Sotheby's New York
10 AM, November 13, 2019
Sale 10148
Lot 119, "Etretat, coucher de soleil" by Claude Monet, oil on canvas, 16 3/8 by 13 1/4 inches, 1889
The day auction of Impressionist & Modern Art November 13, 2019 at Sotheby's New York highlighted by a great Monet painting of Etretat, good works by Degas, Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Loiseau, Derain, Pissarro, Lempicka, a nice dark Van Gogh and some Latin American paintings by Lam, Varo and Reveron.
Lot 119 is a very great oil on canvas of "Etretat, coucher de soleil" by Claude Monet (1840-1926). It was painted in 1889 and measures 16 3/8 by 13 1/4 inches. It once belonged to Benny Goodman and is probably the best painting in this fall's auction season, regardless of category.
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Claude Monet’s lifelong affinity for the landscape of Normandy and its dramatic coastline can be traced back to his childhood. The son of a commercial officer who worked in the trading house in Le Havre, Monet spent his formative years surrounded by the region’s rugged cliffs and powerful waves. His earliest sketches depict scenes from the coastal towns around Le Havre, where he met the landscape painter Eugène Boudin, who became his first teacher and taught him the techniques of painting en plein air that would become the foundation of Monet’s career. At age 19, Monet moved to Paris to advance his career as an artist, but the charm and beauty of the Normandy landscape would lure him back often. Indeed, one of Monet’s most iconic works—the likely namesake of the entire Impressionist movement itself—Impression, soleil levant, depicts an early morning view of Le Havre....In its color palette, treatment of the sea, and dynamic brushwork, the present work embodies the very essence of this revolutionary artistic movement ignited in Impression, soleil levant.
"While the Normandy coast contained no shortage of dramatic vistas, the town of Étretat was a focal point for artists and tourists alike, renowned for its breathtakingly majestic chalk cliffs, defined by patterned striations visible in the sedimentary rock face and three weathered arch formations that jut out into the sea resembling elephant trunks.... Here, against the backdrop of relentless waves, powerful tides, and salt-filled air, the landscape appears as a work of art sculpted by the processes of Mother Nature itself. The novelist Guy de Maupassant, who was a native of the region and became acquainted with Monet during the latter’s frequent visits to Étretat, described the quality of light as the crucial advantage of the Normandy coastline: 'I have seen so many other painters pass through this little valley, doubtlessly drawn to the quality of light, so unlike anywhere else! The daylight is as different to places just a few leagues away as the wines of the Bordelais. For here it is dazzling without being harsh; everything is bright but not startling and all imbued with a remarkable subtlety' (Guy de Maupassant, "La Vie d’un paysagiste," in Gil Blas, September 28, 1886; translated from French). This dazzling quality of light, in combination with the breathtaking juxtaposition of shore and sea, served as an irresistible inspiration for many artists in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, among them Boudin, Courbet, Loiseau and Monet.
"The present work depicts one of the three rock arches along the coast around Étretat, the Porte d’Aval, as the sun descends beneath the horizon. The contrast between the shimmering water in the shallows and the golden highlights across the sky imbues the canvas with stunning luminosity. Unlike many of Monet’s other canvases of this area, which depict sailboats, leisure seekers, or even commercial activity, Étretat, coucher de soleil is devoid of any sign of human presence. The focus in this work is squarely on the raw beauty of nature: the majesty of the cliffs, the serenity of the sea, the transcendent glow of a setting sun.
"Monet first visited Étretat in 1869, but did not spend extended time there until early 1883, when he stayed in town for three months. Over the next three years, he returned to Étretat on numerous occasions and completed approximately 70 canvases featuring views of the coast.... In many examples from this series, as in the present work, Monet focused on the unique rock formations as the central subject, exploring myriad vantage points to heighten their drama and majesty and capturing the interplay of light upon the cliffs and waves during different seasons, times of day and under changing atmospheric conditions. In its repetition of motif and ingenuity in capturing variations in light, Monet’s body of work from Étretat marks his most extensive series from the first half of his career. It also foreshadows his later, even more extensive serial campaigns of the Breton coast, the cathedral in Rouen, and of course, the nymphéas at Giverny. The present work dates from Monet’s first visit to Étretat, and other paintings completed during this visit are found in the Impressionist collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d'Orsay and the North Carolina Museum of Art.... Prominent examples from Monet's later visits from the series are housed at the Phildelphia Museum of Art, the National Museum of Norway and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon....
"The many hours Monet spent painting along the coast en plein air were not without adventure. The challenging weather conditions at Étretat often made for the most interesting and dramatic compositions. Writing to Alice Hoschédé of one such adventurous day in 1885, Monet recounted: “I was counting on a rewarding session at the Manneporte, but I had an accident… Completely absorbed, I didn’t see an enormous wave that threw me against the cliff, then I tumbled into the foam with all my gear. For a moment I thought I was lost...finally I managed to crawl out, but, my God, in what a state! My boots, heavy socks, and coat were soaked. The palette in my hand had hit me in the face and my beard was covered with blue, yellow, etc… The worst of it was that I lost my canvas, which I got smashed up” (quoted in Monet: Light, Shadow, and Reflection (exhibition catalogue), Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2017, p. 104)."
The lot has an estimate of $1,200,000 to $1,800,000. It sold for $3,020,000 including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article.
