SOTHEBY’S SALES OF IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART
TO TAKE PLACE ON NOVEMBER 5 AND 6, 2002
WORKS BY AMEDEO MODIGLIANI, PABLO PICASSO AND FERNAND
LÉGER FROM THE ROBERT C. GUCCIONE COLLECTION FEATURED
IMPORTANT WORKS BY CLAUDE MONET, PAUL CÉZANNE, HENRI
MATISSE, ALBERTO GIACOMETTI AND MAX ERNST ALSO
INCLUDED
WORKS BY GIACOMETTI, LIPCHITZ AND MONET FROM THE
ESTATES OF STANLEY MARCUS AND OGDEN PHIPPS
On the evening of November 5 and on November 6,
Sotheby’s New York will offer Impressionist and
Modern Art. The evening sale will feature 12 works
from the Robert C. Guccione Collection, including
important paintings by Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo
Picasso and Fernand Léger, which are estimated to
sell for $17/25 million. The sale will also include,
from various owners, an extraordinary canvas from
Monet’s groundbreaking Nymphéas series, a rare,
posed female nude by Paul Cézanne, an early
Fauvist still life by Matisse and a celebrated
Surrealist sculpture by Max Ernst.
The Robert C. Guccione Collection
Featured in the November 5th evening sale is a group of works from the
Robert C. Guccione Collection. David Norman, Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s
Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide, said: “As a collector
and an artist himself, Bob Guccione has always had an interest in the
portrayal of the figure, and in those artists who found their creative voice in
the expression of the figure and the human condition. The drama of the quiet
gesture, the resonance of solitude, the passion of the religious impulse, or
the intrigue of a face only registering the slightest expression, are attributes
of the many artworks in this collection.”
Chief among the works from the Robert C. Guccione Collection is Amedeo
Modigliani’s Giovanotta dai Capelli Rossi from 1919, which is estimated to
sell for $6/8 million. This sensitive depiction of an unidentified young man with
red hair typifies the fresh and direct style Modigliani’s paintings had assumed
in his later years. Although this work is related to the portraits Modigliani
executed of peasants in the Midi, its handling is closer to the style of his post1916 Paris paintings. The pure oval of the young man’s face, the delicate
tracing of his features and the hypnotic and intense blue eyes lend the portrait
a mood of urban elegance and dignity.
Also from the Guccione Collection is Pablo Picasso’s
Le fils de l’artiste en arlequin, an endearing
interpretation of the harlequin, a subject that held the
artist’s fascination for much of his career. The early
1920s heralded Picasso’s classical period, a style that
was manifested in a more realistic and sentimental
approach to his figures. Here, Picasso has rendered his
young son with soft, gestural brushstrokes. The
geometric pattern of the harlequin costume and the dark
backdrop behind him frame his delicate face, drawing
attention to his large brown eyes and wisps of hair.
Though dressed in a fanciful costume, Paolo retains the dignity of innocence
and directness of childhood. Executed in 1924, this painting is estimated to
sell for $2/3 million.
Fernand Léger’s Composition les trois soeurs, also being sold from the
Guccione Collection, is one of the artist’s definitive compositions of the
1950s. In contrast to the rarefied and elitist aesthetic of postwar abstraction,
Léger’s paintings of the 50s were intended to appeal to the public with a
more comprehensible figurative style and relevant subject matter. The
present work exemplifies Léger’s firm commitment to neoclassical figuration
and his fascination with the expressive potential of color – the two defining
stylistic factors of his work during the last decade of his life. Here, he has
rendered the figures with a sharp clarity that is characteristic of his later work,
using a vivid plane of primary color for the background, and articulating the
figures’ contours with bold, black lines. The colors, in keeping with his works
of this period, are fully saturated, voluminous and substantial. This painting is
estimated to sell for $2/3 million.
Property from Various Owners
Discussing the November offering, Charles
Moffett, Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s
Impressionist and Modern Art Department
Worldwide, said, “Monet’s Nymphéas of
1906, which the artist included in the
landmark 1909 exhibition of Water Lilies
paintings at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, is one
of the most beautiful and striking works in his
1903-1908 series. Cézanne’s Femme nue
debout is one of the artist's most remarkable
late pictures, offering a unique opportunity for
a discerning private collector or museum.
