On 11 November, Le bassin aux nymphéas will be offered in the Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale at Christie’s in New York.
Claude Monet's (1840-1926), Le bassin aux nymphéas,
1917-19. Oil on canvas. 39 3/4 x 79 in (100.7 x 200.8 cm) Estimate:
$30,000,000-50,000,000.
On 24 June 2008 Le Bassin Aux Nymphéas, sold for almost £41 million at Christie's in London, almost double the estimate of £18 to £24 million.
I do not have long to live, and I must dedicate all my time
to painting,’ wrote Claude Monet in a 1918 letter to the Parisian
art dealer, Georges Bernheim. ‘I don’t want to believe that
I would ever be obliged to leave Giverny; I’d rather die
here in the middle of what I have done.’
Monet would survive these words by a number of years, but they
reflect his precarious state of mind in the summer when he
was working on
Le Bassin aux nymphéas.
He was approaching 80 — well beyond the life expectancy for
men of his generation — and suffering increasingly with cataracts
in both eyes. The First World War was also entering its final
phase, the Germans recently having launched their Ludendorff
Offensive on the Western Front: a last-ditch effort at victory
before newly-arriving US troops could be fully deployed on
the Allied side.
The Germans’ advance was swift and effective, with Paris now
within reach of their long-range guns. As, just about, was
the village of Giverny, located slightly to the west of the French
capital and a place Monet had called home since 1883.
Monet was an avid gardener, and much of
his time at Giverny
was spent in his sizeable garden. Peonies and red geraniums
jostled for attention with pansies and yellow roses. His
most famous horticultural feat, though, was creating a water
garden, complete with a lily-covered pond, which, over the
decades, he’d paint around 250 times.
By the turn of the 20th century, the pond became the almost-exclusive
subject of Monet’s art, inspiring an outpouring of creativity
that, for many, marks the summit of his career. A 1909 exhibition
of 48 of his water-lily paintings, at Galerie Durand-Ruel
in Paris, left art critics purring at how close to abstraction
they looked. ‘His vision is increasingly limiting itself
to the minimum of tangible realities, in order… to magnify
the impression of the imponderable,’ wrote Jean Morgan in
daily newspaper, Le Gaulois.
Monet wasn’t an artist to rest on his laurels or repeat past
successes, however, and in 1918 he ordered a set of 20 large
canvases in elongated, horizontal format (roughly a metre
high by more than two metres wide). He duly began work on
a new, compositionally connected group of paintings, where
lily pads are clustered towards the lateral edges and a burst
of sunlight makes its way in a vertical band down the centre,
before spilling out into a broad pool at
the bottom.
He’d complete 14 works of this type, Le Bassin aux nymphéas among
them. In that particular painting, he unified the scene’s
elements by adopting a diaphanous veil of colour all over,
laid down with a light, transparent touch.
‘Monet saw the canvases as forerunners... of his late, water-lily Grandes Décorations’ — Paul Hayes Tucker, curator
For Paul Hayes Tucker, the curator of a number of exhibitions
on the French master, including
Monet in the 20th Century at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Royal Academy of
Arts, London, in the late 1990s, ‘this [suite of] canvases
has a physical and emotional expansiveness’ that earlier
water-lily paintings lacked.
Work on them proceeded rapidly, and in August 1918 Monet invited
the dealer René Gimpel to Giverny for a private viewing.
An enthused Gimpel remarked that ‘it was as though [he] were
present at one of the first hours of the birth of the world.’
He saw neither horizon nor shore, being thrown into the midst
of a seemingly limitless scene ‘without beginning or end.’
Twelve of the 14 paintings are extant today, the most recent
example to appear on the market — another
Le Bassin aux nymphéas — fetching £40.9 million ($80.4 million) at auction in 2008,
which at the time represented a new world auction record
for the artist.
According to Tucker, there’s a final reason the 14 works are
important: the likelihood that ‘Monet saw the canvases
as forerunners... of his late, water-lily
Grandes Décorations’. Monet completed this ensemble of 22 mural-sized
paintings shortly before his death
in 1926 and donated them to the French state. Totalling more than
90 metres in length, they boast the same elongated, horizontal
format as
Le Bassin aux nymphéas (albeit on a larger
scale)
and are displayed, as per the artist’s wishes,
like a panoramic frieze, wrapped around a circular room.
‘Between the winter of 1886 and the summer of 1887 Van Gogh effectively crossed the divide into contemporary art.’ – Richard Kendall, art historian and curator at large at the Clark Art Institute
Vincent Van Gogh, Coin de jardin avec papillons, oil on canvas, 1887
New York – On 11 November Christie’s
will offer the painting that marked the moment Vincent Van Gogh ‘crossed
the divide into contemporary art,’
Coin de jardin avec papillons, 1887 (estimate on request).
