Professional Documents
Culture Documents
June Impressionist & Modern Highlights FINAL Release 7.6.11
June Impressionist & Modern Highlights FINAL Release 7.6.11
June Impressionist & Modern Highlights FINAL Release 7.6.11
Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes Egon Schiele, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche Pablo Picasso, Couple, le baiser,
qui marchent II, est. £10-15 million (Vorstadt II), est. £22-30 million est. £6–8 million
SOTHEBY’S LONDON, 7th June 2011 --- On Wednesday 22nd June 2011, Sotheby’s London Impressionist
& Modern Art Evening Sale will offer a selection of works of exceptional quality and rarity, many of which have
remained in private collections for decades and have never before appeared at auction. In addition to two
exquisite works on one of René Magritte’s most sought-after themes, a monumental Joan Miró and a rare
painting by Paul Klee, the sale is led by one of the most important oils by Egon Schiele ever to come to the
market, Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II), being sold by the Leopold Museum, Vienna, and estimated at
£22-30 million/ $36-50 million*. Further important works include a lifetime cast of Alberto Giacometti’s
bronze Trois hommes qui marchent II, an instantly recognisable icon of Modern art estimated at £10-15 million,
and Pablo Picasso’s bold late painting Couple, le baiser, estimated at £6–8 million. The Impressionist &
Modern Art Evening Sale is estimated to fetch a total in excess of £77 million.
Commenting on the sale, Helena Newman, Chairman, Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art
Worldwide, said:: “The sale will appeal to a wide and very international audience. It presents a great
Department Worldwide,
opportunity for collectors to acquire some exceptional works, many of which are fresh to the market, having been in
the same collections for many years. The selection, which ranges from Rodin through to late Picasso, brings to the
market many works of museum quality, led by a magnificent Schiele cityscape from the prestigious Leopold
Museum collection.”
Representing a culmination of Pablo Picasso’s exploration of lovers that preoccupied him between October
and December 1969, Couple, le baiser (£6–8 million) moves beyond the latent eroticism and sense of
tenderness embodied by his earlier works to a more uninhibited interpretation of the passionate encounter.
With such an erotically charged work - understood to represent Picasso’s wife Jacqueline Roque and the artist
himself - Picasso channelled the concerns regarding his fading virility that preoccupied him at the advanced
age of 88.
The physical closeness of the lovers in the throes of an embrace, and the bright, lively palette that Picasso used
to render the figures and the foliage that surrounds them in Couple, le baiser, belies the emotional profundity
that these compositions held for him. Picasso takes the painter and model theme a step further in Couple, le
baiser than in preceding works - there is no longer an easel separating the two figures; the erotic tension of
earlier works is finally consummated as the painter and his muse become entangled in a forceful embrace.
Furthermore, the couple has moved from the artist's studio into nature, emphasising their freedom and the
almost primitive intensity of their act. The artist's granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, wrote of these late
works, 'These are not embraces but wrestling matches the sexes have abandoned themselves to. The unleashing
of sexual passions is total, a lack of inhibition stamped with bestiality, animality ...’.
SCULPTURE
Following the world record for any work of art at auction established at Sotheby’s London, when Alberto
Giacometti L’Homme qui marche I fetched £65 million in February 2010, Sotheby’s now offers
Giacometti’s
Giacometti’s extraordinary bronze Trois hommes qui marchent II (est. £10-15 million). The sculpture, which
epitomises the artist’s mature style and is one of his most iconic works, forms the genesis of L’Homme qui
2
marche I. The image of Trois hommes qui marchent II first appeared in the
margin of a letter that Giacometti wrote to his dealer, Pierre Matisse,
depicting three men on a raised platform walking in different directions,
and the present work is the second of two versions of the subject, with the
figures grouped more closely together. Trois hommes qui marchent II – a
lifetime cast – was created at the definitive point of Alberto Giacometti’s
career, at the end of the 1940s when he was producing career-defining
bronzes featuring his signature attenuated figures. The present work
depicts three men captured in mid-stride, each seemingly alone in a
crowd, as they narrowly pass each other in disconnected paths.
