000 USD
Marc Chagall Femme a l’âne vert or Tête de vache verte(1953) Estimate: £400,000-600,000
Femme à l’âne vert is suffused with the rich blue that characterises much of Chagall’s post-war work and represents his new engagement with colour and light. The figures in the piece are laden with significance and imbue the work with an underlying nostalgia that suggests both a present happiness and remembrances of a lost past.The young woman with dark, flowing hair was synonymous with the artist’s beloved first wife Bella, and here she is lent extra weight by the bouquet of flowers she clasps in her hand.
Christies 2010 L'âne vert Painted in 1969-1973 Price Realized£802,850
GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM
Franz MarcGrosse Landschaft I (Large Landscape I) (1909)Estimate:£4,000,000-6,000,000‘
Marc believed that the horse, with its flowing mane and strong, sinuous physicality, symbolised the ideal beauty of nature. In 1911, Marc and Kandinskychose this majestic animal for the cover of Der Blaue Reiter Almanach–the manifesto of a group fundamental to Expressionism. This early work heralds the artist’s bold palette and his rejection of naturalistic use of colour, in a harmonious and rhythmic composition. Marc died during the First World War, and the surviving artists, including Kandinsky and Paul Klee, later acknowledged their debt to the spiritually based, ‘primitive’ aesthetic that Marc had pioneered.
Emil Nolde Meer Bei Alsen (Sea off Alsen) (1910) Estimate: £1,200,000-1,600,000
Painted in 1910, Meer bei Alsen is one of the earliest representations of the sea by Emil Nolde, and is an exceptionally powerful and dynamic example of a subject which captivated him throughout his career. Preoccupied with the task of representing the sky and sea as elemental forces, the artist’s instinctive response to one of nature's most moving spectacles is clear in the raw energy capture by the rapid brushwork.
Max Beckmann Schlafende am Strand (Quappi at the Beach) (1927& 1950) Estimate: £800,000-1,200,000
Schlafende am Strand was inspired by Beckmann’s visit to Rimini on the Adriatic coast of Italy, where he spent the summer of 1927 with his wife Quappi. Both
the initial sketch
and the painting remained first in the artist’s and then in Quappi’s possession until the end of her life, the drawing now forming part of the collection of Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig. Quappi, who often featured as a model in Beckmann’s works, is depicted as an image of beauty and youth.The sense of simplicity and joie de vivre is palpable as the artist centres his attention on depicting the simple pleasure of lying on a sunny beach.
France Kees van Dongen Lilas et tulipes (circa1925) Estimate: £400,000-600,000
Vibrantly coloured and executed on an impressive scale, Lilas et tulipes exemplifies both Van Dongen’sremarkable mastery of colour and his innovative approach to the still-life form. Juxtaposing the slender stems of the lilac blossoms with the sensuous heads of the tulips, Van Dongen imbues the composition with a remarkable dynamism and his expressive use of thickly applied colour reflects the enduring influence of an association with the Fauves.
Wassily Kandinsky Flächen und Linien (Surfaces and Lines) (1930) Estimate: £700,000-1,000,000
A harmonious exploration of colour and form, Flächen und Linien is an important example of Kandinsky’s mature style. The painting dates from the years the artist spent in the industrial town of Dessau, where the Bauhaus was relocated in 1925.Combining flat planes of colour and clearly defined shapes in the style thatbecame associated with his Bauhaus works, this paintingexemplifies the artist’s ground-breaking aesthetic experiments.His use of strict geometric forms was due to his belief that particular arrangements of shapes triggered an "inner resonance" or "spiritual vibration" and could elicit from a viewer a powerful emotional response.
Sotheby's 2015 Wassily Kandinsky OHNE TITEL Estimate 2,000,000— 3,000,000
LOT SOLD. 5,738,000 USD
SURREALIST ART
Paul Delvaux Le Miroir (1936) Estimate: £5,500,000-7,500,000
In this monumental painting Delvauxpresents an encounter of disparate elements, juxtaposed in such a way as to create aworld of mystery. Depicting at once an interior and an exterior setting, there is an ambiguity in the relationship between the two figures. The nude woman is associated with nature and beauty, whilst the decaying room with its peeling wallpaper may well serve as a metaphor for the woman’s spiritual state. The first owner of Le Miroir was Sir Roland Penrose, who was himself a painter as well as a friend of many Surrealist artists and an avid promoter of their work.
Pablo Picasso Personnages oil on canvas (1929) Estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000
In 1929 Picasso’s private life was dominated by more than one woman, as he was becoming increasingly involved with his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter while still married to Olga Khokhlova. His depictions of the beach at Dinard often contain references to both women, exorcising the tension of his increasingly distressing relationship with his wife Olga while at the same time reflecting the compelling new inspiration and energy that Marie-Thérèse brought into his life.The work reflects the influence of the Surrealist artists who were at the forefront of the European avant-garde, as Picasso used their highly abstracted vocabulary as a means of disguising the image of his mistress, whose existence he would keep secret until 1932.
Francis Picabia Ventilateur (circa1918) Estimate: £1,800,000-2,500,000
An exceptional example of Picabia’s rare and profoundly influential machinist compositions from his Dada period, in this work a ventilation machine is depicted as analogous with a potent female sexuality. The use of mechanical forms and the sensational associations they evoke were fundamental to the artist’s perception of art’s role in the modern, industrialised epoch.
René Magritte Shéhérazade(1956) Estimate: £500,000-700,000
One of Magritte’s most elegant renderings of the recurring motif of the pearl-woman, this intricately composed female face alludes to the enigmatic yet legendary storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights. Her beauty is evident, yet at the same time it appears like a fleeting mirage in a mysterious setting, revealing the artist’s fascination with the paradox of the visible and the invisible. This gouache was commissioned from the artist by Barnet Hodes in 1956.
