Christie’s will present The Collection of Drue Heinz,
which encompasses a remarkable selection of fine art that will be
offered throughout Christie’s New York Impressionist and Modern Evening
and Day Sales in May. The collection of Drue Heinz is a reflection of
her keen observation and innate eye. Heinz was married to H.J. (Jack)
Heinz II – CEO of the H. J. Heinz Company – from 1953 until his death in
1987, and she made most of her acquisitions over the course of their
three decades of marriage. Throughout her life, Heinz enjoyed nothing
more than taking on new endeavors that advanced the work of emerging
artists of all kinds. Her spirit is very much reflected within her
collection, and as such, proceeds from its sale will go to support her
beloved Hawthornden Literary Retreat among other charitable projects.
From these and other benefactions one takes away the overall impression
of an energetic collaborator who took a personal interest in
undertakings that she felt were important to nourishing the human
spirit. Works from the collection will also be offered across the Spring
Sales of Post-War and Contemporary and Latin American Art.
Jessica Fertig, Head of Evening Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art, New York, remarked:
Leading the collection is the tour de force by
Balthus, Thérèse sur une banquette, oil on board, 1939. $12-18 million. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019.
Balthus, Thérèse sur une banquette, 1939 (estimate: $12-18 million), which will be offered in the 13 May Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art. The present picture is the last of the artist’s renowned series of portraits featuring his muse, Thérèse Blanchard. In late 1935 Balthus became acquainted with Thérèse, a girl from a large family that lived a few blocks from the artist’s new studio. She was fourteen years old when she posed in 1939 for Thérèse sur une banquette. Between 1936 and 1939, Thérèse featured in “a series of ten paintings that must be regarded as [Balthus’s] most perceptive and sensitive portrayals of a young sitter and among his finest works,” Sabine Rewald has written. “The portraits of Thérèse, showing her reading or doing nothing but dreaming, inaugurated what would be the leitmotif of Balthus’s oeuvre.” In Thérèse sur une banquette, Balthus showcased his primarily professional, compositional concerns — aiming to depict his model in a novel, unique posture, with neither a familiar nor apparent precedent. He moreover sought to evoke her inner world with a sense of presence that was outwardly and convincingly grounded in the mechanics of movement, while exalting the sublime architecture of her youthful figure. Balthus established the complex lineaments of her extended posture, and every telling nuance in her expression, as she appears completely absorbed in a moment of play.
In featuring his teenaged subjects, Balthus captured an essential aspect of their physical deportment: their ability to casually move—seemingly with a modern dancer’s agility and ease—from one posture into another, naturally and unselfconsciously assuming positions that adults might normally avoid as clumsy or maladroit. Such poses might challenge even a practiced, professional artist’s model, and are consequently rarely encountered in figure painting. “In 1939 Balthus completed one of his most emblematic paintings of a peculiar state, close to the graceful state of childhood, which precedes the beginning of the heavy, awkward age of adolescence,” Jean Clair wrote. “The portrait of Thérèse on a Bench is caught in the sort of delicate balance that cannot last for more than a moment… Yet this body in unstable balance is invincibly drawn; it slides towards the further shore to which the gravity of adulthood inexorably leads, when play and its ease can no longer counterbalance the leaden weight of things.” Here Balthus matches his renaissance idol, Piero della Francesca’s mastery of geometric balance and proportion, with Thérèse’s triangular form bisected by the thread hanging from her right hand.
Highlights from the Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art to include:
Pierre Bonnard’s La Terrasse ou Une terrasse à Grasse, 1912 (estimate: $6-9 million) is a pageant of high-keyed color and luxuriant, Mediterranean vegetation. This idyllic scene — one of Bonnard’s earliest tours de force on the theme of the terrace — depicts the grounds of the Villa Antoinette at Grasse, some twelve miles north of Cannes, where the artist and his future wife Marthe stayed on holiday from January to May 1912. La Terrasse is one of the two largest canvases that Bonnard painted during his exceptionally productive stay at Grasse, both major decorative statements visualizing the Côte d’Azur as a modern-day Arcadia. In La Terrasse, Bonnard creates a private, enclosed world that evokes the sultry heat and languorous reverie of a Mediterranean afternoon. Marthe is now subordinate to the colorful profusion of vegetation, her motionless figure registering to the viewer within the composition only after a slight, almost imperceptible delay; her sun-dappled blue jacket and brown cloche hat seem to merge, wraithlike, with the surrounding ground of the terrace. “This dreaming feminine presence, Marthe,” Sasha Newman has written, “who so often appears in cutoff views—glimpsed on a balcony, through a door, or reflected in a mirror—is central to the underlying air of mystery in much of Bonnard’s art.”
