Lot 8 was an "Odalisque couchee aus magnolias" by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), a 1923 oil on canvas that measures 23 3/4 by 31 7/8 inches.

The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:

"Henri Matisse was the modernist heir par excellence to the Orientalist tradition in French art that Ingres and Delacroix established during the 19th century. Among the many lovely, sensual nudes that Matisse painted in Nice during the 1920s, Odalisque couchée aux magnolias may well mark the superlative classical moment in the artist’s treatment of this theme. This painting stands out in its consummate synthesis of the essential pictorial qualities that Matisse was exploring at this time and sought to instill in his art. The variety of visual delights, deriving from the attractive model, her costume and ambient décor, the balance and poise of the composition, the subtlety and resonance of the color harmonies all have been most impressively conceived and integrated.

"The artist’s evocation of a languorous, dreamy mood is irresistibly absorbing, all the more effective for the manner in which he has imparted to the odalisque and her environment a solid, palpable, and vital presence. Matisse rarely cared to draw attention to the finesse of his brushwork, but he appears to have been especially pleased to showcase the skill of his painterly touch in Odalisque couchée aux magnolias - the effects he educed are a joy in themselves. His overall conception is symphonic, clearly and delectably orchestrated. All parts contribute seamlessly, effortlessly, to a concerted summation, suffused throughout with the wondrous aura of a glowing inner light.

"There are other odalisques from this period whose partial or full nudity is more conspicuous and suggestive, but none in which the girl’s pose is as alluring as seen here, yet in the delicate and tasteful manner of which Matisse had become a master. 'What might have been explicit eroticism in the image,' Alfred H. Barr, Jr. wrote of Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, “seems diffused into a luxurious, generalized sensuality, intimate yet objective....” Even the model’s expression has been carefully and individually characterized, as if also to appeal warmly and directly to the viewer. While indulging in feelings of self-contentment and engaged in reverie, the odalisque casts her gaze toward the artist, whose off-picture role as painter/observer is happily transferred to the viewer, allowing the latter, initially a fascinated voyeur, to enter this scene.

"Matisse would have given much of the credit to the young woman who served as his model, his favorite during this period, whom he most often employed - Henriette Darricarrère. She worked with the artist from 1920 to 1927. 'During her seven years of modeling, Henriette excelled at role-playing and had a theatrical presence that fueled the evolution of Matisse's art,' Jack Cowart has written. 'She adopted the subject roles easily and could express the moods and atmosphere of Matisse's settings without losing her own presence or her own strong appearance. Her distinctive physical features - a sculpturesque body and a finely detailed face with a beautiful profile - are evident in many of the artist's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper....” Hilary Spurling called Henriette 'a living sculpture. The finely modeled planes of her torso and limbs caught the light like [Matisse's] clay figures… Her body articulated itself like a cat’s into compact rounded volumes - breast, belly, haunch, hip, calf, knee....”

"Odalisque couchée aux magnolias was painted in Nice during 1923; Matisse sent it to the Salon d’Automne in November. The artist spent the first six months of the year in Nice, before returning to his family residence in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, for the summer. The magnolia blossoms that lend their name to this painting were apparently pinned to the screen behind the odalisque, suggesting that Matisse painted the canvas during the late spring or early summer. His dealers Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune purchased the painting on 17 December 1923, the day following the closing of the Salon, reserving it for his personal collection....

"On the last day of 1917, a mutual friend arranged for Matisse to visit Pierre-Auguste Renoir at his home in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Although Renoir had been suffering from crippling arthritis for many years, he still painted every day except Sunday. Matisse admired the old painter’s fortitude and unshakable dedication to his art. Matisse brought some of his recent paintings for the master’s critique on a second visit in January 1918. They became good friends; Matisse returned twice again later in the year, and called on Renoir frequently during early 1919 when the old painter lay ailing and near death. Matisse would never forget Renoir’s words: “The pain passes, Matisse, but the beauty remains....”

