Artists

Wynn’s Picasso Withdrawn from Christie’s Sale

May 13, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Katya Kazakina reported late on Sunday that Picasso’s Le Marin, a $70m painting featured in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Evening sale had been damaged and, thus, withdrawn from the sale this week:

Christie’s withdrew “Le Marin,” a self-portrait painted in 1943, from its auction this Tuesday for restoration, it said in a statement. It declined to comment on the nature or extent of the damage.

Update: Christie’s had released on their website a statement on the matter earlier on Sunday:

Pablo Picasso’s Le Marin (The Sailor)was accidentally damaged Friday during the final stages of preparation for Christie’s May 12-15 exhibition. Two outside conservators have now been consulted and have made recommendations for the successful restoration of the painting. After consultation with the consignor today, the painting has been withdrawn from Christie’s May 15 sale to allow the restoration process to begin.

Christie’s has a very high standard of care for the objects entrusted to us and we have taken immediate measures to remedy the matter in partnership with our client. No further information is available at this time.

The last time this happened with a Picasso owned by Wynn, admittedly a very different painting, Le Rêve, at a very different time, the restored work ended up selling a few years later for more than his original asking price.

Further Update: The New York Times’s Scott Reyburn is reporting that another Picasso work owned by Wynn has also been withdrawn:

Christie’s has not divulged the precise nature of the damage to “Le Marin,” but following the mishap, the auction house said in an email that Picasso’s 1964 painting “Femme au chat assise dans un fauteuil” (“Woman With a Cat Seated in an Armchair”), estimated at $22 million to $28 million, has also been withdrawn from the sale. This second Picasso had also been identified as being offered by Mr. Wynn. Like “Le Marin,” it had been guaranteed to sell courtesy of a third party.

Pablo Picasso Painting, Valued at $70 Million, Is Damaged Before Sale (The New York Times)

Bonhams Goes Back for More on Fangor

May 10, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Bonhams has done well making a market in Wojciech Fangor’s work over the last few years including having established in the last two years the three top prices for the Polish artist. This Spring, Heather James Gallery opened their New York space with a show of Fangor’s work. Three years ago, Simon de Pury held the first show of Fangor’s work in the UK. A monograph on his work, Wojciech Fangor, Color and Space, was recently published by Skira Editore.

Next week, the cover lot for Bonhams Contemporary art sale is a Fangor from 1968 priced at $200-300k, pretty much right where his better works trade.

Christie’s Takes Another Shot at Monet Market in June

May 10, 2018 by Marion Maneker

The Rockefeller sale earlier this week left the nagging feeling that Claude Monet’s Extérieur de la gare Saint-Lazare, effet de soleil might have performed better had it been sold outside of the single-owner sale. Even though the work made nearly $33m, there was a sense that the work didn’t get quite the attention it deserved. Now Christie’s announces it will have the rare second chance with another work from the series of 12 paintings on offer in London in June.

The Bass Family’s Monet is the second of the three works remaining in private hands and it has been estimated beginning at where the Rockefeller Monet sold. Officially, the estimate is available on request which gives the house some leeway in taking the market’s temperature. But the whisper number is £22-28m which suggests there is headroom for this work to outperform the Rockefeller picture when it comes to the block in June:

Claude Monet’s iconic La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure of 1877, will lead Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on 20 June 2018. This magnificent painting, executed in 1877 as part of Monet’s celebrated Gare Saint-Lazare series will be offered for sale from ‘The Collection of Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass’ (Estimate on Request). Works from this esteemed collection were sold in New York in November 2017 where a highlight was Vincent van Gogh’s Laboureur dans un champ, which sold for $81,312,500, the second highest price achieved at auction for a work by the artist.

The present work, La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure, belongs to a series of twelve canvases painted in 1877 depicting the busy railway station which had been modernised and extended in the late 1860s. By 1870 the Gare Saint-Lazare was handling over 13 million passengers a year and had become a major transit point for the vibrant city. The modern age of steam trains, iron railway bridges and extensive public transport was perfectly captured in this remarkable series of Monet’s steam-filled, atmospheric impressionist masterpieces. Gare Saint-Lazare paintings are frequently shown in major retrospectives, are much reproduced, and are included in the permanent collection of many of the most celebrated museums in the world. Of the twelve Monet painted in 1877, three still remain in private hands and nine are in public institutions. These include: The Fogg Art Museum; The Art Institute of Chicago; The National Gallery, London; The Musée Marmattan, Paris; and The Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Two of these museum works are currently included in London’s National Gallery exhibition Monet & Architecture, a pioneering show that examines Monet’s career through the lens of the architecture that he painted. La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure was recently on loan to the Kimbel Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

