This exquisite painting remained in Canonne’s collection until the mid-1940s, by which time Monet’s late Nymphéashad come to be revered as authoritative and visionary among the young American avant-garde. “In the past decade,” the critic Thomas Hess wrote in 1956, “paintings by such artists as Pollock, Rothko, Still, Reinhardt, and Tobey have made us see in Monet’s huge late pictures a purity of image and concept of pictorial space that we now can recognize as greatly daring poetry” (quoted in ibid., pp. 100-101).

Monet in his studio at Giverny, circa 1920. Photo: Henri Manuel / Roger-Viollet, Paris / Bridgeman Images.

Monet’s Au Petit-Gennevilliers (estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000), belongs to another celebrated series from Monet’s early career, when he painted various scenes of Argenteuil in 1874. The site itself is widely linked with the birth of Impressionist painting and provided endless inspiration for Monet and the other impressionists at that time. This painting will be on the market for the first time since 1899. It was purchased by the famed American collector Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1901 and has remained in the family ever since.  

Lot 16C. Claude Monet (1840-1926), Au Petit-Gennevilliers, signed ‘Claude Monet’ (lower right). Oil on canvas, 21 ½ x 28 ⅞ in. (54.6 x 73.3 cm.). Painted in 1874. Estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2016.

Provenance: Victor Chocquet, Paris.
Marie Chocquet, Paris (by descent from the above); Estate sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1-4 July 1899, lot 77.
Dumas d’Hauterive, France (acquired at the above sale).
Lorenzo Crist Delmonico, New York (until 1901).
Boussod, Valadon et Cie., Paris (acquired from the above, 3 April 1901).
Henry Osborne Havemeyer, New York (acquired from the above, 19 April 1901).
Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer, New York (by descent from the above, 1907).
Adaline Havemeyer Frelinghuysen, Morristown, New Jersey (by descent from the above, 1929).
By descent from the above to the present owner.

The Havemeyer house at Fifth Avenue and 66th Street, circa 1901.

THE H.O. HAVEMEYER COLLECTION

From its creation in 1874, Au Petit-Gennevilliers has assumed a place not only within Claude Monet’s exceptionaloeuvre, but also in association with two of the most storied names in American connoisseurship and public service. A magnificent inheritance from the collecting legacy of Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife, Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer, the canvas is similarly connected with New Jersey’s illustrious Frelinghuysen family. Au Petit-Gennevilliersreflects the heart and hand of one of art history’s greatest masters, and a tradition of cultural and civic patronage that continues to this day. 

THE GIFT OF ART
In the annals of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American industry, the Havemeyers sit alongside the Morgans, Carnegies, Astors, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts in achievement and renown. Even today, these same families are recognized as some of the United States’ earliest and most prolific cultural benefactors. In the case of H.O. Havemeyer and his wife, Louisine, it was a passion for fine art—one that encompassed leading figures of the art historical canon—that forever changed the country’s philanthropic and artistic landscape. 

A third-generation sugar refiner and businessman, H.O. Havemeyer expanded his family’s American Sugar Refining Company into one of the nineteenth century’s largest and most prosperous industrial operations. From testing sugar on the docks at the age of fifteen, Havemeyer rose to become president of the firm and founder of what was known as the Sugar Trust. The collector’s tremendous success, a colorful and oftentimes turbulent tale within a nation’s wider growth, provided the foundation for one of the finest assemblages of art in the history of collecting. 

Havemeyer first saw the possibilities in art at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where he acquired several works of ivory, armor, and Asian art. Yet it was through his wife, the fiercely intelligent and independent Louisine Havemeyer, that he fully embraced a decades-long journey in collecting. Mrs. Havemeyer, for her part, was enthralled by the dynamic art and architecture of contemporary France, instilled during her time at boarding school in Paris. “The people love art,” she said of the French, “the people know art, the people buy art, the people live with their art.” When a fellow student introduced her to Mary Cassatt—an artist just ten years older than Louisine Havemeyer—a lifelong friendship was born. Cassatt would go on to produce several works depicting Mrs. Havemeyer and her children, and advised the collectors in some of their most important commissions and acquisitions. 

