Lucian Freud
Girl with Closed Eyes (1986-87, estimate on request), which is among the most exquisite of Lucian Freud’s triumphant 1980s portraits. Girl with Closed Eyes will be a focal point of Christie’s 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale, a key auction within the 20/21 Shanghai to London sales series, which will take place on 1 March 2022. The painting is being offered at auction for the first time, having remained in the same private collection for around 35 years. Reclined on a bed in the artist’s Holland Park studio, the sitter, Janey Longman, is caught as if in a reverie. Her eyes are closed, her lips parted, and her head turned serenely to one side. Her dark hair spills onto the mattress, with Freud’s thick, tactile impasto teasing each strand into tousled life.
Girl with Closed Eyes was among the most recent works included in the 1987-88 landmark touring retrospective Lucian Freud: Paintings, which travelled from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. to the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, the Hayward Gallery, London, and Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. It was later included in the major 2005 survey exhibition at the Museo Correr, Venice, curated by the British curator and art critic William Feaver. Viewers will have the opportunity to experience Girl with Closed Eyes in New York from 4 to 8 February, Hong Kong from 15 to 17 February and London from 23 February to 1 March 2022.
Katharine Arnold, Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie’s Europe: ““As we celebrate 100 years since the birth of Lucian Freud, it is an honour for Christie’s to mark the occasion by offering this magnificent portrait of Janey Longman at auction for the first time. The dexterous handling of the paint sumptuously brings every detail of the sitter’s body into sharp focus. The gentle framing of her pose within the composition seems to invite the viewer closer still, a witness to this moment of contemplation. The painting radiates with intimacy, affection and the sheer pleasure that comes from two people enjoying each other’s company. This portrait is the way any woman would want to be painted. Having remained in the same collection for 35 years, this will be the first opportunity for collectors to acquire this masterpiece. Girl with Closed Eyes will be a leading highlight of our London Evening Sale in March and we are confident that the painting will resonate with our clients internationally.”
Charles Cator, Deputy-Chairman, Christie’s International: “In this beautiful portrait, Lucian Freud shows a more tender and sensuous side, delighting in the beauty of the sitter and wanting to share it with the viewer. That tenderness and emotion made a deep impression on me when I first saw it in the collector’s home. It is a great honour and privilege for us to have been entrusted with the sale of such a superb example of Freud’s work.”
From the soft swell of the sitter’s breast to the tauter lines of throat and clavicle and her complex, expressive face, he maps her skin’s every freckle, sheen and furrow with rapt attention. His palette ranges from shadowed, venous blues to ochres, mauves and flashes of Cremnitz white: its translucent beauty recalls his magnificent early portraits of Lady Caroline Blackwood. Girl with Closed Eyes is a luminous, unflinching portrait in which Freud seemingly captures life itself on canvas. Without recourse to symbolism or narrative, he realises a desire for ‘paint to work as flesh’: the painting is alive with the sensuousness of a person, the push and pull of muscle, the pulse of blood beneath the skin. With her eyes closed, it is unclear whether the sitter is awake or asleep, unguardedly vulnerable or conscious of being observed: she captures the tension between exposure and mystery that makes Freud’s portraits so vividly, irrevocably human.
In his sixties, Freud was working with greater formal ambition than ever before. The bold framing, visceral brushwork and acute psychological scrutiny of Girl with Closed Eyes exemplify the full flowering of his mature idiom. The sitter, Janey Longman, was also depicted in Naked Girl (1985-86) and later, alongside India Jane Birley, in the major canvas Two Women (1992). At this stage, Freud’s style had gradually evolved from the hard-lined, iconic precision of the 1950s towards a richly physiognomic approach, his oil paint growing thicker and his brushes firmer. Over dozens or hundreds of hours of sittings, declared by Robert Hughes in 1987 to be ‘the greatest living realist painter’, he would comb and caress his portraits into near-sculptural being.
The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale
Pablo Picasso’s La fenêtre ouverte will be offered at auction for the first time ever with a pre-sale estimate of £14,000,000-24,000,000
Pablo Picasso, La fenêtre ouverte (1929, estimate: £14,000,000-24,000,000)
Presented at auction for the first time, La fenêtre ouverte (1929, estimate: £14,000,000-24,000,000) is a seminal work from Pablo Picasso’s Surrealist period. The painting will highlight Christie’s 21st edition of The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, a key element of the 20/21 Shanghai to London series of auctions, which will take place on 1 March 2022. Impressively scaled and rendered with a bold colour palette and direct handling, La fenêtre ouverte is a work of striking visual power. Painted on 22 November 1929, this complex and compelling studio scene is one of a series of Atelier works that Picasso had begun around 1926, richly symbolic and radically constructed paintings that reveal the multi-faceted interests of the artist at this time. Other works from this series are housed in museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Le Centre Pompidou, Paris. At once a still life, a veiled Atelier scene, and a Surrealist distortion of reality, La fenêtre ouverte is rich with personal and artistic symbolism.