Modigliani’s Giovanotta dai Capelli Rossi is best male portrait by the artist to
have appeared on the market in years, and Giacometti’s Figure Walking
between Two Houses is sublime.”
Another major highlight of the evening sale is Claude Monet’s Nymphéas,
from 1906. Between 1903 and 1908 Monet worked on an extended series of
Water Lilies in a variety of formats and compositions. The earliest include a
glimpse of the banks of the pond, usually in the background, but sometime in
1905 he restricted his views to the surface of the pond. The present work,
completed in 1906, employs a format consistent with the two dozen water
lilies that the artist executed between 1905 and 1907. In this picture,
horizontal patches of flowers and leaves are juxtaposed with undulating
reflections of the world above the water. Because the reflection of the sky and
the trees have almost as much visual presence in the picture as the lilies
floating on the surface of the pond, Monet effectively recreates the
dimensionality and atmosphere of the site at Giverny. The allure of these
pictures lies with their remarkable ability to capture the
interplay of light reflected and refracted on the surface
of the water. As a series, they demonstrate how the
artist could brilliantly resolve complex perspectival
problems while maintaining the serenity and delicacy
of his compositions. This magnificent canvas is
estimated to sell for $16/20 million.
Another major highlight of the evening sale is Paul
Cézanne’s Femme nue debout, circa 1898-99, unique
among the artist’s compositions depicting the nude,
and a picture which has never appeared at auction. While depictions of
nudes had commonly been incorporated into many of Cézanne’s great
compositions, never before had he executed a solitary female nude in a
studio. The present work, which was once in the collection of the French
industrialist Auguste Pellerin, one of the most important collectors of
Impressionist art in the early 20th century, shows the figure in an ‘academy’
pose, framed by the angular geometry of the wall and floor. Measuring 36 ½ x
28 in., this work is estimated to sell for $10/15 million.
Also included is an early Fauvist still life, Nature
morte, serviette à carreaux, by Henri Matisse,
which Mr. Norman has referred to as being
among the artist’s earliest contributions to the
freedom of form and composition. Thought to
have been painted at Lesquielles-St. Germaine,
where Matisse settled with his wife and children
in 1903, this painting is estimated at $4/6 million.
Other works from the months spent at Lesquielles
show the artist’s immediate surroundings, while
in this canvas the artist continues his investigation of the still life genre, which
had been a major preoccupation since the middle of the previous decade.
The present work reflects the influence Cézanne, not only in general
approach, but also in technique and choice of motifs. Nevertheless, Matisse
has put his own stamp on the composition with the choice of a brightly
colored red and white checkered tablecloth.
The November 5th evening sale also includes a very strong offering of
sculpture highlighted by a group of Modernist works from the Estate of
Stanley Marcus, style-maker and marketing genius who built the family store
into a fashion empire and made Neiman Marcus a household name. Chief
among the works from the Marcus Estate is Alberto Giacometti’s Figure
Walking Between Two Houses, one of the
artist’s rare depictions of a woman in
motion. Giacometti usually immobilized his
female figures, either firmly rooting them to
their pedestals with disproportionately
large feet, or severely abstracting their
anatomy. In the present work, however, he
has animated the figure and encased her
in a glass box, capturing her within the void
between the two “houses.” The spatial complexity of this sculpture is
characteristic of Giacometti’s work from the 1950’s. It is estimated to sell for
$2/3 million.
Also from the Marcus Estate is one of the best-known Cubist sculptures by
Jacques Lipchitz, Arlequin à l’accordéon, which was conceived in 1919 in
Paris and later executed in bronze when the artist moved to New York after
the second World War. Part of a series of standing figures playing musical
instruments, the present work, which is estimated to sell for $400/600,000,
demonstrates the artist’s interest in 18th century paintings, particularly the
work of Watteau. By the time the present work was executed in 1919, a
remarkable stylistic change had become visible in Lipchitz’s sculpture. He
abandoned the strict verticalism of his earlier work and began to approach
Cubism as an act of construction rather than reduction.