Lot 118, "Paysan brulant de mauvaises herbes," by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas laid down on panel, 12 by 15 1/2 inches, 1883
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"His correspondence over this period reflects a growing sense of relief as he rediscovered his vocation: 'I’ve got something back of what I had years ago. That I’m again taking pleasure in windmills, for example, that particularly here in Drenthe I feel much as I did then, at the time when I first began to see the beauty in art” (ibid., letter 394). The move to the countryside meant parting with his mistress, Sian Hoornik, a washerwoman with young children with whom he had lived in The Hague. The romance had strained a number of van Gogh’s personal and professional relationships, and although he was still dogged by anxieties for her well-being and his own financial obligations, life away from the city had a transformative effect on his work. Once again he took pleasure in “finding the outdoor things beautiful, being calm enough to draw them, to paint them... Urban living is always the same," he wrote; for real change, and to become “better, newer, fresher…look for it on the heath' (ibid., letter 394).
"A related sketch for the present lot features in a letter written to Theo in mid-October, in which he describes the weed-burner and writes, “the vastness of the plain and the gathering dusk, and the small fire with the wisp of smoke is the only point of light” (ibid., letter 398; see fig. 1). The effects of evening light fascinated him and he would often walk out at dusk to follow the ploughmen and watch the twilight transform the same figures and fields which had appeared “tedious” and “inhospitable” at midday, into sublime subjects: “The peasants and the women aren’t always interesting, but if one is patient one will nonetheless really see the whole Millet-like quality” (ibid., letter 387; see figs. 2 & 3). By the time he had enrolled at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in 1880 van Gogh’s walls were already tacked with dozens of prints by Jean-François Millet, whose portrayal of peasants influenced the direction he would take.
"The somber tone of Paysan brûlant de mauvaises herbes is characteristic of van Gogh’s early work. The clear influence of the Dutch Old Masters shaped his palette and encouraged his choice of archaic subjects as a valid concern for modern art. Their work represented “a sense of the continuity of Dutch culture and a harking back to a truer, simpler world of shared values as opposed to the fragmented reality of modern, industrialized society. This was a utopian construct superimposed by van Gogh on the tradition as he perceived it. The tradition as he chose to understand it focused on several themes: the edifying portrait; the peasant wedded to the agrarian tradition of the land as a mainstay of the social order; representations of landscape showing mankind in harmony with nature; and a perceived naturalism that expressed the truth” (George S. Keyes, Van Gogh Face to Face, The Portraits (exhibition catalogue), Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, 2000, p. 26).
“Painting with black' as he called it, was a skill that van Gogh had mastered the previous year while experimenting with drawing materials to make a series of lithographs (Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten & Nienke Bakkers, eds., ibid., letter 402, (accessed on September 21, 2019)). Combinations of greasy, jet-black lithographic crayon, pencil and pen and ink made it possible to obtain various shades of black, an effect he worked to develop in oil paint in the peat bogs of Drenthe, where the black earth was 'like soot' and the furrows a “lilac black” (ibid., letter 402; see fig. 3). An account of Max Liebermann’s subtle transitions from slate-grey to brown and yellow-grey tones piqued van Gogh’s interest at this period: “I’ve never seen anything by him, but now that I see nature here I understand perfectly how reasonable it is that he arrives at it” (ibid., letter 395). It is nonetheless remarkable how the relative lack of color in his surroundings did nothing to prevent van Gogh from seeing the hours from dawn to dusk as anything other than a “symphony,” or the muddy landscape as “an exhibition of one hundred masterpieces” (ibid., letter 402).
"Van Gogh was reluctant to leave, such was the 'calm passion for work' that the region inspired (ibid., letter 402). 'Drenthe is so beautiful, it absorbs and fulfills me so utterly that, if I couldn’t stay here forever I would rather not have seen it at all. It’s inexpressibly beautiful' (ibid., letter 405). But financial necessity and an encroaching sense of loneliness prevailed, and on December 4, 1883 he set off for his parent’s house in Nuenen where he would develop the rural themes which he had first encountered in the northeast."
The lot has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $3,140,000.
Lot 131, "Composition (La Danseuse au triangle jaune," by Fernand Leger, oil on canvas, 25 3/4 by 21 3/8 inches, 1930
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"The late 1920s and early 1930s marked Léger’s departure from the rigid, mechanical vocabulary that characterized his earlier Purist work and the embrace of an organic aesthetic. This can be seen in the present work from 1930, which features quasi-abstract forms floating through space, unreliant on traditional forms of perspective. Rejecting classical visual representation, Léger freed his objects from the geometric structure of the painting. He aimed to extract the object from its conventional context and relationships, allowing it to exist for its own sake in a new isolated, revitalized state. As the artist once explained, “In painting, the strongest restraint has been that of subject matter upon composition, imposed by the Italian Renaissance. The effort towards freedom began with the Impressionists and has continued to express itself until our day… The feeling for the object is already in primitive pictures—in works of the high periods of Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman and Gothic art. The moderns are going to develop it, isolate it, and extract every possible result of it” (quoted in 'The New Realism,' in Edward F. Fry, ed., Fernand Léger, Functions of Painting, New York, 1973, p. 109).
"The present work is also an early testament to the powerful influence of Surrealism on the artist’s aesthetic around this time. Although he never aligned himself formally with the Surrealist group, Léger, ever at the forefront of the avant-garde, was drawn to the biomorphic imagery that pervaded the pictures of Miró and Dalí during these years (see fig. 1). The present composition is a fine example of how Léger incorporated the linear flourishes and amoeboid forms of Surrealist iconography into his work."
The lot has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It sold for $572,000.