The entire series, ‘Gare Saint-Lazare’, was created in a short period of intense creativity: in just three months between January and March 1877. The subject would turn out to be Monet’s last confrontation with modernity, before he abandoned the painting of modern life, and started to pursue pure landscape painting. While the works in the group differ in size, viewpoint and handling, the series marks the first occasion whereby the artist committed himself to the pursuit of a single subject through a long sequence of variations. This would come to be one of the defining aspects of Monet’s practice for the rest of his career. In April 1877, Monet included several of his recently painted Gare Saint-Lazare canvases in the Third Impressionist Exhibition.

The group depicts the station from a variety of different positions, at different times of day and in different atmospheric conditions. In La Gare Saint-Lazare, Vue extérieure, Monet has moved outside the covered interior area of the Gare Saint-Lazare, into the midst of the platforms; the railway track weaving a dynamic, serpentine path through the foreground of the scene, as two trains move through the bustling station. One emerges from beneath the Pont de l’Europe made famous by Monet’s illustrious impressionist counterpart Gustave Caillebotte. Captured with a combination of loose, staccato brushstrokes, as well as areas of more refined architectural detail, steam, people, the surrounding architecture of the city, and the structure of this newly constructed beacon of modernity all come together in this vivid, rapidly executed scene of modern life. Architecture and atmosphere combine to create a painting that has become an icon of its time. Before he painted the present work, Monet had been living and working in Argenteuil, just outside of Paris. Having immersed himself in rural Montgeron in the summer of 1876, he returned to Paris in the new year, eager to capture the subjects and scenes of the bustling urban landscape of modern Paris. Caillebotte paid the rent for him to live in a small ground floor apartment near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and just three months later, the series of twelve works was complete.

Jussi Pylkkänen, Global President, Christie’s: “This superb painting describes Monet at his impressionist best, capturing in quick, bold brushstrokes the energy of metropolitan Paris as described by the sound and fury of the glorious steam trains as they left the Gare Saint Lazare on their journey’s northwards out of the city. Painted in situ from the platform of the station, several of these urban plein-air paintings served as the centrepieces of the important Third Impressionist Exhibition in April 1877. It is an honour to exhibit and offer for sale this magnificent painting from The Collection of Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass, in whose collection it has hung for so many years. Only three works from this critically acclaimed series remain in private hands and it is a particular honour for Christie’s to handle the sales of two of these within a month of each other in London and New York.”

Sotheby’s Unveils Trove of 31 Scottish Colourist Works for June Sale

May 9, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, The White Room, 1915, oil on canvas, Estimate £300,000-500,000

One of the themes of the last few years in the art market has been the emphasis on re-evaluating overlooked historical masters in 20th Century art. The search for high quality work has led in many directions, including giving women artists greater attention and finding other overlooked schools. One of those has been the Scottish Colourists, a group of painters who often trained and exhibited in France in the 1920s. Now Sotheby’s has a collection amassed during that period:

This summer, Sotheby’s will offer at auction one of the most exceptional collections of Scottish Colourist works in private ownership. Featuring some of the finest Colourist paintings by George Leslie Hunter, Samuel John Peploe, Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell and John Duncan Fergusson,The Harrison Collection was formed in the 1920s and 1930s by Major Ion Harrison, an important patron and close friend of the artists. Comprising 31 works, the group of paintings, watercolours and drawings will be presented in a single-owner sale in London on 12 June 2018, as part of Sotheby’s Modern British Art Week. Passed down through the family, the works remained together at Croft House, Major Harrison’s home where he openly welcomed the Colourists.

Thomas Podd, Sotheby’s Scottish Art Specialist, commented: “Visiting Croft House for the first time was an experience that will live long in the memory. Crossing the threshold and walking into the elegant reception hall, one was greeted with Cadell’s masterpiece ‘The White Room’ and its harmonious tones of white and grey punctuated with flashes of dazzling colour. Through the hallway, lined with watercolours by Hunter filled with Provençal warmth, and into drawing room, one’s eye was instantly drawn to Cadell’s ‘The Drawing Room, Croft House’, hanging in the very same room it depicts, with the majority of furniture and artworks unchanged some eighty years later. It is hard to imagine a work that encapsulates so perfectly the spirit of an entire collection. With its balanced composition and sophisticated application of colour, the painting is not only the ultimate Colourist statement, but it speaks also about the collector and his friendship with the artists whose works lined the walls of his beautiful home.”