René Magritte L’Usage de la parole ( 1961)Estimate: £500,000-700,000
Magritte’s use of paper cut-outs in 1925 began around the same time that he embarked on his first surrealist paintings. This work features a number of the iconic elements and signature objects that he developed at this time, including the silhouette of a bowler-hatted man –which remained the single most iconic motif of his œuvre. The piece is also linked to Magritte’s celebrated body of work known as ‘word-paintings’, and the word representing an abstract notion (knowledge) adds a conceptual dimension to the composition.
Paul Klee In Stellung (In Position)(1939) Estimate: £120,000-180,000
Executedin 1939, the most productive year in Klee’s career, In Stellung is a magnificent example of the artist’s ability to blend natural elements and geometric forms into a fantastic, dream-like image. Following Klee’s death in 1940, the present work was inherited by his widow Lily Klee and later passed into the possession of the newly formed Klee Foundation in Bern.
SCULPTURE
Auguste Rodin Iris, messagère des Dieux(1890-91) Estimate: £6,000,000-8,000,000
Suspended in mid-air, this image of the female body is one of Rodin's most daring sculptures, both in its defiance of gravity and in the frankness of its sexuality.One of only seven known life-time casts of this magnificent work, the bronze is one of his most celebrated sculptures, admired for its expressiveness. Rodin drew voluminous quantities of nudes in unconventional poses, often highly erotic ones, and it is perhaps these studies that prompted the exceptional arrangement of the Iris. Originally conceived as one of the muses in his second project for the Victor Hugo Monument, the flagrantly explicit composition and central focus on the female anatomy also recalls Gustave Courbet's infamous painting L'Origine du monde.
Alberto Giacometti La Cage (première version)(executed in 1950 and cast in bronze in 1991) Estimate: £1,800,000-2,500,000
Throughout his career as both sculptor and painter, Giacometti was preoccupied with two themes that became central to his work:the role of the artist and his model and the relationship between man and woman. InLaCage (première version)both of these themes combine to create a palpable tension.This is due to the relatively ambiguous relationship of the figures, but also between the geometric structure of the cage itself and the fluidity of its captives.The mportance of La Cage (première version)to Giacometti is evident in the fact that he kept the plaster version of the work himself until his death, whereupon it was cast in bronze posthumously.
Edgar Degas Cheval se cabrant (conceived circa 1880s and cast by 1921) Estimate: £500,000-700,000
Widely regarded as Degas' most expressive rendering of a horse, this work celebrates the elegance and power of the animal’s movement.Degas’ two engrossing passions, horseracing and ballet, provided him with a rich and exciting social life and the artistic inspiration for the greatest part of his œuvre. As a member of the prestigious Jockey Club, the artist was a habitué of the racecourses at Deauville and Longchamps, where he could study the beauty of thoroughbred horses at close quarters. This sculpture is among the earliest-known casts from the edition and was exhibited at the GalerieBernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1921.
Henry Moore Maquette for King and Queen (conceived and cast in bronze in 1952) Estimate: £800,000-1,200,000
The maquette for one of Moore’s most celebrated monumental sculptures, the King and Queen, the work depicts two figures which are imbued with an ancient, otherworldly majesty that is closer to a primitive notion of kingship than a modern conception of royalty. Moore subsequently suggested that one inspiration for them had been an Egyptian limestone statue in the British Museum and the enigmatic quality of their mask-like faces certainly recalls ancient statuary.The figures’ mystical quality was inherent in their making.The first full-size cast was made for the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp in 1953, and further casts are now in the collection of the Tate, London, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D. C., and the Glenkiln Sculpture Park in Dumfries, Scotland.
Salvador Dalí Vénus de Milo aux tiroirs Executed in plaster in 1936 and cast in bronze in 1964. Estimate: £400,000-600,000
The image of Vénus de Milowas celebrated as the apex of female beauty by poets and artists throughout the centuries. Man Ray and Dalí created intriguing reassessments of this paragon of mythical beauty as an object of amusement and sexual play.As a child, Dalí had made a terracotta copy of the famous Greek marble at the Musée du Louvre. The motif evolved further while Dalí was staying in England with Edward James, the renowned collector and supporter of the Surrealists, after a misunderstanding that arose upon hearing someone talk of a “chest of drawers”. The first version of this work was created in 1936 when Dalí, possibly with the technical assistance of Marcel Duchamp, modified a copy of the Vénus de Milo incorporating six drawers.The piece alludes to the mysterious depths of the human psyche. Dalí was influenced by Sigmund Freud, as the human body, an object of beauty at the time of the Greeks, was now full of secret drawers which only psychoanalysis could pull open. Dalí’saddition of fur in the place of the knobs adds a soft, tactile quality to the image, amplifying its erotic undertone.
In this work Dalí painted the bronze in white, thus tricking the viewer into believing that the sculpture is made of marble. The theme of the Vénus de Milo with drawers appears in several drawings and a painting from the same year.
Man Ray Vénus restaurée (1971)Estimate: £350,000-500,000
Vénus restaurée is one of the most iconic of Man Ray’s surrealist creations: a magnificent and thought-provoking object which challenges and subverts preconceived notions of sexuality and beauty. The torso of a nude woman –modelled after the celebrated Medici Venus which dates from 1st century B.C., now in the collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence –is here imbued with undeniable connotations of eroticism and calls to mind the Marquis de Sade, whose writings deeply influenced the Surrealists. The use of rope is suggestive of enslavement, re-enforcing the importance of the body as a sexual and fetishistic tool within Surrealist practice.
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