A 1917 watercolor by Egon Schiele that was recently restituted by Colonge’s Museum Ludwig will be sold during Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May 12 in New York. It is expected to fetch a price of $2.5 million–$3.5 million and is being offered with a guarantee.

Schiele’s Kauernder weiblicher Akt (Crouching Female Nude) depicts a kneeling nude woman, and had been in the collection of the Museum Ludwig since 1976. It was returned to the heirs of Heinrich Rieger, the work’s original owner, last month. A German commission issued a formal recommendation for the work’s restitution after Rieger’s heirs made a claim for it.

“We are now grateful to the Commission for this unanimously adopted recommendation. We also thank the heirs of Dr. Heinrich Rieger for their patience and are relieved that with the return of the work to the family a just and fair solution has now been found,” said the museum’s director, Yilmaz Dziewior, in a statement to ARTnews.

Continue Reading

Christie’s has unveiled a 1983 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that the house will offer for sale in its New York contemporary art evening sale on May 11. Titled In any case (1983), the painting is expected to fetch a price of $50 million and is being sold by Italian collector Giancarlo Giammetti, the cofounder of fashion label Valentino.

If the work reaches its low estimate, it will be among the most expensive works by the artist ever sold at auction. The painting will go on view at Christie’s outpost in Hong Kong on April 28 and then travel to New York ahead of its sale.

Measuring at more than 6-by-6-feet, the painting is one of three from a series of large-scale skull works that Basquiat completed in 1983. The piece bears reference to the 1983 police killing of Michael Stewart, a young Black street artist in New York. (Similar works formed the basis of a 2019 Guggenheim Museum survey curated by Chaédria LaBouvier.) It comprises some of the artist’s signature motifs prized among collectors—a skeletal head bearing a wide grin and scrawled signs in the background.

Continue Reading

An 1888 Vincent van Gogh painting will be offered at Christie’s in a 20th century art auction in New York on May 13. Titled Le Pont de Trinquetaille (1888), the work is estimated to sell for $25 million–$35 million.

Measuring at 25 inches by 31 inches, the painting was made a year before his suicide at the age of 37 in 1890. It is one of the few landscapes from his coveted Arles period, and it offers a street scene showing the Trinquetaille bridge rendered using the artist’s signature expressive brushwork and warm color palette.

Continue Reading