By Carter B. Horsley
Christie's November 3, 2009 evening auction of Impressionist & Modern Art has only 41 lots, one of the smallest totals for a major evening auction in New York in recent memory. In contrast, Sotheby's is offering 68 lots the next night.
Christie's offerings also pale considerably with Sotheby's in terms of quality and Carol Vogel of The New York Times observed in a November 2, 2009 article that it is "perhaps the weakest of the season," adding that Conor Jordan, the head of its Impressionist and modern art department in New York, said "it's been a struggle."
The Christie's auction is highlighted by a very pleasant and luminous Monet landscape, a lovely woodland scene by Corot, an impressive floral still life by Fantin-Latour, a good cityscape by Pissarro, small abstractions by Mondrian and Kandinsky, a large and dramatic Friesz, a great Venetian scene by Cross, and a pleasant Cannes scene by Signac, an interesting surrealist work by Ernst, a good portrait by Modigliani, and a cabaret scene by van Dongen, a large, circular cut-out by Matisse, and an early work by van Gogh.
In 1901, Monet (1840-1926) painted 15 paintings of the "picturesque village of Vétheuil on the right bank of the Seine" where he had worked from 1878 to 1881. Monet would subsequent explore the serial approach on the Thames in London and at his water-lily garden in Giverny. Monet's 15 paintings were all executed from the same viewpoint in Lavacourt across the Seine from Vétheuil, whose major landmark is a Romanesque Church of Notre-Dame, which is the focal point of the pyramidal composition of Lot 19, an oil on canvas that measures 32 ¼ by 36 ¼ inches. Seven of the 15 Vétheuil paintings of 1901 are now in museum collections. This lot has an estimate of $5,000,000 to $7,000,000. It sold for $5,458,500 including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article.
Of the 40 offered lots, 28 sold for $65,674,000. The pre-sale estimates, without buyer's premiums, were $68,650,000 to $97,150,000.
Christopher Burge, the auctioneer, said at the post-sale news conference that 29 percent of the buyers were American, 42 percent were European, 4 percent were Asian and 25 percent were other, which he later said included Russians.
"We are still in a period of settling down after the difficulties of the financial market, slowly but surely, and for the most post sellers will gain confidence in giving us things," Mr. Burge said.
Although the number of passes was more than Christie's would have like, Mr. Burge remarked that "there were very pleasant surprises," especially Lot 5, a sculpture of a couple kissing by Auguste Rodin that sold for $6,354,500, more than four times its pre-sale high estimate.
The top lot of the auction was Lot 22, "Danseuses," by Edgar Degas, a pastel, that sold for $10,722,500, considerably over its pre-sale high estimate of $7 million.
While the Monet is quite dazzling in its late-afternoon light and the glistening Seine, a more poetic mood is casts by Lot 4, "Ville d'Avray, L'Etang vu à travers la feuillage (Une vachère assise au bord de l'eau sous les arbes)," by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875).
Corot's enchanting, grayish landscapes in and around Fontainebleau sometimes populated by attractive young women in peasant dress were for many years extremely popular but in recent seasons have rarely appeared at auction in New York. This oil on canvas, which measures 16 3/8 by 24 1/8 inches is extremely attractive and beautiful and is property from the estate of Hannah Locke Carter. It depicts the hills near his lakeside home in a small commune on the outskirts of Paris.
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Time seems to stand still, as if in a dream abut to be revealed, in a world newly awakened. Corot in fact preferred to work during the very early morning hours, lending this scene the veiled, silvery light and misty effects that are famously characteristic of his late landscapes. The artist advised his viewers: 'To enter fully into one of my landscapes, one must have the patience to allow the mists to clear, one only penetrates it gradually, and when one has, one should enjoy it there."
This lot has a modest estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. It sold for $866,500.
Lot 3 is a very lovely and lush still life by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) that was once in the collection of John D. Rockefeller III of New York. An oil on canvas, it measures 22 by 26 5/8 inches and was painted in 1865 and has been widely exhibited. Another property from the estate of Hannah Locke Carter, this lot has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000. It sold for $1,706,500.
Lot 2 is a good cityscape by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) that is entitled "Le Quai Malaquais et l'Institut." An oil on canvas, it measures 21 3/8 by 25 5/8 inches and painted in 1903. It was once in the collection of Paul Cassirer of Berlin and then Brigitte and Gottfried Bermann Fischer of Vienna from whom it was confiscated by the Nazis in 1938 and returned to their family in 2008. Pissarro painted the work from his room at Hotel du quai Voltaire, the same hotel at which Charles Baudelaire had lived when writing Les Fleurs du Mal, and one of the favorite Parisian hotels of George Barrett, for many years the lead rewriteman in the newsroom of The New York Times in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.
The lot, which is notable for its dramatic, angled perspective and very colorful sky, has an estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,500,000. It sold for $2,154,500.
Lot 29 is a small but excellent abstraction by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) that is entitled "Composition II, with Red." An oil on canvas it measures 19 ¼ by 20 ¼ inches and was painted in 1926. It was once in the collection of Edgar J. Kaufmann Jr. of New York and has been widely published and exhibited. It has an estimate of $4,500,000 to $6,500,000. It failed to sell and was passed at $4,100,000.
Lot 15 is a lyrical abstraction by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) that is entitled "Winkelschwung" (Angular Swing). An oil on board, it measures 19 ¼ by 27 3/8 inches and was painted in 1929. It was acquired in 1949 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and sold at Sotheby's in 1954. It has been consigned by the estate of Jack Dreyfus Jr. It has an estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,500,000. It sold for $2,658,500.
