Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks'

 High Museum of Art 

Oct. 25, 2024-Feb. 16, 2025

Famed for her images of flowers and Southwestern landscapes, American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) spent several years of her prolific career exploring the built environment of New York City with brush in hand. This fall, the High Museum of Art will be the exclusive venue in the Southeastern United States to present “Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” (Oct. 25, 2024-Feb. 16, 2025). Featuring approximately 100 works across a range of media including paintings, drawings, pastels and photographs, the exhibition is the first to seriously examine how O’Keeffe’s urban landscapes fit within the diverse context of her art.



Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition establishes these works not as outliers or as anomalous to O’Keeffe’s practice but as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s — from her abstractions and still lifes at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond to her works upon arriving in the Southwest in 1929.

“Most of our visitors likely know O’Keeffe best for her floral paintings and works focused on the American Southwest, including her 1919 painting ‘Red Canna,’ one of the most visited works in our collection,” said the High’s Director Rand Suffolk. “This exhibition offers the wonderful opportunity to highlight this important, but perhaps less recognized period of O’Keeffe’s artistic life and demonstrate how her ‘New Yorks’ exemplify her innovation as a Modernist.”

In 1924, O’Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, moved to New York City’s newly built Shelton Hotel, then the tallest residential skyscraper in the world. Its soaring heights inspired a five-year period of energetic experimentation, across media, scale, subject matter, form and perspective. She created street-level compositions capturing the city’s monumental skyscrapers from below and suspended views looking down from her 30th-floor apartment. She called these works her “New Yorks” and through them investigated the dynamic potential of New York’s cityscape — the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed.

These New York paintings are essential in understanding how O’Keeffe became the artist we know today. For this reason, the exhibition includes a significant portion of the artist’s New York paintings alongside select works that highlight her varied subject matter, including shells, flowers, abstractions and landscapes. This integration underscores how O’Keeffe centered her New York works in her innovative and experimental modernist investigation of form, line and color — an approach she continued upon her arrival in the Southwest. Additionally, the exhibition includes photographs by Stieglitz from the Shelton and other Manhattan high-rises, exploring the productive artistic dialogue that developed between them as each was inspired by their powerfully new urban environment.

The exhibition is curated by the Art Institute’s Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen. The accompanying richly illustrated catalogue features a series of essays that present new scholarship and viewpoints on this formative group of works.

“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” was first on view at the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer of 2024 and will be presented at the High on the Second and Skyway Levels of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing.

Exhibition Organization and Support
“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.



Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928, oil on canvas, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, Stephen B. Lawrence Fund, 1958.9. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.



Georgia O'Keeffe, New York Street with Moon


Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York Street with Moon, 1925, oil on canvas, mounted to Masonite, Colección Carmen Thyssen. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.



Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Manhattan, 1932, oil on canvas

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Manhattan, 1932, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1995.3.1. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, New York.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Chrysler Building from the Window of the Waldorf Astoria, New York, ca. 1960, gelatin silver print

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Chrysler Building from the Window of the Waldorf Astoria, New York, ca. 1960, gelatin silver print, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2006.6.1370. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.



Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York, Night, 1928–1929, oil on canvas

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York, Night, 1928–1929, oil on canvas, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Art Association, Thomas C. Woods Memorial, N-107.1958. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo by Bill Ganzel.




Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), City Night, 1926, oil on canvas


Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), City Night, 1926, oil on canvas, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, gift of funds from the Regis Corporation, Mr. and Mrs. W. John Driscoll, the Beim Foundation, the Larsen Fund, and by public subscription, 80.28. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Group Show: Masterworks of Line and Color

 


The Park Avenue Armory, Booth A12

October 30 – November 2, 2024


The late 19th through the first half of the 20th centuries saw the rise of several art movements, including Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Pointillism, and Symbolism. These movements set the groundwork for the development of modern art in the latter 20th century, and opened the door for artists to work abstractly and conceptually in the 21st century.


By looking at 19th and early 20th century artwork, we can gain insight into the artistic and historical complexities of this transformative period. The beginning of globalization allowed artists to see artwork made in other countries; to use paint and materials bettered by technical innovation; and to engage with the new societal focus on individualism, which in turn shed light on the gender, class, and racial dynamics of the time. Each of these forces appears in the works of Delacroix, Matisse, Bonnard and Cézanne, and hint at the major movements of modern and contemporary art on the horizon.


Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798-1863), Standing Female Nude Seen from Behind, Pencil on paper, 9 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches.

Eugène Delacroix was born in 1798 in France and lived there until 1863. In three small scale drawings shown here, we see his enormous talent for composition, which enabled him to be an effective muralist as well as an easel painter. The smallest sheet is from a “carnet” or sketchbook he made from life while on a brief diplomatic trip to Morocco in January 1832. It depicts a lithe and sinewy dancer he had seen in Tangiers, and this figure was used to create
 



his 1839 major painting The Jewish Wedding, 



as well as inspiring the figure in Femmes d’Alger of 1834 (both Paris, Musée du Louvre). 

Both of these important paintings subsequently inspired Matisse, who in 1912, also traveled to Morocco.


Moroccan Dancer, 1832, Pencil on paper, 5 x 4 inches.


Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867-1947), L'Escalier, c. 1932, Oil and gouache on paper, laid down on canvas, 25 1/4 x 19 1/2 inches.

A large and extraordinary oil on paper by Pierre Bonnard depicts an interior view of his home in Le Cannet, with his partner Marthe peering around the base of the staircase, and their dog looking up eagerly at the viewer. Bonnard shows us a postcard of his interior world, the influence of Van Gogh clearly seen in the bright yellow rays of light in the upper right corner of the composition.

Done while Henri Matisse was living in Vence, high in the hills over Nice, our charcoal is one in a series of large scale drawings of black models from the Caribbean and Africa. Matisse employed black models in creating the illustrated Fleurs du Mal, published in 1947, and produced a series of fourteen etchings dating from 1946 of La Martiniquaise, using models from Madagascar and the Congo.

Interestingly, our drawing was traditionally titled “Femme Assise” without the identification of the race or nationality of the model.


Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954), Femme assise, 1945, Charcoal on paper, 20 1/2 x 15 9/10 inches


Each artist’s individual technique and chosen subject matter is indicative of the shifting artistic consciousness of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though created at different times, under different circumstances, and within the framework of different artistic movements, the artworks in this show are in undeniable dialogue with one another while laying groundwork for what will come next.

Masterworks in line and color, each of these works are masterful in their ability to capture the moment in which they were made, and to resonate in the future.

Group Show: Masterworks of Line and Color is the latest in a series of exhibitions presented at the Art Show which include The Watercolors of George Sand (she/her/hers) (2023); Eugène Delacroix: The Enduring Power of Image (2019; essay by Jovana Stokic); Pierre Bonnard: Affinities (2018; essay by Karen Wilkin) and Under the Influence: Edouard Vuillard and Contemporary Art (2017; essay by Norman Kleeblatt).

Surrealism -Centre Pompidou

 


4 Sep 2024 - 13 Jan 2025

Surrealism

Retracing over 40 years of exceptional creative effervescence, from 1924 to 1969, "Surrealism" marks the anniversary of this movement, which was born in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s founding Manifesto.

The exhibition is organised both chronologically and thematically, structured into 14 sections that evoke literary figures who inspired the movement (Lautréamont, Lewis Carroll, Sade, etc.) and the poetic principles that structured its imagery (the artist as a medium, dreams, the philosopher’s stone, the forest, etc.).Designed like a maze, the “Surrealism” exhibition is an unprecedented dive into the exceptional creative effervescence of the Surrealist movement, born in 1924 with the publication of André Breton’s founding Manifesto.  

Combining paintings, drawings, films, photographs and literary documents, the exhibition presents works by the movement’s iconic artists (Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró), as well as those by the female Surrealists (including Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun, Dora Maar). 


Max Ernst, « L'ange du foyer (Le triomphe du surréalisme) », 1937 © Adagp, Paris. Vincent Everarts Photographie

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists

 

 National Gallery London

13 September 2025 ‒ 8 February 2026  

Georges Seurat’s painting of cancan dancers 'Le Chahut' (1889‒90) will go on display in the UK for the first time next autumn as a star loan in a major new exhibition at the National Gallery has announced - its first-ever devoted to the Neo-Impressionist art movement.

Seurat’s painting will be one of several by the artist to be included in Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists (13 September 2025 ‒ 8 February 2026).

Largely drawn from the outstanding collection of the German art collector Helene Kröller-Müller (1869‒1939), at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, in the Netherlands, the exhibition will show radical works of French, Belgian and Dutch artists, painted from 1886 to the early 20th century. These include Anna Boch (1848‒1936), Jan Toorop (1858-1928), Théo van Rysselberghe (1862‒1926), Paul Signac (1863‒1935) and Georges Seurat (1859–1891) himself.