Lot 438, "Femme de maison," by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, peinture a l'essence on board, 19 1/8 by 13 3/8 inches, 1894
"Painted in 1894, Femme de maison belongs to a period of intensive study for Lautrec, who found his greatest subjects in the demi-monde of performers and prostitutes. The last years of the artist’s life were spent frequenting the maisons closes of Paris, often residing for weeks at a time in the established brothels of the Rue des Moulins, Rue Joubert and Rue d’Ambroise. Despite his aristocratic lineage and privileged upbringing in the south of France, Lautrec found himself drawn to the fringes of popular society after moving to the capital city, and quickly assimilated into the bohemian circles of artists, writers and their muses. Perhaps due to his own physical limitations—traits inherited from the intermarriage of his pedigreed family—Lautrec found solace and understanding in the company of such marginalized characters, and in turn observed his friends and subjects with a keen eye and lack of judgement.
"Lautrec’s sketches and paintings from this time reveal naturalistic and unidealized accounts of working women who are frequently depicted in between engagements, casually leaning on couches, adjusting their clothing, or talking among themselves. These accounts of Parisian brothels and their employees do not aim to tantalize; rather these calm and quotidian scenes lend a sense of normalcy to the women’s profession and reflect a candor which Lautrec found lacking in typical artists’ models....An anonymous portrait, the present work depicts one such femme de maison in a poised and quiet setting. The profile view, often used by Lautrec in his sketches and preliminary studies, here is employed in the service of a fully rendered painting, in effect elevating the standing of his subject by the more formal means of portraiture.
"First recorded in the Baumgarten collection, Femme de maison later belonged to Maurice Joyant, a close personal friend of the artist and major proponent of his work. After Lautrec’s untimely death in 1901, Joyant directed the artist’s estate and helped establish the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in his hometown of Albi."
The lot has a modest estimate of $700,000 to $1,000,000. It sold for $560,000.
Lot 120, "Danseuse a l'eventail," by Edgar Degas, pastel on paper, 20 7/8 by 14 5/8 inches, 1900
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Danseuse à l'éventail depicts a dancer caught unaware in a moment of rest backstage. Her pose recurs in examples in other media, such as in Danseuse habillée au repos, les mains sur les reins, la jambe droite en avant. This sculpture was likely modeled around the same time as the present work, circa 1895-1905 and cast at a later date from the wax original, which is presently in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Of the fourteen casts, four can be found in important museum collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Musée d’Orsay, Paris and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil. The sculpture is a critical example within the artist’s corpus because it is the only work aside from Petite danseuse de quatorze ans to have been modeled in a tutu....Unlike other Degas sculptures, which highlight the artist’s conceptual understanding of space, movement and the human form, this particular model contextualizes the figure within a performance space or backstage environment, much like the present work.
"Degas’ statuettes can truly be seen as three-dimensional displays of his exploration of the human form, complementing his two-dimensional studies on paper. In the present work, Degas experiments with the use of pastel by using the medium to imbue the sheet with all the energy and movement present in the backstage world of these ballet performances. Rendered in vibrant hues of pink, blue, green and yellow, Degas skillfully depicts the vigorous movement of the dancer’s fan while also alluding to the flurry of colorful tutus behind the dancer through the quick, energetic application of pigment in the background.
"Degas’
pastels offer a chance to see his draftsmanship at its finest. His use
of cross-hatching, shading and smudging capture the palpable energy and
attention he dedicated to each work. An exquisite example of Degas’
impressive mature works on paper, indeed Danseuse à l'éventail exudes
the same color and energy present in the backstage world of the ballet,
while illustrating the vital creative connection between the artist’s
two-dimensional and three-dimensional works that served as a defining
feature of his career."
The
lot has an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. It sold for $487,500.
Lot 115, "Paysage," by Edgar Degas, pastel over monotype on paper, 10
1/2 by 13 1/2 inches, 1892
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"The
present work was featured in Degas’ sensational exhibition at the
Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1892—not only his first and only solo show, but
an exhibition that would prove to be a breakthrough for the brand new
process of color printmaking. Perhaps most surprising of all was
the subject matter Degas chose to exhibit: landscapes, a pivot away
from a reputation built on depictions of ballerinas, laundresses and
nudes. In part because Degas publicized himself as the premier painter
of the human figure, his production of landscapes has been largely
overlooked.
"In fact Degas produced landscapes throughout his career in a variety
of media: "It was in the decade of the 1890s, however, that Degas’
diverse encounters with the landscape bore the most spectacular fruit”
(Richard Kendall, op. cit., p. viii). While Degas described
the vistas he portrayed as purely imaginary, Paysage was part
of a suite of color monotypes begun in the Burgundy region in 1890
after a twenty-day carriage trip through the countryside with the
artist’s companion, the recently widowed artist Paul-Albert Bartholomé.
"Speaking specifically about the present work, Richard Kendall explains
that “The crisply applied forms of the monotype have been allowed to
remain visible within the final composition, resembling brush-marks or
sweeps of liquid colour. Where pastel has been applied, it reinforces
or enhances a printed landscape feature, rather than attempting to
change or conceal it. This is particularly evident in Landscape,
where the contours of the original image have been faithfully followed
its towns subtly extended by the pastel strokes" (quoted in ibid.,
p. 190).
"This series of works speaks to the immense influence of Japanese
prints on Degas....Verging on abstraction, the present work is a
harbinger of the Color Field painters which would emerge in the
United States following World War II."
The
lot has an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000. It sold for $337,500.