"Renoir’s example as both man and artist inspired Matisse to move away from the somber austerity and the 'radical invention' of his wartime Paris production. 'Renoir gave him the impetus to make new contact with his own sensuality,' Jack Flam wrote....Contact with Renoir’s late work set the stage for the emergence of the Orientalist odalisque in Matisse's painting of the 1920s. Renoir’s example also encouraged Matisse to think of color in terms of light, the all-pervasive, limpid luminosity that reflected off the Mediterranean. The late nudes of Renoir revealed to Matisse how it was possible to infuse volume with light, and to express this effect with warm color, without recourse to shadow and other conventional methods of modeling the figure. Matisse loosened up his brushwork to work in a breezier, more improvised manner.

“'From 1904 to 1916 Matisse elaborated an architectonics of color, whereas from 1917 to 1930 he moves to an architectonics of light,' Dominique Fourcade observed. 'In the end, all of Matisse's research during these first years in Nice arrives at a new unity of the surface: human beings and objects are not treated differently than floors or walls on the painting's surface...He resolves the subject-background distinction in terms of space, and resolves the problem of space in terms of light. Each parcel of the painting's surface is a site of color...and each site of color becomes a source of light that, combined with all other sources of light, creates a wholeness of light and space...'

"Complementing his evolving conception of light and space, Matisse began to actively pursue in Odalisque couchée aux magnolias a more sculptural approach in his painting, to meet 'a new need for concentration and construction,' as Isabelle Monod-Fontaine described his effort....

"In his deliberate push toward 'concentration and construction,' Matisse strove to create in Odalisque couchée aux magnolias a figure that projects a more substantial physical presence than in any other picture he had done in Nice prior to this time. The contours are firmer; there is, moreover, the sense of greater depth and architectural solidity within the entirety of the composition. Matisse has here dispensed with the translucent paint film and airy facture that had been typical of his early Renoir-inspired Nice figure paintings, even those done earlier in 1923. Here he applied his paint more thickly, unstinting on finish, lending greater weight to the elements in his composition.

"The example Matisse had taken from Renoir was at this stage working in conjunction with further consideration of Cézanne. As John Elderfield has stated,'“It was only to be expected, perhaps, that he should turn to Cézanne as he returned to sculptural form.... Matisse had always fallen back on Cézanne for insight and instruction. “If you only knew the moral strength, the encouragement that his remarkable example gave me all my life!” Matisse declared. “In moments of doubt, when I was still searching for myself, frightened sometimes by my discoveries, I thought: ‘If Cézanne is right, I am right.’ Because I knew that Cézanne made no mistakes. There are, you see, constructional laws in the work of Cézanne which are useful to a painter. He had, among his greatest virtues, the merit of wanting the tones to be forces...'

"Indeed, the Cézannian stimulus may be observed in Odalisque couchée aux magnolias most outwardly in the cool, deep blue and green tonality of the interior setting, which perfectly sets off the warm flesh tones of the model and the still-life of fruit in the foreground corner. Renoir’s light had been soft, golden, as if appearing to emanate from within, possessing the ability to open up form. Cézanne’s light, on the other hand, was hard, crystalline and external, essential properties for the purpose of defining form. Matisse was in effect mingling the benefits of both approaches when he painted Odalisque couchée aux magnolias, forging his own treatment of the figure in space, evoking the softness of flesh and fabric within a convincingly solid and supportive spatial environment....

The lot has an estimate on request. It sold for $80,750,000, a record for the artist.

"Dismayed and perplexed, the critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed their efforts 'fauve,', as if in the primal fury of their inspiration these two artists, together with some like-minded comrades, had painted like wild beasts. Matisse disliked the term, but by 1907, when he showed this Paysage de Collioure at the Salon d’Automne, this characterization had stuck and gained common currency. 'The Fauves!' - Vauxcelles again declared in his latest review - 'M. Matisse, chief fauve, M. Derain, sub-chief fauve,' then naming several followers and apparent fellow travelers....Matisse, then in his late thirties, had become famous, even notorious, as the pre-eminent painter in Paris, who stood at the cutting edge of a new avant-garde.