Major Ion R. Harrison, a Glasgow ship owner, first encountered the work of the Colourist artists in 1921 when, encouraged by his friend Dr Thomas John Honeyman, later Director of Glasgow Art Gallery, he attended an exhibition at ‘Alex. Reid & Lefevre’ on West Street in Glasgow of paintings by Samuel John Peploe. It would be three more years before Harrison purchased his first work by Peploe, swiftly followed by a number of paintings by George Leslie Hunter. Not long after Harrison purchased his first painting by Cadell, The Pink Azaleas which became a particularly cherished painting in the collection. Ion Harrison’s recollections of the Colourists are elegantly recorded in a chapter at the end of T.J. Honeyman’s Three Scottish Colourists (Edinburgh, 1950) poignantly titled As I Remember Them. It is this close personal relationship between Harrison and the artists that gives the collection such an incredible sense of immediacy.

The term ‘Scottish Colourists’ has now become inextricably associated with the work of Cadell, Fergusson, Peploe and Hunter, but the moniker was only coined in 1948 when three of the four were already dead. The Colourists were arguably the most avant-garde British artists of their day, and whilst they were Scottish by birth, their brightly-hued still-lifes, shimmering interiors and vibrant landscapes, are essentially French in spirit. The spark of their artistic inspiration had been found in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century – a time when the city fizzed with modernity and artistic expression. In the summer of 1924 all four Colourists exhibited their works together for the first time, in an exhibition entitled Les Peintres de l’Ecosse Moderne at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris. By this time the artists had reached their maturity but they continued to seek new subjects for their art and to be influenced and inspired by contemporary art.

The pictures in the Harrison Collection represent such a broad range of styles, subjects and dates by all of the four Colourists that they present an opportunity to assess the differing influences and themes that link them together or contrast them.

Auerbach Comes to New York at Timothy Taylor

May 8, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Timothy Taylor is holding a show, Frank Auerbach: Landscapes and Portraits, opening on May 11th at its 515 W19th location in New York. This show will be the first exhibition devoted to Auerbach in New York for a dozen years. It is the first exhibition of the artist worldwide since the Tate’s retrospective in 2015. On May 10 at 7 pm, novelist and art critic Jim Lewis will present a talk about Auerbach’s work at the gallery (please RSVP to the gallery if you want to attend the lecture.)

Timothy Taylor’s press release for the show follows:Continue Reading

Sotheby’s Has 1932 Picasso Marie-Thérèse for June

May 4, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme de profil. Femme écrivant, oil on canvas, 116.2 by 73.7cm., 45¾ by 29in., Painted in April 1932 (estimate upon request) – Copyright Sotheby’s

Timed to go on view just as the New York previews open, Sotheby’s announces another 1932 Picasso for the London Impressionist and Modern sales in June. The work is estimated upon request but the whisper number is ~$45m:

Painted during Pablo Picasso’s ‘year of wonders’, this monumental, yet remarkably tender and intimate, painting of Marie-Thérèse absorbed in the act of writing evokes a private moment from the artist’s clandestine relationship with his most beloved muse. Awake or asleep, writing or reading, Marie-Thérèse appears in manifold guises throughout Picasso’s oeuvre. In this painting, Picasso focuses on her innocence and youthfulness, depicting her serenely penning her thoughts.

Appearing at auction for the first time in over two decades, Buste de femme de profil. Femme écrivant will highlight Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 19 June 2018.

Helena Newman, Global Co-Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department & Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said: “This tender and romantic vision of Marie-Thérèse is a remarkably intimate portrait of the woman who has come to embody the heart and soul of the most celebrated year of Picasso’s oeuvre. Buste de femme de profil. Femme écrivant comes to auction having remained unseen in public for more than 20 years, marking the third consecutive season this year where an exceptional Picasso from the 1930s has headlined our flagship evening sale. It is all the more wonderful to offer this painting created in the spring of 1932 at a time when we are enjoying a world-class exhibition devoted to this year at Tate Modern in London.”

In this painting, Marie-Thérèse’s unmistakeable profile and sweep of blonde hair are silhouetted in front of a window at the Château de Boisgeloup, the grand house outside of Paris acquired by Picasso in 1930. Her sensual curves are echoed by the diffused green light emanating from the gardens beyond the window – the deliberate juxtaposition of the horizontals and verticals of the window frame with the soft curves of her body masterfully emphasising her form. The palette is characteristic of Picasso’s key depictions of Marie-Thérèse during this year. The composition recalls both his celebrated Cubist paintings and the series of monumental sculpted heads that he created in 1931, again inspired by Marie-Thérèse. It is the intensity and passion of the paintings from 1932 that mark them out as unique amongst the artist’s work.