Lot 430, "Paysage avec
meules, Osny," by Camille Pissarro, oil on canvas, 18 by 21 5/8 inches,
1883
The
catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Paysage avec meules, Osny was purchased by Paul Gauguin, a keen collector of Impressionist painting before he gave up his job as a stockbroker. He was particularly drawn to Pissarro's work and known to have lent three Pissaro paintings to the Impressionist exhibition of 1879. Pissarro became a close friend and mentor, painting with his younger protégé during the summer and providing support when Gauguin wrote to inform him in October 1883 that he had decided to become a professional artist. Pissarro was an encouraging example since he had also given up a career in business to become an artist. Their biographies otherwise read in reverse: Pissarro grew up in the Caribbean and only moved to Paris aged 25, whereas Gauguin famously would leave France in order to explore Martinique and Tahiti, inspired perhaps by his mentor's accounts of an exotic childhood.
"Camille Pissarro was arguably the most complex of all the Impressionists. He was the only artist of that loosely defined group to exhibit at all eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, and he even drew up the provisional charter at the outset, yet the diversity of styles with which he experimented during that time was also perhaps the most wide-ranging. Painted in the same year as his first one-man show, this stunning view of haystacks in late afternoon sun reveals some of the important stylistic shifts that his work underwent in the early 1880s.
"As Christopher Lloyd and Anne Distel note of his work from this period: 'Regarding the compositions, there is less emphasis on recession and spatial depth. The basic elements—foreground, middle distance and background—tend to be flattened, so that the design reads upwards as a series of horizontal bands' (Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903 (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1980, p. 116). The tessellating triangular sections of the present work demonstrate this new departure; the winding road that often leads the viewer’s eye to the vanishing point in Pissarro’s earlier work is absent, and a traditional aerial view or any sense of height is replaced by a modern sense of spatial ambiguity.
"His technique evolved in favor of small, evenly distributed and heavily loaded brushstrokes, anticipating his association with the Neo-Impressionists in the second half of the 1880s. The parallel brushstrokes in the fields and the haystacks of the present work combined with the vibrancy of the palette creates an iridescent effect that is highly characteristic of this period, though it is easy to forget that divisionism was still unchartered territory for many artists of the avant-garde and he was well ahead of his contemporaries in this regard, boldly exploring the individuated dashes of color that created these arresting effects.
"Self-doubts about the direction of his art are movingly recorded in his letters, and in view of the vigorous analysis to which he subjected his work there is little doubt that these effects were deliberately sought. Nor can there be any doubt as to their sensational impact. In 1887 a landscape by Pissarro was temporarily removed from a Georges Petit exhibition on account of someone being offended by its luminosity—testament to just how radical his paintings appeared at the time—and the present glorious view is among the most luminous to appear on the open market. Paysage avec meules, Osny prefigures the celebrated series which Claude Monet painted in 1891 neighboring Giverny, but whereas Monet’s composition is tightly focused, Pissarro painted a more expansive scene, giving the viewer a broad perspective of the terrain beyond...."
The lot has an estimate of $700,000 to $1,000,000. It sold for $836,000.
Lot 472, "Le Pont Corneille, Rouen," by Gustave Loiseau, oil on canvas, 23 3/4 by 28 3/4 inches, 1927
Lot 112, "Pot de fleurs et papiers," by Edouard Vuillard, oil on board, 16 1/2 by 22 3/4 inches, 1904
Lot 215, "La Danse," by Andre Derain, watercolor and pencil on paper, 18 3/8 by 25 inches, 1906
Lot 442, "Le Coquillage rose," by James Ensor, oil on panel, 14 1/8 by 16 1/2 inches, 1914
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"While
he initially included objects traditional to the still-life genre, such
as fruit and vegetables, more esoteric items like fans and chinoiserie,
rare stuffed fish or shells appear with greater frequency in his mature
works. The iridescent glow of the shells in his grandmother’s curiosity
shop caught his imagination as a young boy, and large conches were
often used as the centerpieces of his still lifes.
"Famously reclusive, Ensor remained in Ostend throughout the war and
the present work is one of only a handful paintings which he produced
in 1914. His studio was in the attic of the narrow family house which
had large windows at street level to display the shop’s exotic wares
that hung from transparent threads. “To some extent, the future of
modern painting was determined in that attic” (Paul Haesaerts, Ensor, New York, 1959, p. 50).
"A description of this strange setting was provided by the writer
Stefan Zweig, whose account of a visit in 1914 is recorded by
Volker Weidermann: “Zweig went in. Yes, he was told, her son was
upstairs, why didn’t he just go up. A dark, narrow hallway and stairs
carpeted in red, maliciously smirking masks lining the stairwell. He
passed a tiny kitchen, red-enameled pots on the stove, dripping faucet.
Up on the third floor a man wearing a flat cap was sitting at the piano
playing quietly to himself, apparently oblivious to everything around
him… A round table displayed a large armful of dusty grasses in a vase,
painted, Chinese, acting as the base for a laughing, toothless skull,
wearing a woman’s hat stuck with dried flowers. The man at the piano
kept playing to himself and humming. Stefan Zweig stood for a while as
if paralyzed, then he turned around and ran down the stairs, through
the shell shop and onto the street, in the sun, back into the daylight.
He wanted to get away from here, back to being carefree, have something
to eat, regain his composure” (Volker Weidermann, Ostend, Stefan
Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark, London, 2016, n.p.).
"The
mottled but clearly delineated planes in the present work anticipate
the color combinations of mid-century artists such as David Hockney or
Mark Rothko...."
The
lot has an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. It sold for $162,500.