Presented at auction for the first time,
Coin de jardin avec papillons
possesses a sweeping exhibition history. Most recently, it was
exhibited as a focal point of ‘Van Gogh & Japan,’ a travelling
exhibition that explored the artist’s fascination with Japonism, and the
significant impact it had on his work. ‘Van Gogh and Japan’ toured to
the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art in
Sapporo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and The National Museum of
Modern Art in Kyoto throughout 2017 and 2018. Van Gogh’s
Coin de jardin avec papillons will return to Japan once again for a presale exhibition at Christie’s Tokyo from 10-11 October.
David Kleiweg de Zwaan, Senior Specialist, Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s, remarked:
“The
two years that Van Gogh spent in Paris, from March 1886 until February
1888, represent a pivotal period in his career, during which he
assimilated a host of diverse artistic currents and forged a deeply
personal style. With its range of creative influences, from pointillism
to Japanese prints, the present painting exemplifies the experimental
zeal of the era. Van Gogh’s Coin de jardin avec papillons is a key
example of his innovative and radical style.”
‘
What people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity,’
wrote an exhilarated Van Gogh to his sister Wil in the summer of 1887.
The cause of the Dutch painter’s excitement was the discovery of a
groundbreaking new art movement that had exploded onto the Parisian art
scene in the 1870s.
‘In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘
Now I have seen them and though not being one of their club yet I have admired certain Impressionist pictures.’
Out
went the earthy tones and studied gravity and in came a series of
richly-coloured landscapes and still lifes alive with the spontaneity
of
plein air painting, and the stylistic influence of Japanese
wood block prints. As he studied the colour theories and gestures
promoted by artists like Georges Seurat, his brushstrokes became looser
and his palette became brighter.
Executed between May and June 1887,
Coin de jardin avec papillons marks
this crucial turning point in the artist’s career. Painted at a time
when experiments in photography were pushing the boundaries of pictorial
conventions, it is nature in close-up — a profound departure from the
traditional landscape. At its centre, six butterflies dart between the
foliage, their wings iridescent spots of white and red.
Interestingly, the park Van Gogh used for
Coin de jardin avec papillons was
in Asnières, a small Paris suburb on the banks of the Seine, which in
the mid-1800s became a popular destination with day-trippers. Here, Van
Gogh became acquainted with many of the younger Post-Impressionists,
including Emile Bernard and Paul Signac. They inspired him to adopt some
of their experimental techniques, particularly Pointillism, which Van
Gogh had first encountered at the eighth Impressionist exhibition in
1886.
Yet Van Gogh was never one for structure or rules. Under his
brush, Seurat’s neatly ordered dots were willfully slackened and
applied with a furious intensity. What Seurat thought of Van Gogh’s very
personal twist on his invention is not known, but it did not seem to
bother Signac, who became a friend of Van Gogh’s and was intrigued by
his feverish passions.
As the summer came to an end, Van Gogh’s attention turned south, toward Arles.
Coin de jardin avec papillons anticipates the garden paintings he would make
in the asylum at St Rémy in 1888 following a mental breakdown, and the butterflies are a fitting metaphor for the fragility of his own life.
In the
Van Gogh & Japan exhibition catalogue, art historian Cornelia Homburg describes
Coin de jardin avec papillons, stating:
“There
are no other fully fledged works from Paris that show a similarly
concentrated focus and attention to detail as in this extraordinary
canvas.”
Originally held in the collections of Theo van Gogh and his descendants,
Coin de jardin avec papillons
also belonged to Joseph Reinach, the 19th-century French journalist and
politician best known as the public champion of artillery officer
Alfred Dreyfus.
Untitled
(Rotunda -University of Virginia) Scrapbook U of V, 1912-1914 Georgia
O’Keeffe Watercolor on paper 11 7/8 x 9 (30.16 x 22.86) Georgia O’Keeffe
Museum Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2006.05.608) Copyright
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
![Niagara Falls (1818) by Louisa Davis Minot. Oil on linen, 76.2 × 103.2 cm; Gift of Mrs. Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Sr., to the Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., Collection. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Object 156.4. In the early 19th century, Niagara Falls was considered the epitome of the overwhelming sublime, but the tourists walking the rocks clad in fine suits or dresses indicates this landscape was already tamed and accessible [21]. Image © The New-York Historical Society. Reproduction of any kind is prohibited without express written permission in advance from The New-York Historical Society.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307840044/figure/fig4/AS:404090648580101@1473354126982/Niagara-Falls-1818-by-Louisa-Davis-Minot-Oil-on-linen-762-1032-cm-Gift-of-Mrs.png)