Married in 1883, H.O. and Louisine Havemeyer were fervent, groundbreaking collectors. Assembled with careful scholarship and discernment, the Havemeyer Collection included not only superb nineteenth-century French painting, sculpture, and works on paper, but also Old Master pictures, decorative art, Asian art, and antiquities. It was, in the words of collector Albert C. Barnes, “the best and wisest collection in America.” The couple’s affinity for Impressionism proved to be especially prescient, and they were encouraged by Cassatt to consider work by artists such as Degas and Monet—two figures in which the Havemeyers’ collection was particularly strong. At their stately residences in Greenwich, Connecticut, and at 1 East 66th Street—both designed by Samuel Colman and Louis Comfort Tiffany—the Havemeyers’ zeal for fine art was fully evident. In rooms both grand and intimate, masterpieces by artists such as Corot, Courbet, Cézanne, and Manet hung alongside pictures by Rembrandt and El Greco, elegant examples of Islamic pottery, and resplendent Tiffany glass. 

When H.O. Havemeyer died in 1907, Louisine Havemeyer devoted her boundless energies to the promotion of women’s rights. The collector provided significant financial backing and leadership to the efforts of suffragette Alice Paul, and even organized exhibitions of her collection to raise funds for the movement. At the time of her death in 1929, Mrs. Havemeyer bequeathed some 142 important works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of her husband, joining gifts that had already been made during the couple’s lifetime. “One of the most magnificent gifts of works of art ever made to a museum,” it was reflective of the abundant generosity of spirit that had always informed H.O. and Louisine Havemeyer’s commitment to the public sphere. For the Met, the bequest was truly transformative, raising the institution to unparalleled international prominence. The couple’s three children soon donated over 300 additional inherited works to the museum, with other pieces gifted in the ensuing decades. 

Installation view, The H. O. Havemeyer Collection, The Metropolitian Museum of Art, 1930.

Literature: “Vente Chocquet” in New York Herald: Édition de Paris, 29 June 1899.
W. Dewhurst, Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development, London, 1904, p. III (titled La seine à Argenteuil).
T. Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, Paris, 1906, p. 79 (illustrated).
G. Geffroy, Claude Monet: Sa vie, son temps, son oeuvre, Paris, 1922, p. 219 (titled Argenteuil).
H.O. Havemeyer Collection: Catalogue of Paintings, Prints, Sculpture and Objects of Art, Portland, 1931, p. 411 (titledLandscape–Argenteuil and dated 1873).
M. Rostand, Quelques amateurs de l’époque impressionniste, Paris, 1955, p. 154.
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie at catalogue raisonné, Geneva, 1974, vol. I, p. 258, no. 337 (illustrated).
D. Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1996, vol. II, p. 140, no. 337 (illustrated).
P.H. Tucker, The Impressionists at Argenteuil, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 32, fig. 25 (illustrated; titled Boats Along the Banks of the Seine at Petit Gennevilliers). 
A. Distel, "Inventar des Hauses von Victor Choquet an der Rue Monsigny 7, Paris" in Victor Choquet: Freund und Sammler der Impressionisten, Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Manet, 2015, p. 199, fig. 84 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Palm Beach, The Society of the Four Arts, Claude Monet, January-February 1958, no. 10 (dated 1873 and titled The Barges at Argenteuil).
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection, March-June 1993, p. 363, no. 396 (illustrated, p. 362).
Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party," September 1996-February 1997, p. 256, no. 24 (illustrated in color). 

The promenade at Petit-Gennevilliers, looking upstream, late nineteenth century.

Note: Monet painted this exquisitely lyrical and radiant scene of the Seine at Argenteuil–a place that has come to be virtually synonymous with the origins of Impressionism–during the summer of 1874, just weeks after the epoch-making First Impressionist Exhibition. Since moving to Argenteuil in December 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, Monet had been consolidating the revolutionary formal vocabulary of this new modern movement, as well as actively militating for an independent alternative to the Salon. Now, both efforts bore fruit. From April to May 1874, in the former studios of the photographer Nadar in Paris, Monet exhibited a selection of new work alongside that of ten like-minded colleagues–the first time that artists had banded together to show their art publicly without the sanction of the state or the judgment of a jury. History had been made, and the show became the touchstone for all such future modernist efforts.

