Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale 5 February 2020
Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale will be followed by The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, together launching '20th Century at Christie's' on 5 February 2020. Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932, estimate: £8,000,000-12,000,000) and Alberto Giacometti's Trois hommes qui marchent (Grand plateau) (1948,
estimate: £8,000,000-12,0000,000) will both lead the Impressionist and
Modern Art Evening Sale. Further highlights include George Grosz's
politically charged Gefährliche Straße (1918,
estimate: £4,500,000-6,500,000), which has remained in a private
collection for 50 years and will appear at auction for the first time. A
group of three still lifes by Pablo Picasso demonstrate his career-long
dedication to evolving the genre with exceptional examples from the
1940s, 50s and 60s: La cafetière (1943, estimate; £1,000,000-1,500,000); Intérieur au pot de fleurs (1953, estimate: £7,000,000-10,000,000) and Nature morte au chien (1962,
estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000). Works on paper by Gino Severini, Egon
Schiele Paul Klee, Picasso and Max Ernst provide intimate insight into
key artists of the 20th century.
Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait de Marjorie Ferry 39 x 25 in. (100 x 65 cm.) (1932) £8,000,000-12,000,000 (US$10.4-15.7m)
TAMARA DE LEMPICKA Portrait de Marjorie Ferry was
commissioned in 1932 by the husband of the British-born cabaret star
Marjorie Ferry at the height of Lempicka's fame in Paris where she was
the most sought-after and celebrated female modernist painter. By 1930
Lempicka had become the première portraitist
in demand among both wealthy Europeans and Americans, specifically with
those who had an eye for classicised modernism.
A major highlight of this series of
auctions will be George Grosz’s highly politicised depiction of Germany
at the close of the First World War, Gefährliche Straße, which will be
offered at auction for the first time. The painting will be presented
100 years after it was first exhibited in Grosz’s solo exhibition at the
Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich. The painting has remained in the same
private collection since 1970 and was last seen in public over twenty
years ago in the Haus der Kunst, in Munich, in an exhibition titled ‘Die
Nacht’ in 1999.
Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art,
Christie’s: “We are honoured to present at auction this masterpiece from
the rare and celebrated First World War series of city paintings by
George Grosz. It has remained in the same collection for half a
century. Only three of the original 20 or so cityscapes (ten in museums,
seven lost or destroyed) remain in private hands and this is arguably
the best and most complex of those. Grosz with all his corrosive wit and
a mastery of colour here combines futurist dynamism and expressionist
fervour to convey his hatred of Germany and contempt for its
establishment. He has added an angry self-portrait in the lower right
corner of the composition.”
Ten paintings from the series can be seen in leading museums including
the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Staatsgalerie
Stuttgart; Tate, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid and
the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gefährliche Straße (Dangerous Street) is a picture of the First
World War as it was played out on the streets of Berlin, painted during
the last months of the War in July 1918. This series of often
nightmarelike pictures of the city are the finest of all Grosz’s
achievements. They are works of art that have come to fix the image of
Berlin in the popular imagination and to define the traumatic era within
which they were made. Gefährliche Straße is one of the last and most
accomplished of this famous series of apocalyptic paintings. Unlike some
of Grosz’s earlier, more deliberately crude and sketchily-executed
works in this series, there is a cooler and more measured sense of
assuredness and stability about the way in which this deliberately
disorientating and fragmented vision of a dark and dangerous street has
been depicted. Employing a style that is reflective of both the complete
command of the oil medium that Grosz had by this time acquired and also
of the more focused, moralising sense of political purpose that his
work had begun to pursue, the forms, figures and rich colour
combinations of this painting are all rendered with a new-found clarity
and precision.
The painting will be on view in the King Street galleries in London from 30 January to 5 February 2020
.
PABLO PICASSO STILL LIFES
Picasso is credited with transforming
the still-life genre into an art form of endless symbolic, allegorical
or stylistic possibility.
La cafetière (1943,
estimate; £1,000,000-1,500,000) is constructed with angular lines and
saturated colour and was given as a gift from Picasso to his lover of
the time Marie-Thérèse Walter.
Intérieur au pot de fleurs (1953,
estimate: £7,000,000-10,000,000) is filled with the formal influence of
his friend Henri Matisse, while this intriguing interior scene can also
be seen to allude to the inner turmoil that characterised the artist's
life at this time. Nature morte au chien (1962,
estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000) is a large and playful still-life that
not only offers a glimpse into the private world of Pablo Picasso and
his idyllic final home, Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, but encapsulates
the abiding themes and stylistic qualities of the artist's work in what
has become known as his late, great period.
WORKS ON PAPER
Conjuring a sense of light, movement, sound and people, La Ferrovia Nord-Sud dates
from 1913 (estimate: £700,000-1,000,000), the peak of Gino Severini's
Futurist period. Here, Severini transports the viewer into the bustling
realm of the underground railway. Executed in 1929, Der Ballon im Fenster (estimate:
£200,000-300,000) by Paul Klee takes as its focus a multicoloured
balloon which the artist has glimpsed through a gap in the curtains, its
bright form floating across the sky above a landscape bathed in the
glow of a setting sun.
Christie's
annual auction The Art of the Surreal will continue on from the
Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on 5 February 2020, marking
the launch of ‘20th Century at Christie’s’. Painted in 1962,
René
Magritte’s À la rencontre du plaisir (Towards Pleasure) (estimate:
£8,000,000-12,000,000) combines several of the artist’s most iconic
motifs into a single, evocative image, creating an elegant summation of
the poetic imagination which fuelled his unique form of Surrealism.
Purchased directly from the artist shortly after its creation, the
painting has remained in the same family collection for over half a
century, and is coming to auction for the first time.
Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art,
Christie’s: “It is with great expectation that we present this unique
masterpiece by Magritte to the market for the first time on behalf of
the family who were close friends of the artist and frequent guests at
his famous Saturday gatherings of poets and other Surrealist
intellectuals. It is probably the most hyper realistically painted and
most strikingly poetic composition by the artist that I have had the
honour to work with. It is a powerful illustration, just as his best
‘L'empire des lumières’ paintings are, of the ways in which Magritte
deployed realistic looking symbols of a normal, ordinary and
conventional life to casually pull us, the viewer, into a familiar
setting only to then surprise us, unsettle us, cast his magical spell on
us, thereby changing forever our experience of everyday reality.”
At
its centre stands one of Magritte’s most familiar and enigmatic
characters, the solitary man in the bowler hat, who appears lost in
thought as he gazes upon the landscape before him. The bright glow of
the moon casts a subtle sheen on the dome of his hat, while a soft,
creeping mist hangs in the middle-distance, blurring the boundary
between the forest and the open field. Seen from behind, the gentleman
seems captivated by the vista, his stance and positioning amidst the
sublime beauty of the natural world calling to mind the compositions of
Caspar David Friedrich, although Magritte was no Romantic. There is a
palpable sense of mystery and poetry to the scene, an uncertainty as to
whether or not the view is real or imagined, and what exactly this
figure’s role or place is in the world that the artist conjures.