Lot 114, "La Maison jaune," by Pierre Bonnard, oil on canvas, 29 by 23 5/8 inches, circa 1923
Lot 444, "Femme a la rose," by Pierre Bonnard, oil on paper laid down on canvas, 24 7/8 by 18 7/8 inches, 1908
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Bonnard was aware of what Matisse was doing with color and the Cubists with space, but his genius was to absorb their discoveries on his own terms, finding subjects where these abstract concepts could be treated in a seemingly naturalistic way. 'Faced with the overtly decorative style of Matisse, who had assumed the leadership of the avant-garde, he went in the opposite direction, his art becoming more atmospheric and naturalistic, his settings resolutely French' (Nicholas Watkins, Bonnard, London, 1994, p. 85). Bonnard had followed the footsteps of several contemporaries and made a trip to the South of France in early 1906, and two years later traveled further to Algeria and Tunis, but he did not feel the same need to translate the sensations of his travels into explosive and disruptive color combinations. His restraint almost feels like a conscious decision. 'A sequence of marks which join together and end up forming the object, the fragment over which the eye wanders without a hitch' was how he described painting, a summation which downplays the increasing subtlety of design and arrangement of space which is among the most attractive and revolutionary aspects of his work (quoted in ibid., p. 134).
"Bonnard cast aside traditional notions of perspective, as we see in Femme à la rose where he plays with flattened planes and geometric alignments, years before it became common practice to build a composition so flagrantly around squares, lines and angles. The effect he sought was "to show what one sees when one enters a room all of a sudden," that sense of uncertain depths before one has brought into focus or identified the various details (quoted in Marcel Arland & Jean Leymarie, Bonnard dans sa lumière, Paris, 1978, p. 21).
"Radical in execution, this intimate scene is a classic example of the manner in which Bonnard’s best work feels both traditional and completely modern at the same time. The year after it was painted, Femme à la rose was acquired by the legendary gallerist Heinrich Thannhauser, whose Munich exhibitions included the work of some of the most notable French Post-Impressionists and artists who would later come to define the avant-garde."
The
lot has an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. It sold for $375,000.
Lot 154, "Red Dahlias," by Emil Nolde, watercolor on paper, 9 by 10 7/8 inches
Lot 270, "Self-portrait with hat," by Emil Nolde, watercolor and pencil on paper, 11 by 8 1/2 inches, circa 1910
Lot 236, "Nu," by Constantin Brancusi, gouache and pencil on paper laid down on board, 25 3/8 by 18 3/4 inches, 1926
The catalogue provided the following commentary:
"Although Brancusi worked primarily as a sculptor, the artist completed a limited number of works on paper, many of which he made for his friends or patrons when they visited his studio. According to Brancusi scholar Margit Rowell, this body of work numbers between 150-200, though examples as complete as the present work are rare within this group.
"In
contrast to the process of sculpting in marble or wood, drawing
provided Brancusi with more immediacy of expression and encouraged a
freer exploration of form, yet the change in medium did not deter him
from his primary goal: to strip down detail and focus on line. Dr.
Friedrich Teja Bach, another leading scholar on Brancusi,
explains: “Simplicity is thus the outcome of the artist’s effort to
resolve the complexity of natural forms. But there is more to
resolution than mere elimination: it is also the preservation, even the
generation, of form… Essential form in Brancusi is not reductive but
productive. It is defined not by the precision of geometry but by the
(in every sense) pregnant concision of life” (Constantin Brancusi:
1876-1957 (exhibition catalogue), Musée national d’art moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris & Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia, 1995, p. 23).
"Nu is divided into three
horizontal sections in a softly gradated palette to suggest a sense of
depth. The model’s limbs are outlined with the aid of negative space
where Brancusi has left the ground unworked. The clean lines and
restraint of the present gouache suggest that his works on paper
deserve the same level of critical attention as his work in stone or
metal. As Rowell writes, “In his drawings...Brancusi provides
significant clues as to his vision and his priorities… [His drawings
bear] witness to an approach entirely consistent with his vision of the
world and his approach to form” (ibid., pp. 287-88)."
The
lot has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It failed to sell.
Lot 135, "Etude pour 'Le Reve," by Balthus, oil on canvas, 18 1/4 by 21 3/4 inches, 1954
Lot 396, "L'Avocatpathetique," by Honore Daumier, charcoal, pen and ink, brush and ink and pencil on paper, 8 3/4 by 6 1/8 inches
Lot 368, "Les Deux amies V," by Tamara de Lempicka, oil on canvas, 26 3/4 by 15 inches, circa 1974
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"In pioneering her own distinct style, Lempicka absorbed a variety of elements from the avant-garde movements of her time—the geometric aesthetic and fragmented perspective of Cubism, the vibrant color palette of the Fauves, the proportionality of Neo-Classicism, the dynamic lines of the Futurists, the dream-like spatial logic of Surrealism and the razor-sharp draftsmanship and hyper-realism of the Neue Sachlichkeits in central Europe—blending these styles and influences with her love of the Italian Old Masters to extraordinary effect. As Magdeleine Dayot writes, the paintings are a “curious blend of extreme modernism and classical purity that attracts and surprises, and provokes, perhaps even before conquering completely, a sort of cerebral struggle where these very different tendencies fight with each other until the moment the gaze grasps the great harmony that reigns in these opposites” (quoted in Gioia Mori, Tamara de Lempicka: The Queen of Modern, Milan, 2011, p. 21)."
The lot has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It failed to sell.