Public response to this novel venture, though, was decidedly mixed. Some critics had no doubt that the participants were creating the most avant-garde and important work of any artists in France. “The means by which they seek their impressions will infinitely serve contemporary art,” Armand Silvestre declared in L’Opinion Nationale. An equally vocal cohort, however, took great affront at these young painters’ subversion of long-standing Salon norms. Instead of scenes of timeless grandeur, they reveled in the depiction of contemporary life and leisure; eschewing traditional modeling and laborious finish, they exhibited paintings with all the vigor and brio of sketches. “What do we see in the work of these men?” Etienne Carjat asked in Le Patriote Français. “Nothing but a defiance, almost an insult to the taste and intelligence of the public” (quoted in The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986, pp. 108-109).  

Claude Monet, Barques au repos, au Petit-Gennevilliers, 1874. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

After the exhibition closed, Monet returned to Argenteuil even more strongly committed to the New Painting. During the ensuing summer, he painted more pictures than he had ever completed in a similar amount of time–nearly forty vibrant and light-filled scenes, including the present Au Petit-Gennevilliers. Testament to its great beauty and sensitivity, this canvas has belonged for almost its whole history to two of the most important collecting families in the entire chronicle of Impressionism. Its first owner was Victor Chocquet, a Parisian customs official who made a name for himself as an energetic champion of the Impressionists at a time when most still derided their art. In 1901, the painting entered the now-legendary collection of Louisine and Henry Havemeyer, arguably the most discerning connoisseurs of Impressionism in America at the turn of the century; it has belonged to the Havemeyers’ descendants ever since.  

When Monet moved to Argenteuil, it was a lively suburb of some eight thousand inhabitants, located on the right bank of the Seine just eleven kilometers west of the capital. Parisians knew it as an agréable petite ville, all the more convenient because it was only fifteen minutes by rail from the Gare Saint-Lazare, and trains ran every half-hour. The town had some factories, and several smokestacks punctuated the skyline among the stretches of tall trees that lined the Seine. Two bridges, one for coach and pedestrian traffic and the other for the train line, connected Argenteuil to Petit Gennevilliers on the opposite bank. Visitors, however, could easily disregard these encroachments of the industrial age and focus instead on the picturesque aspects of the town. As a result, Argenteuil beckoned as a congenial destination for middle-class Parisians who wanted to escape the noise and grime of the city for fresh-air holidays and Sunday outings. 

Edouard Manet, Monet peignant dans son atelier, 1874. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

The town was especially popular among leisure-seekers devoted to the newly fashionable sport of boating, since the Seine is deeper and broader here than anywhere else near Paris. From the mid-century onward, town leaders encouraged the development of Argenteuil as a sailing hub, permitting the establishment of mooring areas and boathouses along the banks and promoting the near-perfect conditions of the river among sports enthusiasts. Their efforts paid off, and by the later 1850s the most stylish yacht club in Paris had its headquarters there. The sight of sailboats and larger vessels flying before the wind in regattas and other fêtes nautiques attracted numerous spectators, and in 1867 the town was even chosen as the site for the sailing competition during the Exposition Universelle. By the time Monet arrived, Argenteuil had become a postcard town for suburban leisure.  

Although Monet explored a wide range of motifs during his years at Argenteuil, it was the river that provided him with the greatest wealth of pictorial enticements. Between 1872 and 1875, he created more than fifty paintings of this stretch of the Seine, focusing principally on three motifs: the boat rental area immediately downstream from the highway bridge, as in the present scene; the wide basin of the river, with its sandy promenades; and the Petit Bras, a diversion of the Seine by the Île Marante where larger boats sometimes moored. Although they range in mood from reflective to high-spirited, these views all offered Monet the opportunity to paint essentially the same subject: a well-ordered, modern suburb where man and nature met in agreeable harmonies. “Evocative and inviting, this is the suburban paradise that was sought after in the 1850s and 1860s but made all the more precious and desired after the disasters of 1870-1871,” Paul Tucker has written, “its calm the restorative balm for the nation as a whole” (Claude Monet: Life and Art, New York, 1995, p. 61). 

