Sotheby’s announced two star lots for its Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York this November. One is this Picasso, Tete de Femme:
Painted in March of 1935, the work is distinguished as perhaps the last major canvas that the artist completed before taking a year-long break from painting, during the time of his contentious divorce from Olga Khokhlova as well as Marie-Thérèse’s pregnancy with their child, Maya. Tête de femme is estimated to sell for $20/30 million in the November auction.
In the last five years, six of Picasso’s depictions of Marie-Thérèse have achieved prices of more than $20 million at auction. The most recent examples were sold at Sotheby’s in London and New York: Femme assise près d’une fenêtre, which sold for $44.8 million in London in February 2013, and Nature morte aux tulipes, which sold for $41.5 million in New York in November 2012.
And this Alberto Giacometti sculpture of his brother Diego:
By the 1950s, Giacometti shifted his attention from the elongated figures of his post-war years and turned to figural sculptures that were more naturalistic in scale. Many were heads and half-length busts, completed between 1951 and 1957 and often executed from memory. For the most part, these sculptures were solid, designed without a base, and executed with the matiére pétrie, or kneaded method, which heightened the expressiveness of the figure.
The first owner of this sculpture was Richard K. Weil (1902-1996), the St. Louis manufacturer and trustee of Washington University. Weil and his wife Florence Steinberg Weil were avid collectors of modern art and major benefactors of the University’s Art Department and Gallery. The couple acquired this bronze from Giacometti’s European dealer Maeght in 1957 and sold it to the present owner in 1980.