"In May 1906, following a two-week stay in Algeria, his first experience of North Africa, Matisse returned to Collioure as his base of operations, remaining in the Pyrenées-Orientales - apart from a couple of trips back to Paris, and a month in Italy with Leo and Gertrude Stein during the summer of 1907 - until he moved back to the capital in early September 1907. From the outset of his second sojourn in Collioure, Matisse was already evolving in new directions. The expressive potential of color remained his primary interest; he had begun working, moreover, toward a formal re-organization of the pictorial surface, in conjunction with a changing emphasis in his choice of subjects.

"Painting the land- and seascape in the dazzling light of the South had been Matisse’s driving passion during the initial season in Collioure. The figure became the artist’s priority during his subsequent stay. Matisse had once again taken up sculpture; Aristide Maillol, who lived in Banyuls-sur-Mer, a few stops distant on the coastal railway, provided technical and critical advice. In Matisse’s new paintings, the nude, singly or in groups, became the central element in pastoral, idyllic settings, often in the context of a classical, allegorical theme. He followed Le bonheur de vivre, painted in Paris during the autumn and winter, 1905-1906, with the two versions of Le Luxe and the study for La Musique, which date from the spring and summer of 1907.

"The present Paysage de Collioure has been ascribed to 1906 or 1907, that is, within the span of Matisse’s second sojourn in his southern retreat, having been painted among a series of related landscapes during the summer, early fall, or winter of 1906, or certainly by the spring of 1907. The later date appears less likely, however, as Matisse had begun at that time to experiment with a more thinly painted, abstractly stylized representation of the landscape, which culminated in the Gelman Collection's Vue de Collioure, dating from that summer, or perhaps completed after his return to Paris in September 1907.

"While the large figure compositions took precedence in the studio, Matisse was reluctant to forego the exhilaration he typically enjoyed while working outdoors, taking in that overwhelming effusion of light, while also absorbing the smells of earth, flora, sea, and sky, feeling the frisson of being connected, in the most direct way possible, to the here and now of his surroundings. This practice allowed Matisse, as Jack Flam stated, to 'express the pantheistic vitality that he felt in nature....' The artist’s visit to Algeria in May 1906 had been momentous and unforgettable, having opened wide all his senses. Painting in this manner afforded the artist his most authentic contact with the primacy of his sensations - the very essence of being fauve.

"The landscape around Collioure, though by now familiar territory for Matisse, was still riveting in its primitive, elemental aspect. The site from which Matisse chose to view the town in the present painting was one he favored in other plein air canvases of 1906-1907 - he set up his easel on the Roca-Alta d’Ambeille overlooking the town, finding shelter from the sun among the trees in le bois d’Ernest Py. The nearest houses lay just beyond the transecting diagonal of the coastal railway tracks. As the focal point in this composition, Matisse sighted on the landmark clock tower, once a lighthouse, that adjoins the portside Église Notre-Dame-des-Anges, highlighted against the dark blue of the Mediterranean.

"This scene lent itself to the full range of hues on Matisse’s palette, from the sun-scorched earth tones of red, ochre, and yellow, to varied shades of cool and darker greens in the foliage, heightened in places with blue and white tints, interspersed with patches of blanched violet. Matisse was careful to denote the pale cerulean tone of blue along the horizon with the sea, in contrast to the darker cobalt expanse of the upper sky. Unlike the Impressionists, both first generation and Neo-, who had banished black from their paint boxes, Matisse made good use of this color that absorbs all light, for picking out scattered linear features in the landscape, and as a darkening agent with other hues.

"Characteristic of Fauve facture are the slivers and patches of canvas that Matisse left untouched and bare, as passage between adjacent tones. The variety of marks throughout the composition, from the smallest spots to the larger patchwork of colors, were applied, blended, and scrubbed directly on the canvas. Matisse, in effect, drew this painting with his brush - color and line were united as form. Unlike the larger figure compositions of this period, worked and 'layered' during multiple sessions, the composition of this quintessentially Fauve canvas proceeded quickly; the result was rough, but on its own terms whole, harmonious, and complete - the picture would neither require, nor admit, retouching in any way....