Claude Monet, Le pont routier, Argenteuil, 1874. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

To paint the present scene, Monet worked from a boat that he had outfitted as a floating studio, anchoring it near the Petit-Gennevilliers bank looking downstream–exactly as Manet showed in a remarkable 1874 painting of his friend at work. Pleasure craft skim across the water or bob at anchor; broken reflections dance on the surface of the river, and cirrus clouds scud across the high summer sky. On the left are a cluster of three orange-roofed houses and a distinctive tall tree that re-appear in several of Monet’s other views of the Petit Gennevilliers bank, seen each time from a slightly different angle. Immediately behind Monet from this vantage point, here out of sight, would have been the boat-hire shed with its series of docks and just beyond that the highway bridge. All that is visible of the Argenteuil bank are two factory chimneys in the distance at the far right, the absence of smoke suggesting that the scene was painted on a Sunday. 

Paintings like this one appear so soothing–and have become so iconic–that it can be hard to appreciate how radical Monet’s approach to form was in his day. In Au Petit-Gennevilliers, he has replaced the dark, saturated hues of Corot, Courbet, and the Barbizon school with a heightened palette of blue, green, ochre, and most notably, copious white, which brilliantly conveys the sensation of the open air. The paint is applied in a vibrating tissue of broken brushstrokes–small horizontal dashes for the surface of the water, lively comma-shaped marks for the trees and sky–that evoke the gentle rustling of the breeze and the flickering play of sunlight over the scene. This transparent brushwork, a revolutionary departure from Salon norms, also explicitly inscribes the presence of the artist, bearing witness to a central tenet of Impressionism as well as one of its most persuasive myths: the plein-air master before nature, rapidly transcribing his immediate sensations.  

Claude Monet, Les bateaux rouges, Argenteuil, 1875. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge.

The meticulously crafted composition, however, reveals the care and planning that went into this apparently spontaneous scene. All the pieces of the picture fit together like the interlocking parts of an ideally constructed world. The planes of water and sky are near mirror-images, with the horizon line set just below the midpoint of the canvas. The riverbank forms a triangular wedge of contrasting color that leads the eye into the scene; the dark hull of a boat emphasizes the point where this shape joins the horizon, very slightly right of center. The jostling verticals of the masts and sails punctuate the canvas from left to right, forming a planar counterpoint to the receding orthogonal of the bank, with its houses and trees of diminishing scale. “Despite the impression of a captured moment, the painting is an artful construct,” Tucker has written about a related scene. “Each element...is painstakingly arranged and scrupulously rendered, underscoring Monet’s powers as an artist and the humanly imposed rationale of the place” (The Impressionists at Argenteuil, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 68). 

Victor Chocquet, the first owner of Au Petit-Gennevilliers, discovered Impressionism in 1875, just a year after Monet painted this seductive and harmonious canvas. Chocquet had previously collected Delacroix but rapidly switched his allegiance to the Impressionists, becoming one of their most consistent early buyers. “He was something to see, standing up to hostile crowds at the exhibition during the first years of Impressionism,” the critic Georges Rivière recalled, “leading a reluctant connoisseur up to canvases by Renoir, Monet, or Cézanne, doing his utmost to make the man share his admiration for these reviled artists” (quoted in A. Distel, Impressionism: The First Collectors, New York, 1990, p. 137). The appreciation, it seems, was mutual; Monet described Chocquet as the only person he had ever met “who truly loved painting with a passion” (quoted in J. Rewald, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne, New York, 1996, p. 194).  

Claude Monet, Le pont d’Argenteuil, 1874. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

Chocquet probably acquired the present painting soon after its creation, and he retained it until his death in 1891. When his widow passed away eight years later, the canvas appeared in a sale of his collection at Galerie Georges Petit, which generated enormous excitement. Distinguished collectors and dealers thronged the sale room, and spirited bidding spurred record prices. “We now see those one-time despised and belittled Impressionist pictures realizing at public auction the price of a respectable lawyer’s yearly labor, the pay of a general, the equivalent of broad acres of hill and vale,” the English Impressionist painter Wynford Dewhurst reported. “Finally, Monet, and with him the survivors of that small and gifted band of Impressionists, have lived to see the reversal of a hostile, because ignorant, public judgment; and are able to enjoy to the full the immense satisfaction of principles fought for and successfully vindicated” (“Claude Monet, Impressionist,” Pall Mall Magazine, June 1900, pp. 223-224). 