Towering in the foreground of this painting are two highly abstracted figures. On the right stands a plaster bust that appears to be a disguised image of the artist’s great lover and muse of this time, Marie-Thérèse Walter. The figurative object on the left, an amalgam of feet intersected with an arrow, is said to be an abstracted, symbolic representation of Picasso himself. Two spires of the church of Sainte-Clotilde are identifiable in the background. John Richardson has suggested that this work therefore depicts the secret Left Bank apartment that Picasso and Marie-Thérèse shared as a hideaway during their clandestine relationship. In the foreground, a configuration of abstracted objects are depicted in an arrangement reminiscent of the artist’s earlier cubist still lifes.
Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s: “Held in the same European collection for half a century, this powerful and explosively coloured painting from the highpoint of Picasso’s Surrealist period and two years into his clandestine love affair with Marie-Thérèse, represents a brilliant fusion of the different passions and inspirations that defined the artist’s life at the end of the 1920s. Relishing the secret nature of their romance, Picasso could not help but include his lover’s presence in the form of the plaster bust in this painting. Marie-Thérèse’s presence in Picasso’s life reinvigorated every area of his work, her statuesque form and radiant beauty, as well as her youthful, carefree sensibility inspiring the artist to create works that stand as the finest of his career. This metamorphosised, cryptically coded work stands as a fascinating self-portrait of Picasso and his golden haired muse, which we are thrilled to present to the market for the first time as a major highlight of the 21st edition of The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale.”
Although Marie-Thérèse was yet to emerge in full form in the artist’s work – this would not happen until he created the sentinel-like plaster busts in the spring of 1931 – her profile and sweep of hair are instantly identifiable in La fenêtre ouverte . Her presence in the artist’s life and art was at this point secret, however, the iconic visual idiom which Picasso developed in his portrayals of her, in profile, and with the luminous white visage, are already present.
Picasso chose to include La fenêtre ouverte in his landmark 1932 retrospective, first held at the Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, from June to July, before moving to the Kunsthaus Zurich, in September to October. The painting was also included in The Museum of Modern Art, New York’s seminal survey exhibition, ‘Dada, Surrealism & Their Heritage’ in 1968.Picasso’s La fenêtre ouverte will be on view in New York from 4 to 8 February 2022 and in Hong Kong from 15 to 17 February 2022 before being exhibited in London from 23 February to 1 March 2022.
In the year that marks the centenary of the artist’s birth, Christie’s will offer Lucian Freud’s masterpiece of frank, tender observation,
La fenêtre ouverteis a rare example from Picasso’s Surrealist period, which will highlight the 21st edition of The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale .
Held in the same European collection for half a century, this painting is a surreal depiction of Picasso and his great muse Marie-Thérèse Walter
Christie’s continues to establish cultural dialogues between major international art hubs, launching the key 20/21 Marquee Weeks with 20/21 Shanghai to London sale series
The sale series will incorporate 20th / 21st Century: Shanghai Evening Sale, 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale
An oil painting by German expressionist Franz Marc
An oil painting by German expressionist Franz Marc - returned by a German museum to the descendents of a Jewish collector who fled the Nazis - could fetch a record price for the artist at auction next month.
Marc's The Foxes (Die Füchse), a canvas featuring two colorful intertwined foxes, is estimated to bring about 35 million pounds ($47 million, excluding fees) at a Christie's sale in London on March 1.
"It'll be an amazing moment for the art world because Franz Marc's important pictures are incredibly rare," Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s global president, told Reuters.
Born in Munich in 1880, Marc died at age 36 during the World War One battle of Verdun. Few works are left in private hands. The artist's auction record stands with Weidende Pferde III (1910), which sold for £12.3 million ($24.4 million, including fees) at Sotheby’s London in 2008.
According to Christie's, The Foxes was acquired in 1928 by German-Jewish collector Kurt Grawi, and his wife Else, who were forced to sell the work in order to escape Nazi Germany. After imprisonment by the Nazis, Grawi sold the painting to fund his family's emigration to Chile. The painting then went through a series of owners until it was gifted in 1962 to the Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf.
"The picture was restituted to the family last year after a long process, and they had already made the decision that when they got it back, that it would be put onto the open market for the next great collector to have the opportunity to own it," Pylkkänen said.
Germany's Limbach Commission, which investigates cases of Nazi-seized cultural property, recommened in March 2021 that the painting be returned to the Grawi family's heirs as it had been sold "under duress."
"The Foxes" will tour in Hong Kong and New York in February before heading to London for sale. Christie's inaugural 20/21 Shanghai to London series of marquee sales will begin with bidding livestreamed from its new Shanghai location.