One of the first great women art patrons of the 20th century, Kröller-Müller, assembled what is probably the world’s greatest and most comprehensive collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings just two decades after these works were painted.

As well as being one of the first European women to put together a major art collection, Kröller-Müller was a pioneer in displaying modern works of art on white walls; in a museum designed by Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who began his career as a Neo-Impressionist painter. 

Her entire collection was eventually given to the Dutch government (under the condition that a museum be built to house it), along with her and her husband, Anton Kröller's, large, forested country estate. Today it is the Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden and Hoge Veluwe National Park, one of the largest national parks in the Netherlands.  

As well as' Le Chahut', works by Georges Seurat coming from the Kröller-Müller Museum to the exhibition will include 'Sunday at Port-en-Bessin' (1888) and 'The Canal of Gravelines, in the Direction of the Sea' (1890) as well as two outstanding conté crayon drawings.  

The exhibition will include important pictures from the same collection by other significant Neo-Impressionists such as Théo van Rysselberghe’s 'In July - before Noon' or 'The Orchard' (1890), Jan Toorop’s 'Sea' (1899), Henry van de Velde’s 'Twilight' (about 1889) and Paul Signac’s 'The Dining Room' (1886-87), which will be paired with the artist’s other interior scene, 'A Sunday' (oil on canvas, 1888-90), an exceptional loan from a private collection.  

'Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists' will focus on how this style that emerged from 1886 when Georges Seurat exhibited his work 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte' at what was to prove the final Impressionist exhibition heralded the end of Impressionism and, became one of the very first pan-European art movements. So radical was the style that some critics of the time saw it as signifying the death of painting, due to the methodical nature of a painting’s production in regular pointillist dots of pure colour, removing an artist’s individuality usually expressed through their brush strokes. 

The radical nature of these works will be explored both in the way that they were painted, and in political underpinnings of the Neo-Impressionist movement with artists reacting against the industrial age with a desire to reshape society by painting the struggles faced by the working class.

At the same time, they also aimed to produce pictures that sought to transcend reality, creating radically simplified compositions that captured the essence of what they aimed to depict, attaining harmony through colour and geometry.  

The first exhibition to return to the temporary exhibition galleries in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, 'Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists' will also feature works that Kröller-Müller did not collect herself. These will come from public and private collections worldwide including the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Museum Barberini, Potsdam, and Tate, as well as pictures from the Gallery’s own Neo-Impressionist collection.   

'Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists' is curated by Julien Domercq, Curator, the Royal Academy of Arts, Christopher Riopelle, the Neil Westreich Curator of Post-1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, and Renske Cohen Tervaert, Curator, Kröller Müller Museum. 

This exhibition is a collaboration between the National Gallery and the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.




Image: Georges Seurat 'Le Chahut', 1889‒90 © Kröller-Müller Museum


Image: Helene Kröller-Müller © Kröller-Müller Museum

Notes to editors

Publicity images can be obtained from https://press.nationalgallery.org.uk/ 

Millet: Life on the Land


The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) will open at the National Gallery in autumn 2025. 

The show will coincide with the 150th anniversary of Millet’s death – by which time his works were well known in the UK and beginning to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, resulting in a significant body of his work in UK public collections.

Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of 'L’Angelus' (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The exhibition will range from Millet’s last years in Paris through to his images of workers on the land during the 1850s following his move to the village of Barbizon in the Fontainebleau Forest in 1849, when he became one of the most significant painters associated with the 19th-century Barbizon school*. Two drawings of shepherdesses from the Cooper Gallery (Barnsley) and the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) will be shown together for the first time.

'The Winnower', which was acquired by the National Gallery in 1978, is one of Millet’s first paintings to treat the theme of rural labour. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and was well received. However, later works exhibited at the Paris Salon produced extreme reaction. While Millet’s own political convictions are unclear, many critics appropriated his work for their own progressive agenda while others labelled him as subversive. Yet there is no doubt that he had sympathy with the workers around him and wrote in 1851 of the ‘human side’ that touched him most. 