Their collection would eventually include thirty paintings by Monet, many of them acquired on annual picture-buying expeditions with Cassatt in Paris. “Louie wants me to keep a look out for fine Monets,” Cassatt wrote to Mr. Havemeyer at the start of the century. “I have just heard of someone who has several good early pictures” (quoted in F. Weitzenhoffer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America, New York, 1986, p. 143). The present canvas had sold at the Chocquet auction to one Monsieur d’Hauterive for 11,500 francs, a stunning sum; by April 1901, however, it was with Boussod et Valadon, where the Havemeyers recognized its exceptional quality and added it to their collection. When Louisine Havemeyer died in 1929, she generously bequeathed a substantial part of the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Au Petit Gennevilliers passed instead to her daughter Adaline Havemeyer Frelinghuysen and then to two generations of the latter’s heirs, remaining part of the legacy of this storied family all the way to the present day.

Also featured is Amedeo Modigliani’s (1884-1920) Jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) (estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000) painted in 1916. This portrait is a quintessentially modern painting of the female figure painted in Modigliani’s signature style- with a patrician long neck and oval face, large eyes and small, red lips. Here he adds the uncoventional, and alluring adornment of a rose in the subject’s décolletage, further heightening her seductive allure. It is the finest of a series of three paintings from 1916 recorded by Ambrogio Ceroni that takes a dark haired and brown-eyed young woman as its subject. It has been suggested that the model is the artist’s older sister Margherita.  

Lot 7C. Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Jeune femme à la rose (Margherita), signed 'modigliani' (upper right), oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 18 1/8 in. (64.9 x 46.1 cm.). Painted in 1916. Estimate: $12,000,000-18,000,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2016.

Provenance: Anon. sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 20 October 1926, lot 44.
Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris.
Private collection, Europe (acquired circa 1927).
Private collection (by descent from the above); sale, Sotheby's, London, 22 June 1993, lot 47.
Acquavella Galleries, Inc., New York (acquired at the above sale).
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 10 May 2000, lot 34.
Galerie Nichido, Tokyo.
Acquired from the above by the present owner, February 2001. 

Literature: A. Pfannstiel, L’Art et la vie: Modigliani, Paris, 1929, p. 37 (titled La jeune fille à la rose).
A. Pfannstiel, Modigliani et son oeuvre: Étude critique et catalogue raisonné, Paris, 1956, p. 126, no. 224 (titled La jeune fille à la rose).
A. Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani: Dessins et sculptures avec suite du catalogue illustré des peintures, Milan, 1965, p. 43, no. 177 (illustrated).
A. Ceroni and L. Piccioni, intro., I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, 1970, p. 94, no. 128 (illustrated).
J. Lanthemann, Modigliani: Catalogue raisonné, Barcelona, 1970, p. 118, no. 159 (illustrated, p. 202).
A. Ceroni and F. Cachin, intro., Tout l'oeuvre peint de Modigliani, Paris, 1972, p. 94, no. 128 (illustrated).
C. Parisot, Modigliani: Catalogue raisonné, Peintures, dessins, aquarelles, Livorno, 1991, vol. II, p. 296, no. 21/1916 (illustrated, p. 121).
O. Patani, Amedeo Modigliani: Catalogo generale, Dipinti, Milan, 1991, p. 145, no. 131 (illustrated).
C. Parisot, Modigliani: Catalogue raisonné, Florence, 2012, vol. V, no. 21/1916 (illustrated). 

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Cent tableaux de Modigliani, 1958, no. 46 (dated 1917).
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Modigliani, January-February 1959, no. 20.
Tokyo, Seibu Department Store; Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art and Fukuota, Cultural Centre, Masterpiece of Modigliani, May-September 1968, no. 40.

Modigliani sitting in his studio at Bateau-Lavoir, Montparnasse, 1915-1916. Photo: Paul Guillaume. 