Lot 418, "Au commencement de la nuit (Bonjour Monsieur Lam," by Wilfredo Lam, oil on burlap, 29 1/2 by 59 1/4 inches, 1959
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"La Rencontre (The Encounter) is perhaps the most famous composition of 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet. It was exhibited in Paris at the 1855 Exposition Universelle where it was at once a critical flop and a broad public success. Press mockingly referred to the work as Good Morning Mr. Courbet, in reference to the casual and self-referential moment depicted in the work. Roughly one hundred years later, Wifredo Lam painted Au Commencement de la Nuit (At the Beginning of the Night), also known by its nickname: Bonjour Monsieur Lam.
"Like La Rencontre, in which Courbet depicts himself meeting friend and collector Alfred Buyas and his valet, M. Calas, on the road, Au Commencement de la Nuit (Bonjour Monsieur Lam) is also a self-portrait. Painted in 1959, at the height of the artist’s mature period, it represents an exegesis of a critical moment from the artist’s early childhood in which he was awoken in the night by a bat darting through his room in a flash of light. He later recounted: 'Rays of light from the exterior… penetrated every crack, creating shadows, changing the space into a magic lantern and reversing all the images' (Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, Austin, 2002, p. 98). For Lam, this formative incident marked the moment of his understanding of human consciousness and the passage of time. Here, as flora, fauna, and human forms arise entangled in the dark of night before the viewer, the artist heralds the integration of his intricate mystical iconography with symbols of deep personal significance.
"A testament to Lam’s technical mastery, this work executed on burlap exhibits the rich darkness and rhythmic composition characteristic of his mature period. During this period Lam often worked directly on his prepared canvases in charcoal, later reinforcing his compositions in oil but rarely revising them; Max-Pol Fouchet describes this extraordinary draftsmanship as 'heightened plastic decisiveness, a handwriting endowed with clarity and dynamism' (ibid., p. 122) Lam’s crisp, sweeping lines contribute to an overall quality of understated elegance in this mysterious composition, rendered in rich blacks. This flattening of the picture plane and clarity of the image underscores its emotive power, a technique Lam drew partially from the art of Oceanic cultures, which he began to collect eagerly in the 1940s. Here, Lam harnesses the full power of his complex pictorial vocabulary to create an image with powerful psychic presence.
"In Lam's Au Commencement de la Nuit (Bonjour Monsieur Lam), the artist depicts himself within the mythical and fantastic world of his imagery, stalking across the composition on horseback. He seems arrested in motion and, like Courbet, turns bearded head towards the spectator, breaking the wall of the picture plane and inviting the viewer into a world beyond our own. Nestled amongst the snarl of limbs is another figure; the iconic image of a Femme-cheval, a woman-horse, emerges. Further to the right, Lam rises above her as a geometric second head with two prominent horns, eyes wide open and staring up towards his two arms and hands that close the composition on the right side with a protective gesture. A mysterious long shape with ribs or spines crosses the painting in parallel of the creature's body: its presence echoes and accentuates the angular and fleshless qualities of these limber, linear beings.
"This
image of Lam riding the Femme-cheval relates closely to his
study of Santería. In devotional practices, participants become vessels
for and are 'ridden' by the Orisha (god or goddess) summoned,
bridging the barrier between the divine and the mortal. Here, Lam
embodies the Orisha Eleguá, the god of the crossroads, who holds the
keys to the past, present, and future. Where Courbet presents us a
moment in time, Lam presents an encounter with eternity."
The
lot has an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. It sold for $860,000.
Lot 377, "Femme avec un oiseau," by Wilfredo Lam, oil on canvas, 49 by 43 inches, 1949
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Sotheby’s is honored to present an important work from the Collection of Mercedes and Gabriel García Márquez. A Nobel laureate in literature, Garcia Márquez is considered the master of magical realism: fiction in which fantastical events come to pass in otherwise realistic settings, in which the line between the real and the possible is erased. García Márquez’s celebrated novels transport us to complex universes tangled with miracles and nightmares, love and violence, death and resurrection....
"Throughout his life, García Márquez maintained close friendships with some of Latin America’s most revered visual artists, among them Wifredo Lam and fellow Colombians Fernando Botero and Alejandro Obregón. Perhaps it was with the surrealist painting of Wifredo Lam that he felt the closest affinity, as both surrealism and magical realism describe the realm between dreams and reality on the borderline of the possible. Lam also collaborated with the author, illustrating a portfolio of engravings for El último viaje del buque fantasma, a short story published in 1976.
"García Márquez’s enduring influence in Latin American literary circles cannot be overstated. Three decades after the publication of Cien años de soledad, he was still the titan with whom every serious Latin American writer needed to reckon. Ultimately, he forged Latin America’s most contagious and original style. He wrote its most influential and popular books about the motives of tyrants and the endurance of love. And he explained what connects his perennial themes: “You know, old friend, the appetite for power is the result of an incapacity for love.”
