Press Release London
For Immediate Release
London | +44 (0)20 7293 6000 | Matthew Weigman | Matthew.Weigman@sothebys.com
Sarah Rustin | Sarah.Rustin@sothebys.com| Leyla Daybelge | Leyla.Daybelge@sothebys.com
New York Lauren Gioia | Lauren.Gioia@sothebys.com
SOTHEBY'S LONDON FEBRUARY IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART EVENING SALE TO FEATURE MUSEUM-QUALITY WORKS FROM EVERY KEY PERIOD IN THE CANON
Highlights Include a Major 1933 Painting by Joan Miró, a Rediscovered Masterpiece by Gustav Klimt and a Previously Unseen Claude Monet Snowscape
Joan Miró, Peinture, 1933, oil on canvas, £7-10 million*
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, Monday 9th January 2012 --- On
8th February 2012, Sotheby's London Impressionist & Modern
Art Evening Sale will offer a selection of works of
exceptional quality and importance. Highlights include Joan
Miró's monumental Peinture of 1933, estimated at £7-10
million, Gustav Klimt's recently rediscovered landscape
Seeufer mit Birken (est. £6 - 8 million), which has not been
seen in public in over a century, and a rare and atmospheric
winter scene by Claude Monet, L'entrée de Giverny en hiver
(est. £4.5 - 6.5 million). The auction features a
particularly strong Surrealist group, with works by Salvador
Dalí, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte, as well as an
outstanding group of paintings by German artists including
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Lyonel Feininger and Otto
Dix. The sale is estimated to realise in excess of £78
million.
Helena Newman, Chairman, Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern
Art, Europe, said: "We are delighted to present a wonderfully
rich and varied sale to collectors, with many works of museum
quality from every key period in the Impressionist to Modern
canon. Many of the works are appearing at auction for the
first time or returning to the market after many decades in
private collections."
Peinture, a monumental masterpiece by visionary Modernist Joan Miró, estimated at £7 - 10 million (illustrated above) is one of the strongest and most refined works of a series of paintings considered to hold a vital position at the pinnacle of Modern Art. It is one of the few works from this series that is not currently housed in a major museum. Executed in Paris in 1933, it was during this intensely creative period that Miró first broke away from any discernable
influences and created wholly unique works. Miró saw these
works as a personal breakthrough and referred to them in a
letter to Matisse as 'a great success that might mark a red
letter day in my career'. The critical reception of these
paintings was unprecedented for Miró, signifying a major
turning point in his career.
In the same family collection since 1924, Claude Monet's
previously unseen L'entrée de Giverny en hiver (est. £4.5 -
6.5 million, pictured on page one) depicts the snow-covered
road leading into the town on the outskirts of Paris which
would become synonymous with the artist's most innovative
compositions. Monet and his family moved to Giverny in 1883
and the present work, painted in 1885, is one of the artist's
first significant depictions of his new surroundings. Monet's
pictures from this era exemplified his interest in the
transformative power of the elements on the natural world, in
particular the unique properties of winter light which
presented temporal and tonal challenges that appealed to
Monet's most profound sensibilities as a landscape painter.
For most
of its history, the painting has been in the famed collection
formed in the 1920s by Parisian pharmacist and industrialist
Henri Canonne.
Following Sotheby's recent sale of Gustav Klimt's Litzlberg
am Attersee (Litzlberg on the Attersee) for the remarkable
sum of $40.4 million (est. in excess of $25 million) in the
November Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York,
a major highlight of the February London Impressionist &
Modern Art Evening Sale is Gustav Klimt's recently
rediscovered masterpiece of 1901 Seeufer mit Birken
(Lakeshore with Birches). The painting (illustrated on the
previous page) has not been seen in public for over a century
and is estimated to fetch £6 - 8 million. Coming to auction
in the year of the 150th birthday of the
painter, it is a work of haunting beauty that stands at the
very axis of Klimt's modernism. Acquired in 1902 from an
exhibition in Dusseldorf by distinguished collectors Richard
and Klara Koenigs-Bunge, Seeufer mit Birken has
remained in the same family for over a century. A FULL
PRESS RELEASE ON THIS WORK IS AVAILABLE FROM THE PRESS OFFICE
ON REQUEST
Recognised as one of Edouard Vuillard's masterworks,
LesCouturières (pictured left) is estimated at £3 - 5
million. Vuillard painted this work in 1890 at the start of
his involvement with the Nabis painters who, following the
example of Gauguin, eschewed traditional representation to
develop their own pictorial language. Vuillard was fascinated
by the rich ambiguities of the domestic space and the figures
in the work are likely to have been his mother and sister,
who were his constant muses. His predilection for domestic
interiors finds clear lineage in the works of the Dutch and
French Old Masters, and the artist sought similar intimacy in
his domestic scenes, though using entirely different means.
The vibrant colour palette of the present painting is
characteristic of Vuillard's work of this period and with its
historical motif and formal
eloquence, it offers a rare glimpse into the artist's
revolutionary work at the end of the 19th
century.