Emile Othon Friesz (1879-1949) was an important member of the Fauves who painted closely with Georges Braque for a while. Lot 9, "Paysage, La Ciotat," is a large and very dramatic Fauve landscape that measures 32 ¾ by 45 3/8 inches and was painted in 1907. The catalogue notes that it "is among Friesz's most radical Fauve paintings - the artist has rendered nature in a supercharged, color-driven, ecstatically expressionist manner that goes beyond anything else that even his fauve colleagues were doing at this time."
"His insistence of featuring exaggeratedly precipitous landscape motifs, and his stacked treatment of a wild profusion of knotted and twisting vegetative forms - all as flat as on a Japanese screen - have no direct precedent in French landscape painting, and would not be seen again until Chaim Soutine painted his vertiginous Cèret landscapes more than a decade later. Friesz's partner in Fauvism was Georges Braque, who would later pair off with Picasso to preside3 over the development of cubism. Both men grew up and studied in Le Havre. Friesz had a head start on Braque - in1904 he had exhibited some post-Impressionist pictures in a group show at Berthe Weill's gallery. He participated in the landmark Salon d'Automme of 1905, in which his paintings were hung in a room not far from the notorious Salle 7 that held the incendiary, color-drenched canvases of Camoin, Derain, Manguin, Marquet, Matisse and Vlaminck….Braque and Friesz traveled together to Antwerp during the summer of 1906 and painted their first fauve canvases there, working side by side from the same motifs. Friesz showed some of these recent paintings at the 1906 Salon d'Automme, where they were hung with works by Matisse and the Fauves. During the autumn and winter of 1906 Friesz and Braque stayed in l'Estaque, a port town on the Mediterranean coast where Cezanne had painted. Braque returned to the Midi in May 1907, and Friesz joined him the following month. They stayed for a while in l'Estaque and Cassis, where Derain was working, and then spent most of the summer painting in and around the seaside town of La Ciotat….The influence of Gauguin and Van Gogh on his work would never be more telling: Friesz transformed their expressive arabesques into a lyrical and deeply subjective reworking of form, to which he applied a visceral, wrist-inflected technique that presages the spontaneity and fervor of abstract expressionist painting a half-century later."
The lot has a conservative estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It passed at $850,000.
Lot 25 is a brilliant and gorgeous Pointillist work by Henri Edmond Cross (1856-1910) entitled "Barques à voiles sur la Guidecca or Venise, Marine." An oil on canvas, it measures 22 ¼ by 28 5/8 inches and was painted in 1903-5. Cross and Paul Signac worked together in 1897 at Saint-Clair in the Midi on the Mediterranean exploring the "Neo-Impressionist divisionist technique as it had been pioneered and practiced by Georges Seurat." "By the end of the decade," the catalogue noted, "Cross had largely abandoned the use of the pointillist dot, and instead employed separated rectangular strokes of pure color, similar to the tesserae employed in the creation of mosaics."
In 1903, Cross visited Venice and on his return to Saint-Clair began a series of 15 paintings based on his trip and he completed eight by February 1904 in time to show six of them that spring at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris.
The lot has a modest estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $698,500.
Paul Signac (1863-1935) worked with Henri Edmond Cross in continued the pointillist style originated by Georges Seurat and Signac's very bright and colorful marine works are pyrotechnical tours de force. Interestingly, his watercolors are more linear but just as colorful and dramatic. Lot 7, "Vieux port de Cannes," is a 1918 oil on canvas that measures 29 ½ by 38 ¼ inches. It has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000. It sold for $3,778,500.
Lot 14 is a large circular cut-out by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) that was once owned by Mr. and Mrs. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. Entitled "Rosace," it is a gouache, pencil and paper collage on paper laid down on canvas that is 76 inches in diameter and was painted in 1954. It has an estimate of $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. It passed at $2,000,000.
It is the maquette for the stained-glass window in memory of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in the Union Church in Pocantico Hills, New York.
According to the catalogue, the commission "proved to be the artist's last, and the Rosace cut-out is his final major work of any kind." "Matisse created a design that is serenely beautiful in its austere, yet elegant simplicity. Rosace is moreover deeply felt in its spiritual dimension, without alluding to conventional or denominational religious imagery."
Lot 24 is a painter of a weaver by Vincent Van Gogh that was executed in 1884. It has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It sold for $818,500.
Max Ernst (1891-1976) is one of the major Surrealist painters and Lot 35 shows his fertile imagination at work overtime as it ferrets out some huge insect in a subterranean green world. An oil on masonite, it measures 20 3/8 by 24 inches and was painted in 1945. It has an ambitious estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. It passed at $1,300,000.
Lot 27 is a very fine portrait of a photographer by Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). An oil on canvas, it was painted in 1916. It has a modest estimate of $3,000,000 to $5,000,000. It passed at $2,400,000.
Lot 8, "La danse de Carpeaux (Le Bal masqué à l"Opéra)," is a raucous, colorful nightclub scene by Kees van Dongen (1877-1968). It is an oil on canvas that measures 25 3/8 by 18 ¼ inches and was painted circa 1904. It was concerned by Mrs. Wendell Cherry. "The painting mixes fantasy and social satire," according to the catalogue, "Van Dongen always maintained his sharp illustrator's eye for capturing the foibles of the haute-bourgeoisie. The title refers to Carpeaux's sculpture La Danse, which adorned the façade of the Opeera (today a replica may be viewed on site;' the original sculpture is in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris). The sculpture was widely condemned for the lewd abandon of the nude female dancers when it was unveiled in 1869."
The lot has an ambitious estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. It sold for $2,098,500.