In 'L’Angelus', a man and a woman are reciting the Angelus, a prayer which commemorates the annunciation made to Mary by the angel Gabriel. It is traditionally cited at morning, noon and evening, when it marks the end of the working day.  Never collected by its original commissioner, it followed an extraordinary journey through several collections and sales. The two quiet figures silhouetted against land and sky, the profound sense of meditation underscored by a beauty of light have turned it into a world-famous icon in the 20th century. 

Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post 1800 Paintings, says ‘Millet endowed rural labourers with dignity and nobility, depicting them in drawings and paintings with empathy and compassion.’ 


Images

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Jean-François Millet (1814–1875)
Millet was born at Grouchy (Manche) and was a pupil of Paul Delaroche in Paris by 1837. For some years he painted chiefly idylls in imitation of 18th-century French painters. Becoming, like Honoré Daumier, increasingly moved by the spectacle of social injustice, Millet turned to peasant subjects and won his first popular success at the Salon of 1848 with The Winnower. From the following year he was chiefly active at Barbizon and associated with the Barbizon school of landscape painters.

His work was influenced by Dutch paintings of the 17th century and by the work of Jean-Siméon Chardin and was influential in Holland on Jozef Israëls and on the early style of Vincent Van Gogh.

*Barbizon school

The Barbizon school of painters were part of an art movement toward Realism in art, which arose in the context of the dominant Romantic Movement of the time. The Barbizon school was active roughly from 1830 through 1870. It takes its name from the village of Barbizon, France, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where many of the artists gathered. Most of their works were landscape painting, but several of them also painted landscapes with farmworkers, and genre scenes of village life. Some of the most prominent features of this school are its tonal qualities, colour, loose brushwork, and softness of form.

The leaders of the Barbizon school were: Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Constant Troyon, Charles Jacque, and Narcisse Virgilio Díaz. Jean-François Millet lived in Barbizon from 1849, but his interest in figures with a landscape backdrop sets him rather apart from the others.

Images





Jean-François Millet

The Winnower

about 1847-8

Oil on canvas

100.5 × 71 cm

© The National Gallery, London

Jean-François Millet
'L’Angélus', 1857–9
Oil on canvas
55.5 x 66 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris (RF 1877)
© Musée d'Orsay, Dist. Grand Palais Rmn / Patrice Schmidt




Jean-François Millet

Wood Choppers, about 1850

Black chalk and watercolour on paper

46.9 x 30.8 cm

National Gallery of Scotland (D NG 1237)

Purchased 1919

© National Galleries of Scotland






Jean-François Millet

A Milkmaid, about 1853

Oil on canvas

32.5 x 24 cm

© The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham (77.1)






Jean-François Millet

A Shepherdess, about 1856

Black chalk with touches of blue chalk on pale buff paper

22.8 x 15.1 cm

National Gallery of Scotland

Mr A.E. Anderson Gift 1929 (D3729)

© National Galleries of Scotland




Jean-François Millet

The Faggot Gatherers, about 1850-5

Oil on panel

30.4  18 cm

National Gallery of Scotland

Accepted in lieu of Estate Duty by HM Government from the Craigmyle Collection, and allocated to the National Galleries of Scotland, 2020 (NG 2887)

© National Galleries of Scotland




Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale Nov 24 2024

 





JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) Untitled, oilstick on paper, 63½ x 44 in. (161.3 x 111.8 cm.) Executed in 1982. Estimate: $20,000,000-30,000,000

Christie’s has announced the 21st Century Evening Sale, taking place live at Rockefeller Center, 7pm on Thursday, November 21, 2024. The sale will be led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled, a monumental portrait that sits among the iconic artist’s most impressive and outstanding works. Executed in 1982 when the artist was just 22-years-old, the work has been held in the same private collection since the early 90s and was exhibited in the artist’s defining retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2019. Basquiat often indicates the heroic status of his subjects by adorning their heads with a crown or a halo. Likely inspired by the artist’s passionate travels to Italy in 1981-1982, in Untitled, our hero is decorated by a laurel wreath—a symbol of triumph, honor, and victory in Greek and Roman mythology—while retaining a characteristic air of self-portraiture. Estimated $20 million – 30 million, Untitled is the leading highlight of the 21st Century Evening sale and poised to set a new record for a work on paper.

Alex Rotter, Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, Christie’s, remarks, “This portrait is the greatest work on paper I have ever seen by Basquiat. It punches above its weight. The face of the figure emanates power. This work is Basquiat as his best. Offering it this November is the ultimate honor.”