"In pursuing a freer and looser handling of his colors, Matisse discarded the Neo-Impressionist conception and practice he had derived from Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, which laid the groundwork for his Fauve summer of 1905. The small blocks of pink paint at the upper left edge are a peripheral vestige of Neo-Impressionist divisionism. The influence of Signac and Cross had encouraged Matisse to analyze and employ color both as a means and an end in itself. Once freed from the technical discipline of Neo-Impressionism, Matisse was able to bend color to his own will and personal need for expression - 'I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation.'

"Vauxcelles and other critics viewed Fauvism as sheer anarchy in art, making out the professorial Matisse as if he were some mad terrorist on the loose in the Parisian art world. During 1906-1907, Matisse was actually seeking to foster, as he wrote, “a truer, more essential character” in his art, 'to obtain greater stability...' The present Paysage de Collioure, its Fauve credentials notwithstanding, reflects this tendency as well. The resolution of these issues, Matisse realized, lie in the work of Paul Cézanne. He never met the master of Aix, but had been aware and appreciative of the latter’s work since the late 1890s, well before many of his colleagues. He studied Cézanne’s paintings whenever they appeared in the progressive salons, and at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery, where he purchased a middle-period Trois baigneuses in 1899...

"Cézanne’s influence on Matisse’s Paysage de Collioure is most outwardly apparent in the framing foliage in the upper part of the composition, a classical device that Cézanne often employed in his mature landscapes. More significantly, however, Matisse took from Cézanne lessons that guided the fundamental organization of space in this picture, deployed in planes of land, sea, and sky. In the locale of Collioure itself, three discernible bands represent the foreground, the middle ground up to the railway, and beyond that, the distance to the tower and the high horizon line where sea meets sky. The downhill illusion of this deep space is vertical and flat, as prescribed in modernist practice. Unlike Cézanne, however, whose more solidly constructed, naturalistic treatment of pictorial motifs is unfailingly legible, Matisse’s approach to composition takes on a more abstract, patterned quality, in which no one element stands out among the many others; all are subsumed within the larger whole....

"Matisse chose to exhibit this Paysage de Collioure, together with another landscape study, among his seven entries to the 1907 Salon d’Automne. Both paintings...were possibly a year or more old, whereas his major contributions to the October exhibition were painted only a few months previously, and represented his most recent ideas on subject, form, and style: La Musique (esquisse) and the first version of Le Luxe. Matisse perhaps intended to contrast his latest work with examples showing their Fauve origins, tracing the line of his development since the revolutionary summer of 1905. The occasion of the Cézanne memorial tribute, comprising 56 paintings, likely inspired Matisse to include examples of his own work that would honor the late master of Aix. Matisse sought to demonstrate that Fauvism had stemmed as much from the constructive post-Impressionism of Cézanne - a painter newly recognized to have been a guiding pioneer in the modernist adventure - as it had proceeded from the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat, Signac and Cross.

"Michael and Sarah Stein, brother and sister-in-law to Leo and Gertrude, likely purchased Paysage de Collioure during the 1907 Salon d'Automne; the painting is visible in a photograph of their dining room taken in late 1907 or early 1908.  They also acquired Le Luxe I.  Sarah became one of ten students when Matisse opened his Paris academy in January 1908.  The ususual German listing in the provenance occured when Paysage de Collioure was stranded in a Berlin exhibition at the beginning of the First World War; the dealer Franz Gurlitt confiscated the painting and fictiously 'sold' it to himself when America declared war on Germany in 1917.  The German painting Hans Purrmann, who studied at the Academie Matisse and was a close friend of Sarah Stein, later assisted in restoring the painting to its rightful owners.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, notified the Rockefellers in 1962 that Paysage à Collioure was available for sale at Eugene V. Thaw’s The New Gallery. The collectors acquired the painting, and began a lasting relationship with Mr. Thaw.

The work has been widely published and exhibited.

It has an estimate of $6,000,000 to $9,000,000.  It sold for $6,500,000.

