Pablo Picasso, Mousquetaire et nu assis, oil and Ripolin on canvas (1967, estimate: £12,000,000-18,000,000)
Pablo
Picasso’s masterpiece Mousquetaire et nu assis (1967, estimate:
£12,000,000-18,000,000) will be a leading highlight of Christie’s Impressionist
& Modern Art Evening Sale, in London on 27 February 2018 as part of ‘20th
Century at Christie’s’, a series of sales that take place from 20 February to 7
March 2018.
Painted with gestural, lavishly and passionately applied
brushstrokes, it is among the first of the triumphant musketeers that appeared
in Pablo Picasso’s art in 1967. This iconic figure is accompanied by a
sensuous, seated nude. With her shock of dark hair, hieratic posture, and her
large, all-seeing almond shaped eyes, there is no question as to the identity
of this woman: she is Jacqueline, the artist’s final, great love, muse and
wife, whose presence permeated every female figure in this final chapter of
Picasso’s life.
With one eye towards the Old Masters and another towards
contemporary art, Picasso shows himself still challenging the history of art,
carrying out iconoclastic attacks, plundering the past and doing so in a
strikingly fresh, gestural way. Steeped in eroticism, a sense of painterly
bravado, and pulsating with a vital sense of energy, this painting paved the
way for the themes, style and execution that would come to define this late
phase of Picasso’s oeuvre.
Keith Gill, Head of Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, Christie’s, London: “Picasso’s late career was defined by sensuous paintings in which he cast himself as the virile artist alongside his voluptuous lover. The allegorical figures were used by Picasso not only to reference fictitious characters but were a means by which he could situate himself firmly within the art historical canon alongside the likes of Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. He seemed to have a sense of urgency to his work in this period, as if trying to beat the passage of time, a feeling that is evidenced by the dense brushwork and bold gestures of ‘Mousquetaire et nu assis’. It is a privilege to present the painting as a leading highlight in the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.”
Throughout his life, Picasso had frequently been drawn to historical, classical, or mythological ‘types’: he was the melancholic harlequin, monstrous minotaur and the courageous torero. Now, in the final decade of his life, Picasso transformed himself for a final time into the brave, adventurous and virile musketeer, clad in ornate costumes, ready for daring escapades, romantic exploits and heroic deeds. In this final act of self-rejuvenation and artistic resurgence, this character became the façade that Picasso presented to the world during the remaining years of his life.
For Picasso, the figure of the musketeer had a wealth of varied art historical origins: from Hals and Rembrandt, to Meissonier, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. This striking, dark-featured character, part Spanish, part French, part Dutch, with his elegant seventeenth-century garb, could as easily have stepped out of Las Meninas as The Night Watch. Picasso was fuelled by a desire to beat the inexorable passage of time, something that led him to paint with a new speed. In many ways, reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists, his brushstrokes are thick and visceral, irrevocable gestures that boldly declare the hand of the artist himself, memorialising his presence in paint upon the canvas.
Keith Gill, Head of Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, Christie’s, London: “Picasso’s late career was defined by sensuous paintings in which he cast himself as the virile artist alongside his voluptuous lover. The allegorical figures were used by Picasso not only to reference fictitious characters but were a means by which he could situate himself firmly within the art historical canon alongside the likes of Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. He seemed to have a sense of urgency to his work in this period, as if trying to beat the passage of time, a feeling that is evidenced by the dense brushwork and bold gestures of ‘Mousquetaire et nu assis’. It is a privilege to present the painting as a leading highlight in the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.”
Throughout his life, Picasso had frequently been drawn to historical, classical, or mythological ‘types’: he was the melancholic harlequin, monstrous minotaur and the courageous torero. Now, in the final decade of his life, Picasso transformed himself for a final time into the brave, adventurous and virile musketeer, clad in ornate costumes, ready for daring escapades, romantic exploits and heroic deeds. In this final act of self-rejuvenation and artistic resurgence, this character became the façade that Picasso presented to the world during the remaining years of his life.
For Picasso, the figure of the musketeer had a wealth of varied art historical origins: from Hals and Rembrandt, to Meissonier, El Greco, Velázquez and Goya. This striking, dark-featured character, part Spanish, part French, part Dutch, with his elegant seventeenth-century garb, could as easily have stepped out of Las Meninas as The Night Watch. Picasso was fuelled by a desire to beat the inexorable passage of time, something that led him to paint with a new speed. In many ways, reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionists, his brushstrokes are thick and visceral, irrevocable gestures that boldly declare the hand of the artist himself, memorialising his presence in paint upon the canvas.
