Sotheby’s Fallek Collection Has $20m Monet London Picture

This morning a private collection of Impressionist & Modern masterworks, led by Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge from 1903 (estimate $20/30 million) was announced at Sotheby’s. The collection—which also features works by Pierre Bonnard, Lyonel Feininger, Jacques Lipchitz, Emil Nolde and Edgar Degas —was assembled primarily in the 1970s and ‘80s by Andrea Klepetar-Fallek and her then-husband, Fred Fallek. According to Sotheby’s, “her extraordinary life story is one of incomparable resilience, independence and optimism – including her flight from Nazi-occupied Vienna, escape from an Italian concentration camp, and departure from Peronist Argentina.”

Charing Cross Bridge was acquired in 1977 through Galerie Beyeler and has remained in the Klepetar-Fallek collection for more than 40 years. Monet’s paintings of Charing Cross Bridge rarely appear at auction: the most recent example was offered in June 1992, and sold for $4.1 million.