Henri Matisse, Nu à la fenêtre. Estimate: $7-10 million. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019.
Henri Matisse painted Nu à la fenêtre (estimate: $7-10 million) – also known as Nu nacré (Pearly Nude) for the iridescent quality of its light—in his new studio during the first part of 1929 and sold the canvas to Bernheim-Jeune that September. The painting was reproduced shortly thereafter in two important monographs, one by Florent Fels and the other by Roger Fry, which paid tribute to the artist on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in December 1929; it was first exhibited publicly at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York the following fall. The focal point of this luminous,canvas is the nude model, the subject par excellence of Matisse’s exemplary Nice period. “The Odalisques were the bounty of a happy nostalgia, a lovely vivid dream, and the almost ecstatic, enchanted days and nights of the Moroccan climate,” the artist recounted. “I felt an irresistible need to express that ecstasy, that divine unconcern, in corresponding colored rhythms, rhythms of sunny and lavish figures and colors”. Here, Matisse depicted a sultry brunette named Loulou, one of several ballet dancers from the Compagnie de Paris who populated the artist’s private pictorial theater in 1928-1929. The paintings that Matisse created in early 1929 represent the culmination of his work at Nice during this transformative period.
Pablo Picasso, a lifelong aficionado of the heroism and pathos of the bullfight, executed Course de taureaux in 1900 (estimate: $4-6 million), capturing the brief, electrifying moment immediately before the bull charges into the corrida, its every nerve-ending fired with the anticipation of combat. Picasso rendered this scene, laying down pastel in vivid hues and with a material density that conjures the physicality of the impending encounter, in mid-1900, the artist was just eighteen years old, ablaze with youthful ambition and preparing for his own dramatic entry into a new arena. The previous year, he had returned home to Barcelona after a brief stint at the prestigious but stiflingly traditional Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid; now, ever more forceful and independent, he was just months away from his first trip to Paris, determined to prove his worth in the very center of the art world.
Jessica Fertig, Head of Evening Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art, New York, remarked:
“The collection of fine art that Mrs. Heinz assembled includes the most important artists of the early modern period —Picasso, Modigliani, Giacometti, Monet, Magritte and Matisse. From Bonnard’s Une terrasse à Grasse, one of the finest and most sumptuous examples of the artist’s terrace series, or in the suspended drama of Picasso’s Course de taureaux, through to the intimate dimensions of Cézanne’s pencil study of five bathers, related to the celebrated Basel painting of the same subject, or the quietude of an exquisite Morandi still-life. In every case, the art reflects careful, informed selection. And it was displayed in the Heinz homes so that at every turn the eye would fall on something thought-provoking and beautiful.”
Leading the collection is the tour de force by
Balthus, Thérèse sur une banquette, 1939 (estimate: $12-18 million), which will be offered in the 13 May Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art. The present picture is the last of the artist’s renowned series of portraits featuring his muse, Thérèse Blanchard. In late 1935 Balthus became acquainted with Thérèse, a girl from a large family that lived a few blocks from the artist’s new studio. She was fourteen years old when she posed in 1939 for Thérèse sur une banquette. Between 1936 and 1939, Thérèse featured in “a series of ten paintings that must be regarded as [Balthus’s] most perceptive and sensitive portrayals of a young sitter and among his finest works,” Sabine Rewald has written. “The portraits of Thérèse, showing her reading or doing nothing but dreaming, inaugurated what would be the leitmotif of Balthus’s oeuvre.” In Thérèse sur une banquette, Balthus showcased his primarily professional, compositional concerns — aiming to depict his model in a novel, unique posture, with neither a familiar nor apparent precedent. He moreover sought to evoke her inner world with a sense of presence that was outwardly and convincingly grounded in the mechanics of movement, while exalting the sublime architecture of her youthful figure. Balthus established the complex lineaments of her extended posture, and every telling nuance in her expression, as she appears completely absorbed in a moment of play.
In featuring his teenaged subjects, Balthus captured an essential aspect of their physical deportment: their ability to casually move—seemingly with a modern dancer’s agility and ease—from one posture into another, naturally and unselfconsciously assuming positions that adults might normally avoid as clumsy or maladroit. Such poses might challenge even a practiced, professional artist’s model, and are consequently rarely encountered in figure painting. “In 1939 Balthus completed one of his most emblematic paintings of a peculiar state, close to the graceful state of childhood, which precedes the beginning of the heavy, awkward age of adolescence,” Jean Clair wrote. “The portrait of Thérèse on a Bench is caught in the sort of delicate balance that cannot last for more than a moment… Yet this body in unstable balance is invincibly drawn; it slides towards the further shore to which the gravity of adulthood inexorably leads, when play and its ease can no longer counterbalance the leaden weight of things.” Here Balthus matches his renaissance idol, Piero della Francesca’s mastery of geometric balance and proportion, with Thérèse’s triangular form bisected by the thread hanging from her right hand.