André Derain’s Londres: la Tamise au pont de Westminster (1906-07, estimate: £6,000,000-9,000,000) will star in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on 27 February, launching ‘20th Century at Christie’s’, a series of auctions that take place in London from 20 February to 7 March 2018. One of 29 recorded paintings of London that Derain painted across 1906 and 1907, it comes to auction alongside the exhibition ‘Impressionists and London’ currently on view at London’s Tate Britain. Londres: la Tamise au pont de Westminster is captured from the Albert Embankment, portraying the Thames, the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Bridge and, in the background, the pyramidal silhouette of Whitehall Court. As with all of the works in this series, the British capital is saturated in radiant colour. The expansive grey waters of the Thames are transformed into a mosaic of shimmering yellow, blue and turquoise; the sunlit sky rendered in an iridescent patchwork of blues and pinks. The painting will be on view in Hong Kong from 5 to 8 February and New York from 12 to 14 February 2018 before being exhibited in London from 20 to 27 February 2018.
Just a few months before he ventured to London, Derain had made his explosive debut into the Parisian art world when he was included in the Salon d’Automne of 1905. Derain’s work at the Salon caught the eye of one of Paris’ leading contemporary art dealers, the man who had, a few months earlier, introduced the artist to Matisse: Ambroise Vollard. Vollard became his dealer later that same year and it was his idea to send Derain to London and commission him to paint a series of cityscapes there. With Monet’s famous series of Thames views set firmly in his mind, over the course of his time in London, Derain travelled across the city in search of his subjects, sketching an array of different views. Unlike Monet, whose depictions of the city had centred around three specific viewpoints, Derain was not fixed to one specific location. Instead he captured the city from a range of positions, never returning to an identical subject twice in an attempt to challenge himself with each work. The notorious London fogs for which London was so well known, and under whose spell Monet had fallen, proved strangely elusive for Derain. As a result, Derain did not pursue the same muted, soft effects of light and colour that this atmospheric condition cast over the appearance of the city, but rather focused on more radical formal experimentation.
Keith Gill, Head of Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, Christie’s, London: “Derain’s time spent in London saw him produce some of the most revolutionary works of his career. With its blazing colour, radical means of execution and structure, Londres: la Tamise au pont de Westminster is a magnificent painting that takes its place within the esteemed artistic lineage of Turner, Whistler and Monet, all of whom had depicted London in their art. Among the most iconic works of Fauvism, many of this rare series of London paintings are now housed in museum collections across the world, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London, where a selection of other works from this groundbreaking London series are currently on view in the exhibition, ‘Impressionists in London’. Following the widely acclaimed exhibition of Derain’s work of this period at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, we are honoured to present this rare Fauvist work in our Evening Sale in London.”
Arriving in London with a strongly felt desire to take colour, and indeed painting, beyond traditional conventions, Derain’s radical ideas took flight upon visiting the capital’s collections of non-Western art. Visiting the ethnographic and ancient collections of the British Museum, he was immediately inspired to ‘make of the Thames something other than coloured photographs’, as he wrote to Matisse on 15 March 1906. Immersed in the capital, its national collections, and most importantly, removed from the avant-garde hub of Paris, Derain was able to forge an artistic idiom that was wholly unique.
Also included in the sale::
Pablo Picasso’s Le coq saigné (‘The bled cock’ 1947-8, estimate: £2,200,000 – 2,800,000). Le coq saigné has been celebrated as one of the most visually complex and arresting works of the large series of still-lifes that the artist painted during and immediately following the Second World War. A sinuously interlocking composition of colour, planar form, line and pattern, the subject itself becomes almost entirely abstract.
Joan Miró’s Painting (1926, estimate £600,000 – 900,000), which belongs to Miró’s famed series of ‘oneiric’ or ‘dream’ paintings, an enigmatic group of spectral compositions which the artist began in Paris in 1925 and Miró’s Tête d’homme (1932, estimate £800,000 – 1,200,000) one of a small group of twelve intimately sized, experimental oil paintings which emerged at a pivotal moment in Joan Miró’s career, following several years marked by what the artist termed a ‘crisis of personal consciousness’.
Paul Klee’s oil-transfer drawing, Weibsteufel, die Welt behrrschend (1921, estimate £200,000 – 300,000),
Wassily Kandinsky’s gouache and watercolour Allein (1932, estimate £120,000 – 200,000)