Note: Throughout his short life, Amedeo Modigliani had an insatiable desire to depict the human form. Nowhere is this deep and enduring fascination more evident than in the profusion of portraiture that constitutes his oeuvre. Fusing elements of tradition with modernism, with his portraits, which most frequently depict a single, frontally posed figure, Modigliani forged a style that was completely his own, capturing the idiosyncratic physiognomic features of his sitters while rendering them in his own highly distinctive artistic vocabulary.  

La jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) exemplifies this novel and unique form of portraiture. Painted in 1916, this work dates from a pivotal and highly productive moment in the artist’s career, which saw his mature figurative style–characterised by sinuous lines and stylised, elongated forms–truly emerge and his portraits from this year are some of the most perceptively characterised and formally compelling of his entire career. Against a dark, richly impastoed background, the figure of a young girl emerges, her head tilted slightly as she gazes out of the painting, her flushed cheeks illuminated by dazzling pink strokes of colour. Although her facial features are stylised, her large, heavily lashed, almond-shaped eyes have a striking intensity, dominating her oval face and creating an enigmatic expression. At once highly individualised yet conforming completely to Modigliani’s quintessential female "type"–the long neck and oval face, large eyes and small, pursed lips–this painting epitomises the artist’s extraordinary ability to balance the generic with the unique, the abstract with the naturalistic, and capture the very essence of the figure seated in front of him, or as the poet and friend of the artist, Max Jacob described, "the splendour of the soul" (M. Jacob quoted in ibid., 1967, p. 298).  

Amedeo Modigliani, Marguerite, 1916.

La jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) is the finest of a series of three paintings from 1916 recorded by Ambrogio Ceroni that takes this beautiful dark haired and brown-eyed young woman as its subject (Ceroni, nos. 128-130). This sitter is identified in one of the paintings, titled Marguerite assise (Margherita), as Margherita–her Italian name emblazoned at the top right of the portrait. While the other two paintings of this series–Marguerite assise (Margherita) and Marguerite assise–depict this young woman clothed in a white apron and seated on a chair in an indescript interior, La jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) presents a more striking and intense frontal portrayal of this sitter in which all narrative attributes are eschewed save for the small floral corsage that embellishes her black dress. One of these paintings was exhibited in the now notorious one-man exhibition of Modigliani’s work that was held at Berthe Weill’s gallery in Paris in 1917, listed in the catalogue simply as Marghareta. 

It has been suggested that the model for these three works is Modigliani’s older sister who was called Margherita. However, if this is the case, Modigliani would probably have painted her from memory, as he made the last recorded trip to his native Italy in either 1912 or 1913. By many accounts a temperamental and argumentative woman, Margherita never married and, after the tragic death of Modigliani and his wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, she became the adopted mother of their daughter, also named Jeanne. Modigliani it seems did not have a particularly amicable relationship with his sister making it unlikely that he painted her, in Jeanne’s own words: “Margherita Modigliani admitted to me that there had been very little sympathy between her and her brother and that Amedeo had steadily refused to discuss painting with her” (Modigliani: Man and Myth, trans. E.R. Clifford, London, 2012, pp. 30-31). Throughout his career, Modigliani painted a host of different women, from the wives of his friends and dealers to his lovers, as well as anonymous young, working-class women whom he met on the streets of Montparnasse. Unable to afford professional models, these women frequently served as the subjects for Modigliani’s portraits, and it seems more likely that the sitter in the present work is one such woman. With her dark hair and dark features, the subject of La jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) conforms to a Mediterranean “type” that Modigliani often painted; women who were, like the artist himself, most likely Italian and or Jewish migrants in Paris.  

Amedeo Modigliani, La servante, 1916.