Highlights from the Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art to include:
Amedeo Modigliani, Lunia Czechowska (à la robe noire), 1919. Oil on canvas. $12-18 million
Leading the collection is Amedeo Modigliani’s Lunia Czechowska (à la robe noire), 1919 (estimate: $12-18 million). Modigliani was infatuated with his subject, a young Polish émigré, who was married to a close friend of the artist’s dealer, Léopold Zborowski, and would ultimately go on to paint her likeness in ten known paintings. Czechowska was 25 when she sat for the present portrait, a canvas that Joseph Lanthemann praised for being “plein de noblesse, de beauté et de communion”. Czechowska’s fine, delicate features bespeak a discerning intelligence and a rare sensitivity, which perfectly suited the artist’s fascination with this type. Her serious demeanor and youthfully lithe, feminine figure lent themselves well to the primary influences the artist liked to incorporate and show off in his portraits—the elongated forms of the 16th century Italian Mannerists Parmigianino and Pontormo, filtered through his modernist attraction to aspects of African tribal art. Pierre Bonnard’s La Terrasse ou Une terrasse à Grasse, 1912 (estimate: $6-9 million) is a pageant of high-keyed color and luxuriant, Mediterranean vegetation. This idyllic scene — one of Bonnard’s earliest tours de force on the theme of the terrace — depicts the grounds of the Villa Antoinette at Grasse, some twelve miles north of Cannes, where the artist and his future wife Marthe stayed on holiday from January to May 1912. La Terrasse is one of the two largest canvases that Bonnard painted during his exceptionally productive stay at Grasse, both major decorative statements visualizing the Côte d’Azur as a modern-day Arcadia. In La Terrasse, Bonnard creates a private, enclosed world that evokes the sultry heat and languorous reverie of a Mediterranean afternoon. Marthe is now subordinate to the colorful profusion of vegetation, her motionless figure registering to the viewer within the composition only after a slight, almost imperceptible delay; her sun-dappled blue jacket and brown cloche hat seem to merge, wraithlike, with the surrounding ground of the terrace. “This dreaming feminine presence, Marthe,” Sasha Newman has written, “who so often appears in cutoff views—glimpsed on a balcony, through a door, or reflected in a mirror—is central to the underlying air of mystery in much of Bonnard’s art.”
Henri Matisse, Nu à la fenêtre. Estimate: $7-10 million. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019.
Henri Matisse painted Nu à la fenêtre (estimate: $7-10 million) – also known as Nu nacré (Pearly Nude) for the iridescent quality of its light—in his new studio during the first part of 1929 and sold the canvas to Bernheim-Jeune that September. The painting was reproduced shortly thereafter in two important monographs, one by Florent Fels and the other by Roger Fry, which paid tribute to the artist on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in December 1929; it was first exhibited publicly at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York the following fall. The focal point of this luminous,canvas is the nude model, the subject par excellence of Matisse’s exemplary Nice period. “The Odalisques were the bounty of a happy nostalgia, a lovely vivid dream, and the almost ecstatic, enchanted days and nights of the Moroccan climate,” the artist recounted. “I felt an irresistible need to express that ecstasy, that divine unconcern, in corresponding colored rhythms, rhythms of sunny and lavish figures and colors”. Here, Matisse depicted a sultry brunette named Loulou, one of several ballet dancers from the Compagnie de Paris who populated the artist’s private pictorial theater in 1928-1929. The paintings that Matisse created in early 1929 represent the culmination of his work at Nice during this transformative period.
Pablo Picasso, a lifelong aficionado of the heroism and pathos of the bullfight, executed Course de taureaux in 1900 (estimate: $4-6 million), capturing the brief, electrifying moment immediately before the bull charges into the corrida, its every nerve-ending fired with the anticipation of combat. Picasso rendered this scene, laying down pastel in vivid hues and with a material density that conjures the physicality of the impending encounter, in mid-1900, the artist was just eighteen years old, ablaze with youthful ambition and preparing for his own dramatic entry into a new arena. The previous year, he had returned home to Barcelona after a brief stint at the prestigious but stiflingly traditional Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid; now, ever more forceful and independent, he was just months away from his first trip to Paris, determined to prove his worth in the very center of the art world.