"During the last two decades of his career, Monet devoted himself single-mindedly to painting the celebrated water-lily pond that he had designed and cultivated at his home in rural Giverny. In one extraordinary canvas after another, he captured the constantly shifting relationships among water, reflections, atmosphere, and light that transformed the pond’s surface with each passing moment. While these now-iconic paintings affirmed Monet’s long-held belief in the primacy of vision and experience, they did so in a pictorial language that was utterly novel and transformative even by the standards of the new century. The earlier paintings in the series - more delicate, ethereal, and restrained - met with immediate acclaim when Monet exhibited them in 1909. The Nymphéas canvases from 1914 onward, in contrast, were bigger, bolder, and much more personal - the very antithesis of the 'call to order' that gripped the avant-garde during and after the First World War. They emerged as authoritative and visionary only two decades after Monet’s death, as American Abstract Expressionism triumphed on the international art scene.

"The culmination of the water-lily series and the most ambitious undertaking of Monet’s career was the Grandes décorations, an ensemble of 22 mural-sized canvases that the artist completed just months before his death and donated to the French state. Although he had considered a decorative program of this sort as early as 1897, he did not actually embark on it until 1914, long after the lily pond at Giverny had become almost the exclusive subject of his art. The present Nymphéas - measuring more than five feet on a side - dates to his inaugural phase of work on this project, in which he tested out new pictorial ideas and visual effects for the Grandes décorations on a scale that he had never before attempted. At once exploratory and definitive, this brilliantly colored and vigorously brushed painting is one of some sixty magnificently varied canvases that Monet painted in a burst of untrammeled creativity between 1914 and 1917, as Europe plunged ever more deeply into the chaos of war.

The story of Monet’s water garden begins in 1883, when the artist and his family settled at Giverny, a tiny rural hamlet some forty miles northwest of Paris at the confluence of the Seine and the Epte. Monet found a large house to rent there on two acres of land; when the property came up for sale in 1890, he bought it at the asking price, 'certain of never finding a better situation or more beautiful countryside,' as he wrote to Durand-Ruel....A dedicated gardener all his life, Monet’s first priority upon purchasing the estate was to replace the vegetable plots in front of the house with flower beds. Three years later, he acquired an adjacent piece of land beside the river Ru and successfully applied to the local government for permission divert the tributary and dig a pond.

"Although Monet created the water garden in part to fulfill his passion for horticulture, he also intended it as a source of artistic inspiration. In his petition to the authorities, Monet specified that the pond would serve 'for the pleasure of the eyes and also for the purpose of having subjects to paint'....The artist did not begin work on his Nymphéas series immediately, however. 'It took me some time to understand my water lilies,' he recalled. 'A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then all at once, I had the revelation - how wonderful my pond was - and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment....”

"Eschewing traditional perspective, he lowered his gaze to the surface of the pond, yielding a dazzling and radically destabilized vision of shifting, disintegrating forms; the world beyond the plane of the water exists only as the most ephemeral reflections. 'The water-flowers themselves are far from being the whole scene,' Monet explained. 'Really, they are just the accompaniment. The essence of the motif is the mirror of water, whose appearance alters at every moment. So many factors, undetectable to the uninitiated eye, transform the coloring and distort the planes....'

"When these pictures were exhibited in May 1909, critics marveled at how novel and nearly abstract they appeared, even by comparison with Picasso and Braque’s latest Cubist experiments. 'His vision increasingly is simplifying itself, limiting itself to the minimum of tangible realities in order to amplify, to magnify the impression of the imponderable,' the critic Jean Morgan exulted....

"Monet could not have hoped for a better response. Yet following the close of the exhibition, there followed a period of nearly five years in which the artist - exhausted from the intense work leading up to the show, and then suffering from a sequence of personal tragedies - barely picked up his brushes. His wife Alice and his elder son Jean both took ill and died during this time, and Monet learned that he had a cataract in one eye that threatened his vision. Less grave but still distressing, flooding of the Seine and Epte caused substantial damage to his cherished gardens....

"It was not until spring 1914 that Monet finally emerged from his despair. 'I have thrown myself back into work,' he wrote to Durand-Ruel in June, 'and when I do that, I do it seriously, so much so that I am getting up at four a.m. and am grinding away all day long....'