Marie-Thérèse Walter entered Picasso’s life one day in January 1927, capturing his attention at first sight on the streets of Paris at a time when his turbulent relationship with his wife Olga was floundering. An intensely passionate – and creatively inspiring – relationship, this chance meeting with Marie-Thérèse galvanised his life and art. She quickly became a source of creative inspiration and veiled references to her appear in his art from that point on. However, it was only five years later in 1932 – following a landmark exhibition at Galerie Georges Petit, Paris – that the artist
announced Marie-Thérèse as an extraordinary presence in his life and art through his paintings.

Picasso almost never painted his muses from life, his depictions being inspired by the memory of them and the metamorphic power of his erotic imagination. With Marie-Thérèse in particular, the artist’s inspiration reached fever pitch in the long periods they were forced to spend apart. Here, he evokes her in a quietly contemplative mood – perhaps picturing her lover as she writes.

Rare Rembrandt Print at Christie’s London in July

May 2, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Christie’s has a Rembrandt print featured in its Old Master sales in London this July.

Christ Presented to The People (‘Ecce Homo’) is considered to be among Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn’s (1606-1669) most significant achievements in any medium (estimate on request: in the region of $3-5million). One of the world’s most versatile, innovative, and influential artists, Rembrandt is viewed by many as the greatest printmaker of any generation. Epitomizing an artist at the height of his powers, both artistically and technically, this extraordinary drypoint of 1655 dates from his third decade as a printmaker. Executed on a monumental scale, the present work is one of only eight known impressions of the celebrated first state of this print and is the last known example in private hands. The other seven known impressions of this state are in major museum collections: Kupferstichkabinett der Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, The British Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Ashmolean Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Musée du Louvre (Rothschild Collection) and the Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

Offered from The Collection of the late Samuel Josefowitz, it is on public view at Christie’s New York until 5 May; going on view in Hong Kong from 24 to 28 May and then in London from 15 to 28 June and 30 June to 5 July, ahead of being offered for sale during Christie’s Classic Week in London, in the Old Masters Evening Sale on 5 July.

Grisebach Has Max Beckmann’s Egyptian

April 30, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Grisebach has a Max Beckmann work „Weiblicher Kopf in Blau und Grau (Die Ägypterin)“ from 1942 with a €1.5-2m estimate in their May 31st sale. The work was bought by Erhard Göpel, who was the author of Beckmann’s catalogue raisonné, out of Beckmann’s studio in 1942. The work has remained with his family until now. Grisebach brings it to the market for the first time.

The sitter is probably the legendary Egyptian beauty, Nimet Eloui Bey. Bey, a dazzling figure of international high society and coveted model of the Paris surrealists, had affairs with Man Ray and Lee Miller.

Diebenkorn Collection of 22 works at Christie’s

April 27, 2018 by Marion Maneker

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #126, (1984) ($16-20m)

A large collection of Richard Diebenkorn works will be sold at Christie’s during this sales cycle including two works in the Post-War and Contemporary Evening sale on May 17th. One is a large, sought-after Ocean Park work, #126 with a $16m low estimate; another is Cityscape #3 with a $4-6m estimate. The remaining 20 works will be in the day sales:

This May, Christie’s will offer 22 Masterpieces by Richard Diebenkorn: Property Sold to Benefit The Donald and Barbara Zucker Family Foundation. The selection will be sold across Christie’s Evening and Day Sales of Post-War and Contemporary Art on May 17 and 18. Leading the group is Richard Diebenkorn’s iconic Ocean Park #126, 1984. With an estimate of $16-20 million, the painting is positioned to realize a new world auction record for the artist. The present group demonstrates superb focus, as it traces the artist’s creative trajectory from abstraction and figuration to the seminal Ocean Park series.

Sara Friedlander, International Director, Specialist Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, remarked: “For the past thirty years, the Zucker’s have lived with Richard Diebenkorn’s entire career in their living room. This exceptionally rare exploration of one artist in such depth represents a Diebenkorn retrospective and touches on virtually every moment of his life as he moved across America. Diebenkorn’s deeply personal vision and exploration of both abstraction and figuration cement him as one of the most important American artists of the 20 th Century.”

David Hockney’s $20m Pacific Coast Highway & Santa Monica