For Modigliani, the presence of the model was essential to his working process. “To do any work,” he explained to the artist, Léopold Survage, “I must have a living person, I must be able to see him opposite me” (Modigliani quoted inModigliani and his Models, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, 2006, p. 38). He intensely scrutinised his sitters’ physiognomy, taking the physical features and expressions of a person as the impetus for his painting, before transposing their likeness in accordance with his own, personal conception of the female form. Emile Schaub-Koch who knew Modigliani and watched him working, described his methods, which Pierre Sichel has detailed: 

“When [Modigliani] found himself in front of someone he was going to paint, he concentrated on the expression of the feelings he saw in his sitter’s face, not on the features themselves. It was part of the process of creation. Then Modi began painting, paying no attention to his model, preoccupied with conveying through his drawing the essence of what he had discovered. This approach produced an unexpected result that not only had nothing to do with the subject but was also disconcerting. Through a series of recalls, retouches, and improvements through successive comparisons between the model and his first rough sketch, Modi always succeeded in capturing something powerful and moving in his subject. He caught a manner or resemblance that was the subject” (Sichel, op cit., p. 323). 

Amedeo Modigliani, Jeune femme assise (Marguerite), 1916.

1916–the year that La jeune femme à la rose (Margherita) was painted–was in the words of Modigliani’s daughter, Jeanne, “a fortunate one” (J. Modigliani, op. cit., p. 79) for the artist. His turbulent, impassioned and in many ways toxic relationship with the South African journalist, Beatrice Hastings came to an end. Recovering from the effects that his hedonistic and wild lifestyle with Hastings had caused to his already poor health, Modigliani started painting with a renewed intensity and this was aided enormously by his association with the Polish poet-turned-dealer, Léopold Zborowski. Zborowski had been a great admirer of Modigliani’s work before they met in the latter part of 1916, but he had not had the funds necessary to represent the artist. However, recognising the artist’s innate talent, Zborowski, with scarcely enough money to support himself and his family, offered Modigliani a deal, paying him a monthly stipend, as well as providing his materials, models and living costs in exchange for all his works, becoming his exclusive dealer. After years of living in dire poverty-stricken conditions, this deal gave Modigliani a new form of security, a renewed optimism and saw the artist’s production increase. He wrote to his mother in November of this year telling her of his newfound contentment: “Everything is going well. I am working and if I am sometimes worried, at least I am not as short of money as I was before” (Modigliani, 16 November 1916 in J. Modigliani, ibid., p. 80).  

Amedeo Modigliani, Jeune femme (Victoria), 1917. Tate Gallery, London, bequeathed by C. Frank.

La Minotauromachie is the apotheosis of the themes Picasso developed throughout the 1930s, and is considered one of the two greatest prints of modern times, the other being La femme qui pleure, I (see lot 47). Although packed with symbolic references, the image is so compelling that it is not necessary to understand every one. Picasso believed that art is not created to make sense of the world, but rather to capture the unknowable elementary forces of nature. As his spiritual self-portrait, La Minotauromachie remained a deeply personal work for the artist. Picasso's most significant prints, both personally and critically, tended not to be printed and editioned in the precise, well organized way that most of his graphic output was. The artist saw these as a more private enterprise, with impressions given to close friends. Even buying one of these masterpieces was no simple process—having sufficient funds was not the only criteria, and many aspiring purchasers went away empty-handed. Picasso carefully selected those who he believed were entitled to own a Minotauromachie and therefore a piece of his own mythology.

Lot 46C. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), La Femme qui pleure, signed 'Picasso' in pencil (lower right) and numbered '3/15' (lower left), etching, scraper and aquatint on Montval paper, Baer's third state of seven. Image size: 27 1/8 x 19 ½ in. (69 x 50 cm.). Sheet size: 29 3/8 x 21 5/8 in. (75 x 55 cm.). Executed in 1937. Estimate: $1,800,000 – $2,500,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2016.

Provenance: Walter Bareiss, New York.
Yale University, New Haven.
Acquired from the above by the late owners, 1979. 

The Francey and Dr. Martin L. Gecht Collection 

Literature: G. Bloch, Catalogue de l'oeuvre gravé et lithographié 1904-1967, Bern, 1968, p. 288, no. 1333 (another example illustrated).
B. Baer, Picasso Peintre-Graveur, Bern, 1986, vol. III, p. 120, no. 623 (another example illustrated).

Exhibited: The Art Institute of Chicago, Master Drawings by Picasso, April-June 1981.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Graphic Modernism: Selections from the Francey and Dr. Martin L. Gecht Collection at The Art Institute of Chicago, November 2003-January 2004.

