Christie’s has announced the auction of an exceptional work by Joan Mitchell estimated at between €3.2 million and €5 million. Appearing on the market for the first time, this Untitled work was painted around 1969 and comes from the collection of the famous French art dealer Jacques Dubourg.
It is the latest addition to the already remarkable catalogue of the Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian sale, which will be the highlight of the auction taking place during Art Basel Paris on 18 October. It includes a rare oil on canvas by Alberto Giacometti, Buste sur la selle de l’atelier (€2 million - €3 million) and an exceptional rediscovery of a surrealist work by Francis Picabia, Myrte (€1.5 million - €2 million).
Acquired directly from the artist, this exceptional work was carefully kept in the private collection of Jacques Dubourg, who never parted with it. A key figure in the art market, Jacques Dubourg played an essential role in the distribution of works by such major artists as Nicolas de Staël and Jean-Paul Riopelle. Joan Mitchell, whom he followed particularly closely, was exhibited several times in his Paris gallery.
In 2023, Joan Mitchell’s retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton marked her first major public exhibition in France. The renewed interest in her work is part of a wider trend to recognize the role of women artists in the history of art. A key figure in Abstract Expressionism, who made her mark on the New York art scene in the 1950s before moving to France in 1955, Joan Mitchell is now present in the world’s most prestigious public and private collections.
Christie’s currently holds 10 of the 12 world records for works by Joan Mitchell sold at auction. In 2023, at the Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian auction, a new record was set in France with a price of €5.8 million, while the world record for the artist ($29.2 million was reached in New York last November).
On 18 October at Christie’s, Avant-Garde(s) Including Thinking Italian – the biggest auction of its category – takes center stage again in Paris. The highlight of the auctions held on the occasion of Art Basel Paris, Avant-Garde (s) Including Thinking Italian, will feature a major work: Alberto Giacometti’s Buste sur la selle de l’atelier. Painted in 1964, this painting was produced by Alberto Giacometti when he was at the peak of his artistic powers – in the final years of his life, when he placed painting on an equal footing with sculpture. Successively owned by Pierre Matisse and Ernst Beyeler, the work has a provenance that ranks among the most significant in the history of 20th-century art. Buste sur la selle de l’atelier is being offered for sale with an estimate of 2 to 3 million euros.
AN ARTIST AT THE TOP
During the postwar period, Alberto Giacometti produces some of his best-known works. Having returned to Paris, he exhibits in America, and gains access to all of the resources necessary to produce the casts he wishes to have. His work then attains unparalleled recognition. In January 1964, he is awarded the International Painting Prize by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. On July 28 of that same year, the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght inaugurates the courtyard and hall that bear his name. The following year, three retrospectives bring him worldwide recognition: at the Tate in London, at MoMA in New York and at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. While Alberto Giacometti is celebrated as one of the major sculptors of the 20th century, the 1960s are also a time when he considers painting to be on a par with sculpture, and produces a body of work with no aesthetic equivalent in modern art. Finally, 1964 is the year in which Eli Lotar – Giacometti’s last male model – begins to pose for his busts. Buste sur la selle de l’atelier represents one such bust in completion, and is emblematic of the final years of Alberto Giacometti’s artistic career.
HISTORICAL PROVENANCE
Buste sur la selle de l’atelier is also a work with exceptional provenance. The fact that it went from the collections of Pierre Matisse to those of Ernst Beyeler is proof enough. In addition to being key figures in the art of the century, those two men are exceptional connoisseurs of a body of work which they supported, sometimes decisively. Pierre Matisse, who hosts Giacometti’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1948, plays a key role in his career. Alberto Giacometti’s long letter to him, reproduced in full in the MoMA exhibition catalogue attests to the depth of the dialogue between them. Ernst Beyeler, a fervent admirer of Alberto Giacometti, plays a key role in the creation of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zurich. More than 350 works pass through his Basel gallery, and around 15 of the most important ones become part of the Fondation Beyeler’s collection. In 2007, when the foundation celebrates its 10th anniversary with a special exhibition, Buste sur la selle de l’atelier is one of the works selected for display.
“We are honored to be able to unveil this important oil painting by Alberto Giacometti, Buste sur la selle de l’atelier, painted in 1964, which will be one of the key works in our forthcoming Avant(s)-Garde Including Thinking Italian auction on October 18th in Paris – in parallel with the Art Basel Paris fair. Originally owned by the famous New York art dealer Pierre Matisse, then by his daughter Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier, this painting has not reappeared on the market for nearly 20 years. The work invites us to take an intimate tour of the artist’s studio and to contemplate one of the last sculptures he made before his death, the famous bust of the renowned avant-garde photographer Elie Lotar.” Antoine Lebouteiller, Director of the Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Christie’s France.