Kat Widing, Head of 21st Century Evening Sale, Christie’s, remarks, “The ethos of our 21st century sale is to dynamically present the most groundbreaking works of the past fifty years. Each work in the auction is thoughtfully selected to represent the powerful art of our time.




The sale also includes an exemplary Flight Fantasy sculpture by David Hammons from the late 1970s ($2 million – 3 million), which skillfully combines socially resonant and found mediums into a form that resembles a bird in flight or ceremonial mask. Among the first in the series, the work was created as a commission for the Hartfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta and was acquired by the consignor directly from the artist, with whom it has remained for almost half a century. 




Further highlights include Pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama ($6 million – 8 million), the largest sculpture of its kind to ever come to auction and 



The Butcher and the Policeman ($4 million – 6 million) an exuberant canvas by Cecily Brown from 2013, the title of which references Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The work comes to Christie’s this fall, coinciding with Brown’s major US retrospective on view at the Dallas Museum of Art and traveling to the Barnes Foundation in 2025.

Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale November 19, 2024


 Christie’s Presents Ed Ruscha 'Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half'

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 65 x 121½ in (165.1 x 308.6 cm), Painted in 1964, Estimate on request; in excess of $50 million

Christie’s has announced Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half will lead the 20th Century Evening Sale during Fall Marquee Week this November (estimate on request; in excess of $50 million). One of the outstanding paintings of post-war art and the last of Ruscha’s large-scale 1960s masterpieces in private hands, it comes to auction after featuring as one of the centerpieces of the artist’s retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2023-24.

Max Carter, Christie’s Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, remarks, “Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half represents the synthesis and peak of Ruscha’s masterpieces of the early 1960s. It is an icon—of Ruscha’s art, of paradox, of the post-war era. Offering it this fall at Christie’s is once-in-a-lifetime.”

CATALOGUE LINKED HERE

Ed Ruscha first encountered the Standard Oil gas stations during a road trip from his native Oklahoma to Los Angeles along Route 66 in 1962. Captivated by the boldness of their design against the vastness of American landscape, he began including them into what would become many of his most famous paintings. Just as Andy Warhol did with soup cans, Ruscha immortalized the gas station through seriality. The image has now become emblematic of the American West and the post-war art historical canon, memorialized in 1963 in Ruscha’s now legendary publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half stands as an icon among this celebrated series. The work debuted the year it was created in a 1964 exhibition in Los Angeles’s famed Ferus Gallery, where it was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Donald Factor of Los Angeles. It has since remained privately held within esteemed collections, while simultaneously shared extensively. The painting has been cited throughout literature and exhibited publicly at leading institutions including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian Institute, The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and most recently The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Its sister painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963 is held in the collection of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.


 Christie’s Celebrates 100 Years of Surrealism with Seminal Artworks by Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte

RENE MAGRITTE (1898-1967) L'empire des lumières, signed ‘Magritte’ (lower left), gouache on paper, 14.3/8 x 18.1/2 in. (36.3 x 46.8 cm.) Painted in 1956, $6 – 8 million 

On the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Christie’s has announced three seminal works highlighting Fall Marquee Week, each of which played a critical role in underpinning the development, evolution, and overarching narrative of the Surrealist movement through the course of the 20th century. The three works —Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915/1964)  René Magritte’s Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (1928) and Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1956) — represent the finest examples of sculpture, painting, and works on paper, and hail from distinctly separate periods within the movement’s history and prehistory. All three will be featured highlights in the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place in New York on November 19, 2024 at Christie's Rockefeller Center.

Olivier Camu, Christie’s Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, remarks, “Christie's has long championed the pioneering artists of the Surrealist movement and we are honored to have offered a wide breadth of their finest examples through a dedicated evening sale, The Art of the Surreal, for more than two decades. Today, we continue to celebrate the movement's enduring relevance. The sale of Magritte’s monumental L’empire des lumières from the Mica Ertegun Collection, arguably the best available large composition of this kind remaining in private hands, is estimated at over $95 million, and set to establish a new benchmark, further cementing Surrealism's lasting impact on the history of the art market.”

