AA

FOR 10/22-SET 10/13

Sotheby’s To Auction Important Works By Key Impressionist And Modern Artists Nov. 11-12

JH/cal

NEW YORK CITY – Sotheby’s fall sales of Impressionist and Modern paintings and sculpture include important works by artists including Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Modigliani, Picasso and Chagall. Highlights will be exhibited in Paris, Zurich and Los Angeles prior to their sale at Sotheby’s on the evening of Thursday, November 11.

David Norman, director of the New York Impressionist and Modern Art department and senior vice president of Sotheby’s, said, “The sale includes major works by some of the masters of Impressionist and modern art including a superb painting by Monet executed in 1876, depicting his wife in a field of flowers, which is an ideal summation of the Impressionists’ aesthetic. Also included is the greatest sculptural work by Degas and a ravishing nude by Modigliani. The sale is rich in examples of Picasso’s work and we are privileged to have what is possibly the finest Chagall to appear at auction for more than a generation – the early masterpieces of 1911, “Le Village Russe, de la Lune.” The majority of the pieces have been consigned from private collections and have not been on the market for many years.”

The highlight of the Part I sale on November 10 is Claude Monet’s “Dans La Prairie,” an oil on canvas, signed and dated ’76. This intimate study shows the artist’s wife, Camille, reading a book while reclining in a meadow flecked with the colors of wild flowers. “Dans La Prairie” was first shown in the third Impressionist group exhibition which was also the first time that the term  ‘Impressionism’ had been used to describe the group as a whole. The painting was formerly in the collection of Theodore Duret, one of the first great scholar-critics of the Impressionist movement (est $16/20 million).

In the spring of 1891 Monet began a group of 24 paintings of poplars located two kilometers from his house in Giverny. Not long after Monet began to paint the poplars, the town decided to auction them off as they had been planted for their wood. In order to continue his paintings, Monet had to enter into a partnership with a local wood merchant to save the trees. In 1892, 15 “Poplars” were exhibited at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, (est $10/15 million).

Nudes by Amedeo Modigliani are generally acclaimed as the artist’s greatest accomplishments. His “Nu Assis sur un Divan (La Belle Romaine),” an oil on canvas painted in 1917, is a compelling example (est $12/16 million). The sensual appeal of the work is heightened by the model’s alluring pose. Two Modigliani nudes hanging in the window of the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris prompted the police to close the artist’s first one-man exhibition in 1917.

Picasso’s “Garcon a la Collerette” belongs to the major series of paintings of 1905, the “rose Period,” which take as their subject the itinerant circus performers whose impoverished lives provided such an apt metaphor for the struggles of Picasso and his fellow artists at the time. The painting has a delicate palette of rusty reds, subdued pinks and ochers (est $10/15 million).

A touching portrait of Picasso’s daughter Maria de la Concepcion, known as Maya, playing on the beach with a small boat and two balls is another highlight. Maya was named after Picasso’s sister who had died of diphtheria in 1895 at the age of eight. She was the model for a stylistically diverse group of portraits painted in 1938 and the present portrait is a touching image of childhood, very different in tone from the numerous portraits of Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar (est $6/8 million).

A portrait of Dora Maar painted by Picasso a year later is estimated at $2.5/3.5 million. Picasso met Dora in January 1936 and although he was still married to Olga Koklova and having an illicit affair with Marie-Therese, he began an intense relationship with Dora. The portraits of her are among the most psychologically penetrating works of Picasso’s career. This work is one of two portraits of Maar which Picasso painted on the same day in 1939.

Following the success of the record-breaking sale of a still life by Paul Cézanne from the Whitney Collection, which sold for $60.5 million, a second, smaller example will be offered in the November 11 sale. Cézanne’s still lifes have long been recognized as among his greatest achievements. In this superb example of the mature still lifes of the 1890s, Cézanne uses an earthenware jug and fruit set against a patterned blue drapery with the floor of his studio shown beyond the table top (est $15 million).

“Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans,” modeled in wax, was the only sculpture exhibited during Degas’ lifetime and it was first seen publicly in the sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881 where its astonishing realism shocked many contemporary critics. The model for the child was Marie van Goethem, the daughter of a Belgian laundress and tailor and whose sisters were ballet students at the Opera. This bronze figure, cast in 1922, with muslin skirt, satin hair ribbon and wooden base is estimated at $9/12 million.

Marc Chagall’s “Le Village Russe, de la Lune,” an oil on canvas from 1911, a pivotal period in Chagall’s career as an artist, is also included. He left his home in Vitebsk, Russia for Paris in 1910. He saw the work of the Fauves and the Cubists and lodged in a room next to Modigliani. However, despite his new environment, his work in his first year in Paris focused on peasant life in his hometown. Chagall depicts the highly colorful village scene from the perspective of an outsider, literally as if seen “from the moon” (est $9/12 million).

Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968) is represented in the sale by one of his finest self-portraits. His “Mon Portrait,” which is signed both in French and Japanese and dated 1926, is a self-portrait in watercolor, oil, gold leaf, pen and ink, brush and ink and crayon on silk. Its first owner was Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan, who together with Lily T. Bliss and Mrs John D. Rockefeller, Jr, was one of the founding trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. In this portrait he depicts himself in the clutter of his studio surrounded by portfolios of drawings, brushes and an ink stone and his low worktable. Perched on his back, his cat gazes into the distance (est $1/1.5 million).

Exhibition dates are November 5 and 6 from 10 am to 5 pm; November 7, from 1 to 5 pm; November 8 to 9, 10 am to 5 pm; and November 11 from 10 am to 1 pm.