Milan/Paris – Christie’s is delighted to be presenting seminal works by the leading Italian Masters in the upcoming Thinking Italian live auction in Paris on 18 October during Art Basel, Paris week. Realised in a 10-year period between1958 to1968 by Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, these works have been consigned from private collections and have not been offered at auction for decades.
Executed in 1968, Concetto spaziale, Attese is a red monochrome with four rhythmic slashes created by Lucio Fontana in the last months of his life. Begun in1958 and continuing until the artist's death in 1968, the tagli ( 'cuts') are the artist's most elegant physical embodiment of his 'Spatialist' ideology. Fontana was keenly aware of the scientific and technological advancements of the Space Age, and the new extraordinary possibilities these discoveries offered to modern mankind (estimate on request). In addition, the auction offers a second Concetto spaziale Attese in blue dating from 1961. In the same collection for 50 years, the work was bought directly from the artist in 1964 and comes now to market from a visionary Italian collection. To our knowledge it never has been publicly exhibited to date (estimate €600,000-900,000).
Created between 1958 and 1959, Achrome by Piero Manzoni is an exquisite early example. A central band of compact, horizontal folds and creases gathers over a crisp white monochrome canvas, underlining the aesthetic power and self-sufficiency of raw materials. In the same collection for 25 years, and then on loan at the Mart, the painting is one of only three comparably sized Achromes from this date, two are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, making this work the only such example to remain in private hands (estimate €2,500,000-3,500,000).
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Further works dating from the 1960s include Domenico Gnoli's La Robe rouge painted in 1964. It is one of the earliest of his close-up paintings in which Gnoli focussed on a particular section of his subject's clothed torso, filling the entire composition with her breasts, arms and hips. The voluptuous and exaggerated curves of her body are accentuated by the various folds and plays of light. La Robe rouge was owned by the author Frédéric Dard, famous for his police novels he wrote under the pseudonym San-Antonio. Gnoli was even mentioned in one of Dard's later novels, Le mari de Léon (estimate €1,000,000-1,500,000).
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Mario Schifano’s Insegna 7E-8E, one of his earlier enamelled monochrome diptychs, was painted in 1961 on shaped canvas and comes from distinctive private collections, including the Malabarba collection, fresh to the auction market, after having been included in many public exhibitions such as at the Scuderie della Pilotta and Fondazione Marconi (estimate €600,000-800,000). Schifano showed his monochrome for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 1960, and as soon as 1963 decided to move on in his artistic development. Schifano described his Monocromi as 'primal', 'signs of energy' and 'empty images' beyond 'cultural intention'.
Where Fontana broke new ground by slashing his canvases with a knife, and Manzoni did so by soaking his in kaolin solution, Enrico Castellani created monochromatic reliefs by driving nails into the underlying frames of his canvases at varying depths, and then painting on top in a single colour. This type of work, known as his Superfici or ‘Surfaces’ became Castellani’s trademark such as Dittico Nero-argento, dating from 1964 and exhibited at the Fondazione Prada in 2001, when Germano Celant and Enrico Castellani worked on the latter’s retrospective showcasing over 70 works – the work will be presented at auction with an estimate of €450,000-750,000.
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Coinciding with the upcoming Arte Povera exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at La Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris, the auction will present a sophisticated Arte Povera private collection, a refined group of eight works all executed in the decade between 1969-1979. by Giovanni Anselmo, Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Vettor Pisani, Emilio Prini, Gilberto Zorio, Giulio Paolini and Alighiero Boetti. Dama, 1967 consists of 100 “playing” pieces. Despite the work’s apparent simplicity, there is only one way to arrange the pieces in the correct order. This visual simplicity but conceptual complexity allowed Boetti to explore the ideas of order and disorder (estimate €100,000-150,000).
Alongside four further works by Alighiero Boetti coming to auction on 18 October, Dama was part of Christie’s curated exhibition "Mettere al Mondo il Mondo”, earlier this year in London, marking the 30th anniversary of Boetti’s death and spanning three decades of the artist’s career. The offering includes a rare diptych dating back to 1969, titled 16 DICEMBRE 2040 11 LUGLIO 2023 (estimate €400,000-600,000), an intense ballpoint pen work from 1991 Senza prima né dopo (estimate €350,000-500,000); a work from the very sought-after Aerei series dated from 1989 (estimate €750,000-1,000,000); and the rare work entitled Dama dating from 1967 (estimate €100,000-150,000).
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The Modern art section of the auction is highlighted by two paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. Piazza d’Italia con Fontana, 1938 belongs to the long-running cycle of paintings that lies at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre. It is the only 1930s painting showing a fountain in the centre of the square (estimate €300,000-500,000).
The paintings of mannequins that de Chirico began to paint at the height of the First World War present a sequence of tragic, lonely and abandoned figures, lost in a strange melancholic world of artifice and enigma. Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) reflects de Chirico's situation when on leave of absence from the army, while he was awaiting his recall to military duty. The work for sale dates from 1948 and will be offered with an estimate of €350,000-550,000.