Max Carter, Christie’s Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, remarks, “In October 1924, André Breton published his Surrealist Manifesto. To mark the 100th anniversary, we are honored to announce three emblems of Surrealist history and its influences from across 40 years: the first of Duchamp’s inner circle readymades to appear at auction in recent memory, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), which comes to Christie’s from the family of Joseph Kosuth; one of the last of Magritte’s seminal masterpieces in private hands, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (1928), which nearly eclipsed the artist’s record when the present owner acquired it at Christie’s in 2014; and L’empire des lumières (1956), the biggest and best of the motif in gouache and unseen since 1981. With this trio alongside Mica Ertegun’s extraordinary collection and iconic Magritte, it does not get any better.”

The earliest of the works, In Advance of the Broken Arm (estimate: $2 – 3 million) dates to the winter of 1915 when Marcel Duchamp, having just relocated from Europe to New York, encountered snow shovels for the first time, piled up outside of a hardware store near his studio. Intrigued by their form, he purchased a single shovel and titled, signed and dated it on the handle. He then hung it with a piece of wire from the ceiling of his studio, transforming it from a utilitarian object into a sculptural artwork. This revolutionary act marked an important moment in Duchamp’s career, and In Advance of the Broken Arm became one of the earliest of the artist’s iconic and profoundly influential Readymades. Duchamp’s Readymades became more fully ingrained within the public consciousness two years later with the exhibition of his notorious Fountain in 1917, which ushered in an entirely new era and an understanding that objecthood can be divorced from function, purpose and surroundings through a process of conceptual sublimation and a shift in perception. This laid new groundwork for artistic thought and innovation, effectively altering the course of art history and in part, contributing to the foundational principles of what would become Surrealism. The present version of In Advance of the Broken Arm comes from the private collection of the conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth. For Kosuth, Duchamp served as one of his earliest and most important influences, his subversion of the notion of an artwork underpinning much of Kosuth’s own practice. With works such as One in Three Shovels, which appears to directly reference In Advance of the Broken Arm, Kosuth paid homage to Duchamp as he took the concept of the Readymade to a new level.

Magritte’s 1928 work, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (estimate: $8 – 12 million), was painted just one year after the young artist relocated from Brussels to Paris in order to be closer to then-nascent Surrealist group. He quickly developed friendships with the group’s key members, including Paul Eluard and André Breton. This was perhaps the most productive and innovative chapter of the artist’s entire career, as he tapped into a rich seam of ideas inspired by the stimulating environment of Paris and his encounters with his fellow Surrealists. Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit is now considered to be one of Magritte’s early masterpieces of Surrealism. The scene depicts a pair of hunters, struggling to free themselves from two walls that threaten to absorb them, next to a darkly lit open landscape on the right. The atmospheric nature of the work invokes the disquieting poetics of Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Magritte was a devoted reader. A letter from Paul Nougé, delivered at the very beginning of Magritte’s stay in Paris, had used the analogy of a wall to issue a great rallying cry to the artist, encouraging him to challenge the status-quo of art making. “There are those who are anxious to know what goes on behind the wall; there are those who are prepared to settle for the wall; there are those who do not care what happens behind the wall, if anything; there are those who don’t see the wall; there are those who deny the wall; there are those who deny or refuse even the possibility of the wall. But you, mon cher Magritte, you have constructed an infernal machine, you are a good engineer, a conscientious engineer. You have left nothing undone in order to blow up the wall.”

The third and final work of the trio is Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (estimate: $6 – 8 million), a work on paper hailing from the artist’s most iconic and highly coveted series – four of which are among his top ten highest prices at auction. Focusing on the mysterious appearance of a sun-lit sky above a quiet house bathed in the shadows of night, the subject of the 1956 gouache is among the most recognizable images of the Surrealist movement and is poised to surpass the current record for the artist in this medium of $7.4 million established at Christie’s London in February 2023. By including day and night, two normally irreconcilable conditions, simultaneously in this scene, Magritte disrupts the viewer's sense of time and space, transforming this otherwise ordinary landscape into something inherently strange and magical. Executed in dynamic layers of fluid pigment, this richly worked gouache is the most brilliant example from the series on paper, capturing the glow from the singular street-lamp—an important leitmotif within the L’empire des lumières paintings—in a dense pattern of delicate brushstrokes.

In February 2015, The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale in Christie’s London became the first Surrealist sale to surpass $100 million mark. Nearly a decade later, demand for Surrealism is stronger than ever. This November, A monumental painting from Magritte’s L’empire des lumières series will be offered by Christie’s New York in a single-owner sale from The Collection of Mica Ertegun carrying an estimate in excess of $95 million, which will establish a new benchmark for both the Surrealist movement and all of art history.