"Monet was 73 years old by this time, well beyond the life expectancy for men of his generation. The mere fact that he resumed work on the Nymphéas series with such vigor is extraordinary. Rather than simply retreading his previous success, moreover, he set himself a wholly new challenge. 'It was not just his personal travails that drove him back to the studio, but a burning desire to do something that would move beyond his early Nymphéas,' Paul Tucker has proposed. 'In the first decade of the century, their beauty and inventiveness might have been an apt summation of his life’s efforts and an appropriate affirmation of Impressionism’s relevance in the face of serious challenges from Fauvism and Cubism. But the second decade called for something more formidable, because everyone knew that a cataclysmic conflict was imminent in Europe....'

A radical change in handling accompanied this shift in scale. In contrast to the relatively restrained brushwork of the earlier Nymphéas, Monet painted the new canvases with loose, expressive strokes of pigment, intentionally sacrificing conventional finish to create an impression of unrestrained vigor and urgency. In the present painting, aggressive vertical striations represent the reflection of a weeping willow on the opposite bank of the pond, providing a bold counterpoint to the horizontal drift of the lily pads. The lily pads that cluster at the upper right seem to reach out in vain for their scattered mates along the left edge of the canvas, the dense skeins of reflected foliage effectively blocking the way. The diminishing scale of the lilies suggests recession into depth, while the cascading eddies of foliage insistently assert the flatness of the canvas.

"The wartime compositions also tend to be much more daring in their color schemes and compositions. Here, the lily pads are rendered in brilliant shades of blue and violet, suggestive of a twilit sky, which contrast with the shadowy green depths of the reflected willows. At the bottom right, the willow fronds give way and the pond seems to breathe free, mirroring the deep blue tones of the sky above. The lily pads take flight above this reflection of the open air, lifting toward the top edge of the canvas, the blossoms themselves like bursts of white light. 'Monet often made these paintings sites of contention, pitting order against balance, and forcing forms and reflections into spaces that might otherwise be lulling and seductive,' Tucker has written. 'That those tensions inform many of these pictures makes perfect sense, as Monet was painfully aware that his new language was the urgent product of a new historical moment, one fraught with unprecedented anxiety....'

"The sheer beauty of Monet’s aquatic paradise also served the artist as a balm during traumatic times. 'I mix and use a great deal of color,' he told one of the Bernheim-Jeune brothers. 'It occupies me enough so that I don’t have to think too much about this terrible, hideous war....' By January 1915, he was feeling confident enough in his new Nymphéas to invite Raymond Koechlin, the former head of the Société des Amis du Louvre and a formidable figure in Parisian art circles, to see them at Giverny. That summer, he began construction on a huge studio specifically designed to accommodate the Grandes décorations. He occupied the building in late October and began work on the actual murals at that time. By November 1917, he considered the panels sufficiently advanced that he permitted Durand-Ruel to come to Giverny and photograph them in progress.

"The present canvas and the other large Nymphéas from 1914-1917, with their range of brilliantly executed, experimental effects, provided Monet with ongoing inspiration throughout the process of painting the 22 murals. He did not exhibit any of these compositions during his lifetime and he sold only one, preferring instead to keep them close at hand in his studio as he worked; they remained with Monet’s family, largely unknown, for roughly more than a quarter-century after his death in December 1926 and the installation of the Grandes décorations at the Orangerie the next year. It was only after the Second World War that contemporary audiences, schooled in Abstract Expressionism, came to recognize the greatly daring poetry of these huge, valedictory paintings....

"The most influential, highly publicized purchase of a late Nymphéas came in 1955, when Alfred H. Barr, Jr. acquired one directly from Michel Monet for The Museum of Modern Art in New York....A few months later, the Parisian dealer Katia Granoff selected a cache of late works from Monet’s studio at Giverny, some thirty of which she exhibited at her gallery in 1956. On Barr’s recommendation, Peggy and David Rockefeller visited Granoff and purchased the present painting. 'One, which was almost certainly painted in the late afternoon and in which the water is a dark purple and the lilies stand out a glowing white, we bought immediately,' David Rockefeller recalled. They added a second Nymphéas to their collection a few weeks later and a third in 1961....“All three hang in the stairwell at Hudson Pines, where we enjoy them every time we go up or down the stairs....'"

