Cezanne

Christie’s Can’t Wait, New York Sales Move to October with $25 M. Cézanne Announcement

August 26, 2020 by Angelica Villa

Paul Cezanne, *Nature morte avec pot au lait, melon et sucrier* (1900–06). Christie’s Images LTD. 2020.

Following its global relay “ONE” sale in July, Christie’s will hold the first major sales run by the house’s newly merged modern and contemporary departments this October in addition to the traditional November. The hybrid live format day and evening sales will take place at the house’s Rockefeller Center location on October 6 and 7.

“We’re giving consignors and buyer multiple opportunities this fall to buy at auction,” Alex Rotter, Christie’s Chairman of Postwar and Contemporary Art in New York, said in an interview when asked what caused the scheduling shift. “These collectors are happily making use of a wide range of platforms, they are buying works across categories, and they certainly are not glued to the conventional auction schedule.”

Christie’s witnessed the success of Sotheby’s “Rembrandt to Richter” sale in June—an “unthinkable date,” according to Rotter—and decided it could also shift collectors’ calendars. But the move was also driven by a desire to seize on a bright moment for the art market, one which some prognosticators fear won’t last, due to the possibility of a second pandemic wave. “Rather than wait for the worst-case scenario, we decided to take advantage of the moment now as long as it holds,” Rotter said, adding that the house still plans to host its typical November sales, but is merely exploring its options with the October one.Continue Reading

The Cezannes That Never Made It to the White House

September 3, 2013 by Marion Maneker

la_ca_0614_cezanne_paintings

Christopher Knight writes up the tale of curatorial skullduggery that deprived the White House of eight Cézannes and enriched the National Gallery’s collection at the expense of the heir of an early Cézanne collector, Charles Loeser:

Loeser died in 1928. In his will, he made three handsome bequests. Two were of Renaissance and Baroque art. Harvard received 262 drawings, forming the core of the Fogg Art Museum’s outstanding collection. Sculptures, paintings, furniture and decorated earthenware went to the city of Florence, where they are now housed in the Palazzo Vecchio.

The White House was allowed to choose eight of his Cézannes. Loeser gave his daughter Matilda, then 15, a life interest in the paintings, which meant they would be sent to Washington upon her death — or earlier, if she wished.

Two years after Loeser died, John Walker, a recent art history graduate of Harvard, moved to Florence. His mission was to oversee the transfer of the drawings in Loeser’s collection to their shared alma mater, and he met frequently with the collector’s widow and the couple’s daughter. […]

Walker urged President Truman to decline the bequest, and the president took the advice of his National Gallery curator. Then Walker had the Cézannes shipped from Italy to Paris. But Ambassador David Bruce — the former son-in-law of National Gallery founder Andrew Mellon and an old Walker friend — said he had no suitable place to hang them.

So Walker offered to take them. He estimated the combined value of the Loeser Cézannes at as much as $3 million in 1951 — the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $27 million today.

Chasing the White House Cézannes (Los Angeles Times)

Cezanne Stolen in 2008 Believed Recovered in Serbia

April 12, 2012 by Marion Maneker

The Associated Press reports that Serbian police have recovered a painting, likely the last one recovered from a 2008 robbery in Switzerland:

Police did not name the painting, but Serbian media said it is likely “The Boy in the Red Vest” stolen from E. G. Buhrle Collection in Zurich along with three other masterpieces by Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas.

Monet’s “Poppy field at Vetheuil” and van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches” were discovered undamaged in a car parked at a mental hospital in Zurich soon after the robbery. The heist was conducted by three armed and masked men who witnesses said spoke German with a Slavic accent.

Serbian police arrested three people overnight in connection with the robbery. They said police raids and the arrests in the capital of Belgrade and in the central city of Cacak were conducted in coordination with police from several European countries.

Serb police find painting believed stolen Cezanne (Associated Press)

Cashing In On Cezanne’s Card Players

March 26, 2012 by Marion Maneker

Perception often generates reality in the art market. Rumors over the past year that the Al-Thanis of Qatar purchased the last privately held version of Cezanne’s Card Players for $250 million generated enough interest in the works to smoke out a lost watercolor study for the work, according to Carol Vogel, which will be auctioned at Christie’s in May with an estimate of between $15 and $20 million:

Cézanne also made seven known drawings and watercolors as studies for the paintings. And “A Card Player,” as the one coming up for sale at Christie’s is called, belonged to Dr. Heinz F. Eichenwald, a prominent collector who died in September. Dr. Eichenwald, a pioneer in research on pediatric infectious diseases, inherited the watercolor from his father, Ernst, who is thought by Christie’s experts to have bought it from a Berlin gallery around 1930. When the Eichenwald family fled Germany and the Nazis in 1936, they took “A Card Player,” along with works by Daumier and other 19th-century artists, to New York. Now Heinz Eichenwald’s widow, Linda, is selling the work.

In 2010 a critically praised exhibition called “Cézanne’s Card Players” opened at the Courtauld Gallery in London before traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan last year. This watercolor was not included in the show, and the catalog listed it only as “whereabouts unknown.”

Interestingly, Vogel goes out of her way to suggest the Embiricos painting of The Card Players might not have been sold to Qatar presenting alternate theories of Philip Niarchos and nameless Russian Billionaires.

[Update: Josh Baer, who was the first to report the possible sale of The Card Players last Summer, thinks it more likely that that the work stayed in Switzerland, changing hands without an intermediary.]

That only serves to underscore the fact that the study will sell on the generally accepted story that the painting was valued at $250 million whether there was a transaction at that level or not.

A Cézanne Resurfaces, Shedding Light on a Series (Arts Beat/New York Times)

Discovery Claimed of Cezanne's Earliest Work

March 25, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Daily Mail is winding up the idea that this painting that has languished in the hands of an owner who finally got around to investigating underneath the frame and found evidence of a signature that he thinks is Cezanne’s.

The canvas was curled up tightly at the edges so I carefully unravelled it to see the markings. I realised I could be looking at the first-ever Cezanne painting. To say I’m excited would be an understatement. I just bought it for the frame.

If true, the painting would be the earliest known example of the artist’s work. However, it is hard to imagine that it would also be among the artist’s most valuable works, as the newspaper tries to suggest:

Cezanne Painting Worth £40m Bought Because of the Frame (Daily Mail)