Offered for sale for the first time in a generation, Georges
Braque's L'Oliveraie (est. £2 - 3 million) provides - with
unprecedented force - a rare glimpse into the Fauve
revolution at the beginning of the 20th century
and Braque's seminal contribution to the movement. Braque was
inspired by the unrestrained colour and spontaneous
brushstrokes of his contemporaries, including Matisse and
Derain, though chose to depict the rich terrain of the
Provençal landscape as opposed to the port towns of the South
of France. Braque's explosive Fauve period ended quickly when
he turned to the Cubist idiom, and the rarity of his Fauve
canvases make them all the more valuable to these early
moments of Modernism.
Following on from the successful prices achieved by Sotheby's for Surrealist works in recent sales, the auction includes An outstanding selection of Surrealist works
Salvador Dalí'siconic oil, Oasis, estimated at £4 - 6 million, holds a vital position in the Surrealist canon and was created at the height of his successful years in New York. With a sophisticated manipulation of form and imagery that distinguishes the artist's most successful compositions, Oasis presents a dreamscape with the inimitable sense of mystery particular to the artist's mature works. Dalí described the composition as 'The visible lovers. At the approach to the oasis, Apollo and Venus materialize in empty space. By grace of the desert flower, they rise into view from the aridity of the rock.'
Yves Tanguy's Deux fois du noir(est. £2 - 3 million) exemplifies the refined and personal language with which Tanguy transformed the boundaries of Modernist painting. In this oil on canvas, painted in 1941, Tanguy presents a brilliant hyper-reality that embodies the aims of the Surrealist movement. He had been invited to become a member of the Surrealist group in 1925 by André Breton and went on to demonstrate his accomplishment in the oeuvre with his complete command of a new personal Surrealist language. By the
1940s his work had entered a new maturity, as his forms
became more complex in their refinement and the horizon lines
which had supported his earlier works gave way to atmospheric
perspective.
With its richly complex interaction of fantastical figures
and potent landscape, La Comédie de la soif (est. £1.2 - 1.8
million) is a masterpiece of Max Ernst's wartime oeuvre. The
work was executed in 1941 - shortly after his arrival in New
York with a sense of revelatory determination - and
exemplifies the sense of excitement and possibility that the
artist felt in his early years in the city. Here Ernst
incorporates recognizable figures amid textured explosions of
colour in a painting that demonstrates the artist's profound
power of expression and novelty of technique.
A STRONG OFFERING OF WORKS BY GERMAN ARTISTS
Ernest Ludwig Kirchner'smonumental Das Boskett: Albertplatz in Dresden(est. £5 - 7 million) of 1911 is a highly sophisticated blend of Brücke boldness allied with cosmopolitan allure, and its unique rendering of the cityscape secured Kirchner's position as the most influential of all the Brücke artists. Executed in the same year that Kirchner and the Brücke group moved from Dresden to Berlin, the painting was one of the artist's last canvases to depict the topography of Dresden - a recurrent theme in his oeuvre and the city where he came of age as an artist and as a man. The idiosyncratic colour palette renders the painting emblematic of Kirchner's new-found voice and his confidence in the Expressionistic idiom. The present
work represents a powerful precursor of the
extraordinarily
daring cityscapes which would follow in Berlin.
Emil Nolde's Blumengarten, ohne Figur(est. £2 - 3 million) is an outstanding example of the artist's important early flower and garden paintings and belongs amongst his most compelling works. His technique of using thick impasto to build an almost relief-like surface marked him out to his younger contemporaries, including Kirchner and Heckel, as a truly innovative artist whose style greatly influenced their formative careers. In 1903 Nolde moved to a village on the island of Alsen, where he rented a fisherman's cottage and cultivated a garden which would become the subject of some of his most important works. A fruitful, intensive phase of creativity saw Nolde adopt a new, powerful use of colour, shown in its maturity in this work of 1908.
Offered for sale for the first time, Lyonel Feininger'sMühle
mit rotemMann (est. £2 - 3 million) comes to auction from the
Estate of the artist's son T. Lux Feininger. Painted circa
1917, the work is an exceptional painting that highlights the
artist's individuality. Through the use of perspective and
figural distortions, as well as eccentricities of colour,
Feininger transforms the scene into a world where the strange
and the familiar are inextricably linked to exquisite
effect.
Further German artists featured in the sale include Otto
Dix,Alexej von
Jawlenskyand Max Liebermann.
FURTHER IMPORTANT SALE HIGHLIGHTS
Estimated at £1.5 - 2.5 million, Reclining Figure no. 2,
Three-Piece Bridge-Prop is one of Henry Moore's most
important monumental sculptures. This work, conceived in 1963
and cast in an edition of six (pictured overleaf), is one of
his most technically sophisticated and complex iterations on
his dominant theme - the reclining figure.
The importance of the present work is documented in David
Finn's As the Eye Moves - A Sculpture by Henry Moore, an
entire book devoted to the model. The present cast is one of
only two remaining in private hands - others can be found in
important public collections around the world including the
Tate Gallery.
* Estimates do not include buyer's premium
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