"The artist had moved to Vétheuil, a rural enclave about sixty kilometers northwest of Paris, in August of the previous year, at the age of 37. He had several good reasons for re-locating from bustling suburban Argenteuil, where he had lived and worked since the Franco-Prussian War. Cost of living was paramount. His income in 1879 was just half of what it had been earlier in the decade, yet his commitments were far greater - his wife Camille and two sons of his own to support, plus Alice Hoschedé and her six children, who moved in with them at Vétheuil while her husband, an erstwhile Impressionist collector, tended to his bankrupt textile business in Paris. Monet was also seeking a more peaceful environment for Camille, who had fallen seriously ill after the birth of Michel in March 1878. Finally, the appeal of Argenteuil had begun to wither for the artist, as the encroachments of modernity - new factories, increased rail service, a burgeoning tourist industry - disrupted its country calm.

"Compared to Argenteuil, Vétheuil was a sleepy agrarian hamlet, far from the Parisian sprawl -  'a ravishing spot from which I should be able to extract some things that aren’t bad,' Monet wrote shortly after his arrival. The population numbered only six hundred inhabitants, less than one-tenth that of Argenteuil; there was minimal industry and neither a train station nor a bridge across the Seine. The village was even shielded from the commercial barge traffic that plied the river, which stayed to the Lavacourt side of the narrow islands that here divide the waterway in two.

"The three years that Monet spent in these idyllic environs would prove to be a decisive moment of artistic reassessment for him. At Vétheuil, he entirely abandoned the scenes of modern life and leisure that had dominated his work at Argenteuil and began to focus instead on capturing fugitive aspects of nature, employing a nascent serial technique that laid the groundwork for his most important later production.

"The view across the Seine toward Lavacourt, as seen in the present painting, was one of the first landscape subjects to capture Monet’s attention upon his arrival at Vétheuil in August 1878. He painted this splendid vista twice during the late summer or early fall of that year, before the trees began to turn (Wildenstein, nos. 475-476). He returned to the same spot - reassuringly close to home and hence to Camille, whose condition had turned increasingly dire - repeatedly the next summer, completing five variations on the same motif....

"In each of these canvases, Monet varied his position slightly and tackled different effects of light and weather. The present painting shows the widest view of Lavacourt in the group, with jostling, red-roofed houses extending almost the entire length of the horizon. In the remaining compositions, Monet shifted his angle of vision slightly to the south, looking upstream. The Seine now bends into depth beyond a stand of poplar trees near the center of the scene, and the gently sloping ridge of Saint-Martin-la-Garenne is visible at the left. Monet explored this vista in dense fog (Wildenstein, no. 476), under overcast skies (no. 538), and in the rosy glow of sunset (no. 540). In the present painting, morning light streams into the scene from behind the artist, dancing across the gently rippling river and illuminating the façades of the houses; the brilliant blue of the sky and the slight rustle of the breeze promise a perfect summer day. The waters of the river fill the entire foreground of the canvas, with only few patches of reeds to suggest the marshy spot on the bank where Monet stood.

"The natural beauties of this scene must have been a balm for the artist during an exceptionally painful period in his life. By the time he painted the present canvas, he was barely one step ahead of his many creditors; in a desperate letter to Georges de Bellio in August 1879, he pleaded with the collector to select some paintings from his studio in Paris (on which Caillebotte paid the rent). Camille, meanwhile, suffered terribly throughout the summer and died on 5 September at the age of 32. Monet’s grief was intense, and made more complicated by the presence of Alice Hoschedé, who would become his second wife. Landscape painting provided him with his principal solace...."

The lot has an estimate of $8,000,000 to $12,000,000.  It lot sold for $15,837,500.

