Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale will be followed by The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, together launching '20th Century at Christie's' on 5 February 2020. Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932, estimate: £8,000,000-12,000,000) and Alberto Giacometti's Trois hommes qui marchent (Grand plateau) (1948, estimate: £8,000,000-12,0000,000) will both lead the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale. Further highlights include George Grosz's politically charged Gefährliche Straße (1918, estimate: £4,500,000-6,500,000), which has remained in a private collection for 50 years and will appear at auction for the first time. A group of three still lifes by Pablo Picasso demonstrate his career-long dedication to evolving the genre with exceptional examples from the 1940s, 50s and 60s: La cafetière (1943, estimate; £1,000,000-1,500,000); Intérieur au pot de fleurs (1953, estimate: £7,000,000-10,000,000) and Nature morte au chien (1962, estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000). Works on paper by Gino Severini, Egon Schiele Paul Klee, Picasso and Max Ernst provide intimate insight into key artists of the 20th century.
Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry 39 x 25 in. (100 x 65 cm.) (1932) £8,000,000-12,000,000 (US$10.4-15.7m)
TAMARA DE LEMPICKA Portrait de Marjorie Ferry was commissioned in 1932 by the husband of the British-born cabaret star Marjorie Ferry at the height of Lempicka's fame in Paris where she was the most sought-after and celebrated female modernist painter. By 1930 Lempicka had become the première portraitist in demand among both wealthy Europeans and Americans, specifically with those who had an eye for classicised modernism.
A major highlight of this series of auctions will be George Grosz’s highly politicised depiction of Germany at the close of the First World War, Gefährliche Straße, which will be offered at auction for the first time. The painting will be presented 100 years after it was first exhibited in Grosz’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich. The painting has remained in the same private collection since 1970 and was last seen in public over twenty years ago in the Haus der Kunst, in Munich, in an exhibition titled ‘Die Nacht’ in 1999.
Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s: “We are honoured to present at auction this masterpiece from the rare and celebrated First World War series of city paintings by George Grosz. It has remained in the same collection for half a century. Only three of the original 20 or so cityscapes (ten in museums, seven lost or destroyed) remain in private hands and this is arguably the best and most complex of those. Grosz with all his corrosive wit and a mastery of colour here combines futurist dynamism and expressionist fervour to convey his hatred of Germany and contempt for its establishment. He has added an angry self-portrait in the lower right corner of the composition.”
Ten paintings from the series can be seen in leading museums including the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gefährliche Straße (Dangerous Street) is a picture of the First World War as it was played out on the streets of Berlin, painted during the last months of the War in July 1918. This series of often nightmarelike pictures of the city are the finest of all Grosz’s achievements. They are works of art that have come to fix the image of Berlin in the popular imagination and to define the traumatic era within which they were made. Gefährliche Straße is one of the last and most accomplished of this famous series of apocalyptic paintings. Unlike some of Grosz’s earlier, more deliberately crude and sketchily-executed works in this series, there is a cooler and more measured sense of assuredness and stability about the way in which this deliberately disorientating and fragmented vision of a dark and dangerous street has been depicted. Employing a style that is reflective of both the complete command of the oil medium that Grosz had by this time acquired and also of the more focused, moralising sense of political purpose that his work had begun to pursue, the forms, figures and rich colour combinations of this painting are all rendered with a new-found clarity and precision.
The painting will be on view in the King Street galleries in London from 30 January to 5 February 2020
. PABLO PICASSO STILL LIFES
Picasso is credited with transforming the still-life genre into an art form of endless symbolic, allegorical or stylistic possibility.
La cafetière (1943, estimate; £1,000,000-1,500,000) is constructed with angular lines and saturated colour and was given as a gift from Picasso to his lover of the time Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Intérieur au pot de fleurs (1953, estimate: £7,000,000-10,000,000) is filled with the formal influence of his friend Henri Matisse, while this intriguing interior scene can also be seen to allude to the inner turmoil that characterised the artist's life at this time. Nature morte au chien (1962, estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000) is a large and playful still-life that not only offers a glimpse into the private world of Pablo Picasso and his idyllic final home, Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, but encapsulates the abiding themes and stylistic qualities of the artist's work in what has become known as his late, great period. WORKS ON PAPER Conjuring a sense of light, movement, sound and people, La Ferrovia Nord-Sud dates from 1913 (estimate: £700,000-1,000,000), the peak of Gino Severini's Futurist period. Here, Severini transports the viewer into the bustling realm of the underground railway. Executed in 1929, Der Ballon im Fenster (estimate: £200,000-300,000) by Paul Klee takes as its focus a multicoloured balloon which the artist has glimpsed through a gap in the curtains, its bright form floating across the sky above a landscape bathed in the glow of a setting sun.