Another highlight of the sale, consigned by a Private Collector, is Max Ernst’s
Le roi jouant avec la reine, the most important work from a group of ten
sculptures that the artist executed during the summer months of 1944. During
the decades prior to that summer Ernst’s interest in sculpture had been
intermittent. In 1934 he had used casts of everyday objects in the creation of
a small group of sculptures, and it was this technique that he developed in the
summer of 1944, creating in the process some of his most memorable works
in three-dimensions. Like many other Surrealists, Ernst was an ardent chess
player and designed his first set of anthropomorphic chess pieces in
1929/30. A second set, more geometrical in form, followed in 1944, as well
the present sculpture. The powerful figure of the king, towering over the
board, protects the queen with his right hand and hides another piece behind
his back. This work, which is estimated to sell for $2.5/3.5 million, was last
seen on the market in 1979 as part of the historic sale of the Surrealist
collection of the painter and collector William N. Copley sold at Sotheby
Parke Bernet.
In addition to the 1920s portrait of Paolo as
a harlequin from the Guccione Collection, the
November auction also boasts a broad
range of works by Picasso which spans fifty
years of the artist’s career. A drawing from
1900, entitled La sortie de L’Exposition
Universelle, Paris, estimated to sell for
$500/700,000, was executed during the
artist’s first trip to Paris in the fall of that year.
Being the adventurous young man that he
was, Picasso was most attracted to the works of contemporary illustrators
such as Toulouse-Lautrec, who captured the excitement of the city in his
swiftly executed drawings of the cabaret. This influence can be seen in the
many cartoons and drawings which Picasso made of his trip, including the
present work in which he depicts himself surrounded by a raucous group of
friends after a visit to the Exposition Universelle. In this drawing, we see
Picasso leaving the show, accompanied by his girlfriend Odette (Louise
Lenoir), and joining them to his left are his friends, the artists Ramon Pichot,
Miguel Utrillo and Carlos Casagemas, and Germaine Gargallo, who would
eventually marry Casagemas. These were the major players with whom
Picasso gallavanted about the city, and some of the first people to inspire his
art as an adult.
Femme au chapeau is an imaginative and abstracted
depiction of Picasso’s legendary mistress, Dora Maar,
from 1938, which is estimated to sell for $4/6 million.
Picasso met Maar, the Surealist photographer, in the
autumn of 1935 and became enchanted by the young
woman’s powerful sense of self and commanding
presence. In the eight years that followed, Maar was
Picasso’s principal model and the subject of some of his
most iconic portraits. The present work was painted in
1938 at the height of their relationship and on the brink of
tumultuous political upheaval in Europe. As this work must have been
invested with a great deal of personal meaning, Picasso kept it in his private
collection for the remainder of his life.
A late work by Picasso, Mère aux enfants à l’orange is
another highlight. Painted in 1951, this large canvas
depicts Picasso’s mistress Françoise Gilot with their two
children, Paloma and Claude. By the late 1940s Picasso
had already won an overwhelming amount of global
recognition and was no longer in need of the tireless selfpublicizing that had distracted him from his family as a
young man. As he entered his sixties the artist attempted
to integrate the obligations of his public and private life,
and his artistic focus noticeably shifted towards spirited
depictions of his young children at play and often accompanied by their
mother. The present work, painted at the family home in Vallauris, provides a
colorful insight into the artist’s familial life and his fascination with his children.
The painting is estimated to sell for $3/5 million.
Consigned by the Estate of Ogden Phipps is Claude
Monet’s Fleurs dans un pot (roses et brouillard), one of the
artist’s elegant compositions of a floral still-life – a subject
which enabled the him to apply his newfound Impressionist
techniques to an indoor subject. Painted in 1878, this
composition demonstrates the innovative manipulation of
color that Monet had originally developed for painting the
effects of light and shadow en plein air. Although scenes of
cultivated gardens and flowers in situ appeared in some of
the artist’s earliest paintings of landscapes, it was not until
1878 that the subject of a single vase and bouquet entered Monet’s
repertoire. The present work, along with three others that he completed
during that year, is one of his first explorations of this motif, and demonstrates
the delicate charm of a subject that has captivated collectors for centuries.
The painting is estimated to sell for $3/4 million.
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