Occassionally, as in Trois hommes qui marchent II, Giacometti enhanced
the patina of the sculpture to give the work a beautiful modulation of gold
and amber highlights against the rich brown base-tone.
A further work by Giacometti, the unique bronze Figure debout of circa 1950 (est. £300,000-400,000)
comes to the market from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be sold, alongside Jean Arp’s
bronze Evocation d’une forme humaine lunaire spectrale, executed in 1950 and cast in 1957 (est. £800,000 –
1.2 million), to benefit the museum’s Acquisitions Fund.
3
IMPRESSIONIST
IMPRESSIONIST AND POST- POST- IMPRESSIONIST WORKS
Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec masterly painting La Liseuse will be
Toulouse- Lautrec’s
offered for sale for the first time in over 70 years (est. £5–8
million). Painted in 1889, the work is a major example of the
insightful character of Toulouse-Lautrec’s portraiture, as well as of
his remarkably modern style. The artist himself held La Liseuse in
great esteem, as demonstrated in his selection of the work, together
with four other paintings, for the exhibition of Les XX held in
Brussels in 1890. Writing to his grandmother, he said: ‘At the end of
January I’m going to carry the good work, or rather the good paintings,
to Belgium…’. The subject of this intimate portrait is the artist’s 18-
year-old neighbour, Hélène Vary, whom he had known since
childhood and proclaimed to be ‘very beautiful’, ‘her Grecian profile
is incomparable’. In 1888 and 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec executed
three portraits of Hélène, and the present work is the most
penetrating and personal in its projection of her inner life, tenderly
capturing the model in the act of reading and exemplifying Lautrec’s exploration of the expressive qualities of
line and colour. The work was acquired by the distinguished Brussels collector Roger Janssen in 1939 and it
has remained in the same family until now.
Coming to the market for the first time in over 80 years, Paul
zanne La Rivière of circa 1881 (est. £1.5–2.5 million),
C ézanne’s
dates from a pivotal period of Cézanne's career. Executed in
soft brushwork, La Rivière presents a departure from the style
that dominated his painting at the time, characterised by an
increasing use of wide vertical and diagonal brushstrokes. The
first owner of La Rivière was Victor Chocquet (1821-1891), a
nineteenth-century art collector who was an important early
patron of Impressionist painters as well as the first collector of
Cézanne's works. La Rivière was later acquired, in 1925, by
French collector Maurice Gangnat – one of the greatest
collectors of Impressionist art – and has remained in his
family’s collection until now. Also to be offered from Maurice
Gangnat’s collection is Les Roses au rideau bleu by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, with whom Gangnat cultivated a
strong friendship, amassing over 150 works by the artist over the course of 14 years. This 1912 painting of
Rodin’s favoured still-life subject, roses, is estimated at £400,000-600,000.
4
MODERN HIGHLIGHTS
Lempicka La
Sensual, bold and ultra-stylised, Tamara de Lempicka’s
Dormeuse (est. £2.2-£3.2 million) is a highly charged and
suggestive depiction of a femme fatale in repose. Tamara de
Lempicka’s striking depictions of women have come to personify
the age of Art Deco and in this tantalising work, painted in 1930,
her model epitomises the ideal of early Hollywood glamour. Every
curve of the figure’s flesh is rendered with imperceptible
brushstrokes. Her skin appears to be incandescent, as if she is
bathed in silver moonlight and her hair glows with a metallic sheen.
The subject of the sleeping woman was filled with erotic potential,
and in this painting, Lempicka precedes Picasso’s celebrated 1932
portraits of the sleeping Marie-Thérèse Walter by two years, creating perhaps one of the most intimate and
unashamedly sensual renderings of the theme.
5
SURREALISM
Sotheby’s February 2011 series of sales demonstrated the high demand for supreme Surrealist works, with
Salvador Dalí’s Portrait de Paul Eluard selling for £13 million, establishing a new record price for any Surrealist
work of art sold at auction, and René Magritte’s gouache Le Maître d’École selling for £2.5 million, achieving a
new auction record for a work on paper. The forthcoming June 2011 sale presents a selection of great works
by artists including Joan Miró, René Magritte and Max Ernst.Ernst.