"As opposed to Picasso and the surrealists, his European contemporaries who often appropriated elements of African art into the formal innovations of modern art, 'Lam's enduring contribution to world art history was the reclamation of an African identity within mainstream art history.' --Lowery Stokes Sims
"Femme avec un oiseau (1949) portrays the seductive figure of a femme cheval, the avatar of female power largely considered the cornerstone motif in Lam's work. (Lowery Stokes Sims, "Lam's Femme Cheval: Avatar of Beauty," in Lam in North America (exhibition catalogue), Milwaukee, Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, 2007, p. 28.) As a formal archetype, the Femme cheval embodies the Africanized forms, modernist hybridization and anatomical disjuncture first consolidated in The Jungle (1943), Lam's preeminent masterpiece in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Acquired by the Museum in 1945, The Jungle (Fig. 1) anticipates the gradual emergence of the physiognomic character evident in the femme cheval: "helmet heads with prominent noses and Egyptesque prosthetic beards and heads from which a fall of hair flows." (ibid., p. 29) A deeper study within this particular series that compares the individual representations of femme chevals reveals that the shape of their heads vary: the version here is typical of the elongated “trumpet” type with protruding sharp “knives” that sustains an air of semi-ferocity integral to our reading of these figures as the “collective mythical virgin-beast, a timeless symbol of carnality." (Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges, Art of the Fantastic: Latin American Art, 1920-1978 (exhibition catalogue), Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, 1987, n.p.) Above all, the femme cheval represents the devotees of the Afro-Cuban religion Lucumí, said to become the caballo/cheval/horse, “ridden” by the deity or orisha during ritual possession.
"Lam’s artistic evolution was ferocious upon his return to Cuba. "I decided that my painting would never be the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs. I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks." (Wifredo Lam, quoted in Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam, Barcelona & Paris, 1989, pp. 188-189.) By 1942, his approach to painting, composition and imagery was one tasked with a renewed spirit and distinct direction. In re-encountering his native country's lush, natural landscape and reviving his interest in Santería practices, an unprecedented, inventive aesthetic style emerged. Executed in 1949, Femme avec un oiseau is a prime example of Lam’s new visual vocabulary—a masterful expression where “reality and the dream world become confused.” (Elizabeth T. Goizueta, “Wifredo Lam’s Poetic Imagination and the Spanish Baroque,” in Wifredo Lam: Imagining New Worlds (exhibition catalogue), Boston, McMullen Museum of Art, 2014, p. 16)
"In the present work, Lam presents us with a maturely stylized femme-cheval, a solitary gentle being in a portrait-like format lovingly engaged with the figure of a young bird which she tenderly holds in her hand. Lam’s isolation of the figure itself, void of a recognizable background—allows for an unobtrusive and personal interaction with the viewer. A seemingly maternal subject, Lam renders the painting as both a seductive confrontation and a mysterious apparition. Set in an empty, hazy space he utilizes delicate, pastel tones of grays, blues, and tints of lavender that create a dream-like revelation and recession by this double-faced, hybrid figure.
"In the late 1940s, Lam had shifted from the colorful palette of his 1942-45 paintings to a more limited range of blacks, browns and beiges, and as his palette changed so did his way of dealing with the spatial organization of his figures. His compositions of 1942-45 are characterized by complex interactions between the figural elements and their environments; they intrude into each other’s forms and space. By contrast, the post-1946 works show a flattening of the shapes into silhouettes set against a neutral background. The variations of form and design become seemingly endless throughout Lam’s investigation of this character, with no less than 30 representations of the hybrid female-horse character dominating the paintings from 1950.
By the end of 1949, Wifredo Lam’s artistic might had advanced throughout Europe and the Americas; he was at this point an artistic tour-de-force within the art establishment: he was preparing his fifth solo exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery, and his works were regularly featured in group and solo exhibitions organized by Galerie Maeght, Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Art London, and Sidney Janis Gallery. Almost a decade before, in 1938, Wifredo Lam arrived in Paris. During his tenure there, he studied with Picasso and met leading Surrealist poets and writers like André Bréton. Early exposure to these creatives resulted in outstanding collaborations to the twentieth-century poetic and artistic canon. In 1976, Lam conceived a series of twelve lithographs to accompany the short story El ultimo viaje del buque fantasma (The Last Journey of the Ghost Ship) by Gabriel García Márquez. Lam deeply admired his poet contemporaries and commented 'I have never created pictures in terms of a symbolic tradition, but always on the basis of a poetic excitation. I believe in Poetry. For me it is the great conquest of mankind.' (ibid., p. 17)."
The lot has an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000. It sold for $1,580,000.
Lot 156, "Arlequin a la clarinette," by Jacques Lipchitz, bronze, 28 1/2 inches high, 1919, numbered 7/7
Lot 156 is a fine bronze by Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) entitled "Arlequin a la clarinette." It is 28 1/2 inches high and was conceived in 1919 and is numbered 7/7
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"Conceived ten years after Lipchitz’s arrival in Paris, Arlequin à la clarinette exemplifies
his exploration of Cubism in a three-dimensional medium and the
singular success the artist had in synthesizing the revolutionary
artistic movement in sculptural form. Born in Lithuania, the young
Lipchitz moved to Paris in 1909 to receive a traditional and highly
academic artistic education at the École des Beaux-Arts and the
Académie Julian. An encounter with Picasso, however, persuaded Lipchitz
to abandon the classical representation of human form. In 1916,
Lipchitz signed a contract with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who also
represented Picasso, Braque, Gris and Rivera. This placed him in the
pantheon of 'true Cubists' and at the forefront of Cubist sculpture.
Rosenberg arranged to pay Lipchitz three hundred francs a month and
cover his expenses in exchange for his sculptural production. For the
first time in his life, the artist had some sense of financial
security; he was at liberty to work in stone and cast in bronze as well.
"The artist’s interest in the stock characters of the Commedia
dell’arte reflected the trends of the early avant-garde in Paris.