"Derain first experienced the southern climes of his country when he spent the summer of 1905 with Matisse in Collioure, a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border. This inspired partnership resulted in the emergence of Fauvism, the first transformative thrust of the avant-garde in the young 20th century, which Matisse and Derain revealed to the art world at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris. The salle des Fauves was a sensational, momentous event, and a hard act to follow. Nonetheless, a year later the two painters were already pressing forward and evolving in new directions, working independently, but still in close contact. Matisse returned to Collioure. Derain again journeyed south during the summers of 1906-1908, painting in L’Estaque in 1906, returning there at the end of the year, and in Cassis during 1907. He worked in Martigues, father west along the coast, near the Rhône delta, between May and late November 1908.

“'Fauvism was our ordeal by fire,' Derain later reminisced. 'Colors became charges of dynamite. They were expected to discharge light. It was a fine idea, in its freshness, that everything could be raised above the real. It was serious, too. With our flat tones, we even preserved a concern for mass, giving for example a spot of sand a heaviness it did not possess, in order to bring out the fluidity of water, the lightness of the sky… The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact.

“'What was wrong in our attitude was a kind of fear of imitating life,' Derain continued, 'which made us approach things from too far off and led us to hasty judgments…Thus it became necessary for us to return to more cautious attitudes, to lay in a store of resources from the outset, to secure patiently for each painting a long development.

"When Derain returned to the Midi in the summer of 1908, having chosen Martigues as his base, he was certainly flush with enthusiasm from having visited the Cézanne commemorative galleries in the 1907 Salon d’Automne. Derain shared this excitement with Picasso and Braque, the leading figures among the new circle of artist friends to which he had gravitated since the beginning of 1908.

"In this Paysage en Provence, Martigues, Derain continued to employ those 'flat tones' of Fauve practice. Back in Collioure during the summer of 1905, Derain and Matisse together viewed the Tahitian Gauguin paintings that Daniel de Monfreid had stored for safekeeping in his home nearby. The example of these works led Derain, more quickly than Matisse, to supplant the broken divisionist facture they had been using in their work, derived from Matisse’s interest in the Neo-Impressionist color theory of Signac and Cross, and to deploy instead broader masses of brilliant color in the Gauguinesque manner.

"Stacked vertically, flat zones of color serve as the constructive elements in the present Paysage en Provence. Larger forms dominate the foreground, while more compact blocks of color describe receding distance. The arboreal framing of the scene is a Cézannian device, learned from the old masters; Cézanne had declared as his purpose to remake the 17th century classical vision of Poussin according to nature.

"Derain’s aim during this period, as he wrote to Vlaminck in March 1906 when discussing the Impressionist art of Monet, was to find 'in nature something different - something which is fixed, eternal, and complex....'Despite his closeness to Picasso and Braque, Derain never sought a resolution for these concerns in Cubism, and experimented only tangentially with cubist elements in his landscapes during 1910. By the beginning of the First World War Derain instead settled into an idealized naturalism, tinged with naïf elements, which anticipated the classicism that would emerge by the end of the decade and become a significant trend in painting following the end of the war."

 

Lot 5 is a colorful four-part screen of oil on canvas laid down on board by Armand Seguin (1869-1903) entitled "Les delices de la vie."  It was painted circa 1903.  It has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000.  It sold for $7,737,500, an auction record for the artist whose previous record was $314,897 set in 2007 at Christie's in Paris.

Lot 2, "La table de musician," by Juan Gris, oil, gouache, colored wax crayons, charcoal and paper collage on canvas, 31 1/4 by 23 3/4 inches, 1914

Lot 2 is a fine still life by Juan Gris (1887-1927) entitled "La table de musician."   An oil, gouache, colored wax crayons, charcoal and paper collage on canvas, it measures 31 1/4 by by 23 3/4 inches.  It was painted in 1914.  It has an estimate on request.  It sold for $31,812,500.

About half-way through the sale, there were at least 15 empty seats.

      

Harry Macklowe, Donald Marron and Larry Gagosian attending the auction


  

Xin Li-Cohen, deputy chairman, Asia, Christie's, was an active bidder