Cézanne invoked the Pierrot in important paintings of the late 1880s
while both characters appear throughout Picasso's
oeuvre, especially his masterworks of the Blue Period. As
Lipchitz himself described: 'We may have been attracted to them
originally because of their gay traditional costumes, involving many
different colored areas' (Jacques Lipchitz, My Life in Sculpture,
New York, 1972, p. 58). Like many other artists during and immediately
following World War I, Lipchitz was thinking in terms of a classicizing
principle, the rappel à l’ordre. Among others, Jean Cocteau had
influentially advocated a 'return' during these years to the
sculpturally solid forms found in classical art. The inspiration,
Lipchitz maintained, came from eighteenth-century painting, and in
particular that of Watteau whose celebrated painting of a Pierrot
belongs to the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
"The works that Lipchitz conceived during this period of intense
creativity were the result of his wrestling with the problem of
deconstructing form using a medium that was inherently solid. With
their geometricized bodies twisting and turning in space, the present
work and its companion sculptures exemplify the complexity of his task.
His faceting of the planar elements in Arlequin à la clarinette is
both highly technical and aesthetically nuanced. Yet the fragmented
forms also build up the structure of the figure in a manner that is
unambiguous, with the intricate staging of positive and negative shapes
allowing for a remarkable play of light. We can identify the subject as
a harlequin due to his distinctive costume, in particular the
wide-rimmed collar that frames his face, his jaunty hat and the buttons
that run diagonally down his bust."
The lot has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. It sold for $680,000.
Lot 209, "Cocoteros," by Armando Reveron, oil and tempera on canvas, 17 by 22 inches, circa 1941
Lot 376, "L'Ecole Buissonniere (haciendo novillos)," by Remedios Varo, oil on masonite, 15 3/4 by 11 3/4 inches, 1962
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"The remarkable creativity evidenced in the work of Remedios Varo stands as some of the most significant contributions to the story of Surrealism. The complex matrix of influences that serve as the foundational architecture and iconography for her paintings—from medieval history and Greek mythology to scientific reason and alchemy, nature, and pagan practices—is uniquely her own. While Varo’s reality is abundant with fantasia, she presents her fantastic pictorial universe within the sobering realities of her past. The outpouring of works she produced during the 'last ten years of her life presents a coherent study of her preoccupations in those years: as an émigré uprooted and exiled from her homeland of Spain, she embarked on a pilgrimage, both psychological and spiritual, to establish deeper, more reliable roots and to seek control by creating a world of her own design.” (Janet A. Kaplan, Unexpected Journeys, The Art and Life of Remedios Varo,” New York, 1988, p. 147)
"Executed
in 1962, L’École buissonnière
(hacienda novillos) is an essential example of Varo’s
complex visual lexicon. Grounding the extraordinary into the ordinary,
she invites viewers into a world within the context of daily
experience, filling her paintings with self-referential characters who
are abstracted, metaphoric, ironic. “Placed in a variety of
situations—some related to her life experience, others purely
invented—they become symbolic equivalents of the artist herself.”
(ibid, p. 147) Varo had a strict and traditional Catholic upbringing,
receiving her education in a convent school run by strict nuns in
Madrid. Unsatisfied by this world of routine and religious convention,
the young Varo sought out acts of rebellion, indulging her fascination
with the occult by secretly writing to a Hindu yogi and collecting
magic plants. Her interest in the fanciful was further spurred by trips
to the Prado Museum with her father, where she would obsess over the
entrancing painting of Hieronymous Bosch....At first awed by his
macabre sense of humor, she later took careful note of the devices the
Flemish master used to create a world so absurd yet to strangely
plausible. (ibid, p. 193) Later on as a young, unmarried woman in 1920s
Spain, she found herself restricted by the conservative social codes of
Spanish society of the time. As a consequence, she turned her physical
restlessness toward spiritual pursuits, studying mystic disciplines and
reading metaphysical texts such as the writings of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D.
Ouspensky and Helena Blavastky among others. Eventually, while a
student at Madrid’s prestigious Academia de San Fernando, the wave of
the Surrealist movement from France was beginning to seep into the
intellectual and artistic rhythms of Spain. Varo was immediately
allured by the Surrealist ethos of the omnipotence of the dream.
Surrealism for her offered the ultimate physical escape, a bohemian
lifestyle of adventure she longed for, eventually marrying the
surrealist poet Benjamin Péret moving to Paris and then settleing in
Mexico City.
"L’École buissonnière (haciendo
novillos) embodies Varo’s lifelong pursuit for freedom and
ascension to a world of special, divine knowledge. Literally
translating to “school in the bush”, and colloquially as “playing
hooky”, Varo presents us with a youth who has snuck away to the forest
in pursuit of accessing the secret connections between the human and
otherworldly. Creating a scene of extraordinary subtlety, Varo utilizes
elements of the natural world to harken cultural traditions of
initiatory ceremonies to mark a child’s transition to adulthood.
Specifically here she likely refers to those of the indigenous tribes
of the Northwest Coast of British Columbia intensely studied by fellow
Surrealist émigrés Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Kurt Seligmann,
that begin with the separation of children from their families and
enter the sacred forest where candidates are instructed in the secrets
of their tribe. As is commonplace in her oeuvre, Varo sets
this scene in a quiet, undisturbed place, in this instance a secluded
enclave of the forest—a location often used in occult ceremonies, and
here by Varo as an active protagonist for the ceremonial practice to
come. The child encounters a looming monumental tower, where an owl,
fox and raven await as otherworldly messengers and guides; composing a
striking resemblance to Bosch’s The Tree has Ears and the Field
has Eyes (executed circa 1500)....The quest of the child
suddenly becomes a journey of mystical revelation and spiritual awe."
The
lot has an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000. It sold for $1,460,000.
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