Jacqueline Roque, Walter Bareiss (then acting director of the Museum of Modern Art) with Pablo Picasso, Ernst Beyeler, and William Rubin, on the occasion of Picasso’s gift of his “Guitar” construction to the MoMA, Spring 1969, Yale Univeristy Art Gallery, Gift of Molly and Walter Bareiss, B.S. 1940s. Artwork: © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Note: Picasso created not one, but two famously iconic images during May-July 1937, as he reacted to news of the murderous Civil War in Spain. The first is the painting Guernica, unveiled at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World Exposition in Paris. Picasso, a life-long pacifist, wanted to use this very public forum to express his shock and outrage at the destruction the German and Italian air forces--acting for General Franco's fascists -- had rained down on the ancient, defenseless Basque town of Guernica, and to affirm his support for the legitimate Republican (Loyalist) government in Madrid. The second image, conceived on a more intimate scale, is La femme qui pleure, I, offered here, which no less significantly reveals a dimension of profound private feeling in Picasso's work, where he grippingly portrayed a woman caught up in paroxysms of deepest sorrow. 

Both these masterpieces feature aspects of one or other of Picasso's two mistresses of the period, whose contending, complementary qualities inspired and galvanized his creative efforts. Marie-Thérèse Walter, whom Picasso met in 1927 and in 1935 became the mother of their daughter Maya, appears in multiple guises in Guernica. "Picasso had no hesitation in using Marie-Thérèse's image as the incarnation of peace and innocence at the mercy of the forces of evil in this supreme indictment of war as well as of totalitarianism," John Richardson has written. Dora Maar had since the summer of 1936 become Marie-Thérèse's rival for the artist's love and attention; Picasso managed the affections of both women to his advantage. "Dora largely inspired the Weeping Woman paintings," Richardson has stated, and while Picasso worked on both ideas concurrently and inter-relatedly, the author has cautioned us to view the Weeping Women as "a separate series that should not be identified too closely with Guernica" (L'Amour Fou: Picasso and Marie-Thérèse, exh. cat., Gagosian Gallery, New York, 2011, pp. 45-46).   

Pablo Picasso, La femme qui pleure, Paris, 12 October 1937. Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In early 1937 Picasso considered the idea of an artist and model theme for his Spanish Pavilion mural, but the bombing of Guernica on Sunday 26th April, killing more than 1,600 of the town's 7,000 inhabitants, immediately convinced him of the subject he should paint. Within days he created his first studies, showing the horse and bull. On 10th May he drew a woman with her head raised to the sky, her mouth agape, looking away in horror from the lifeless infant in her arms. The first studies of a weeping woman, with tears dangling on threadlike tracks from darkened eyes, emerged on 24 May (Zervos, vol. 9, nos. 31 and 33); Picasso was alluding to the precedent of the mater dolorosa--Mary weeping for her crucified son, and by inference, for all humankind--a potent theme in Baroque Spanish religious art. The most intense of all the Guernica studies are those weeping women Picasso drew between 28 May and 3 June (Zervos, vol. 9, nos. 35, 39, 40, 41 and 44 [the latter, fig. 1]; all the preceding, like Guernica, in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid).  

The Weeping Woman, however, did not ultimately appear in Guernica. The closest Picasso came to inserting some aspect of her is visible in Dora's photographs which document the mural in progress during late May; the "Marie-Thérèse" profile of the leaning woman at lower right shows two tears on her cheek, which the artist subsequently removed. Drawing on newspaper photographs, press reports and newsreels, Picasso wanted to describe in his mural the sudden, unprecedented shock of total war to which the civilian population of Guernica had fallen victim. The riveting presence of the Weeping Woman, Picasso decided, would upstage the ensemble effect to which the four women in the painting contribute their fearful and agonized expressions, and distract attention from the primal, mythic symbolism of the horse and bull. Picasso intended Guernica to depict the stunned victims' immediate response to the actual moments of destruction--tears of grief and lamentation would come later, together with the handkerchief to dry one's eyes. The weeping Dora is both victim and witness, like the chorus which responds to the horrors that take place on stage in a Greek tragedy. She is moreover a universal figure not attached to any single event nor even to her cataclysmic century as a whole--she is the timeless manifestation of unfathomable and inconsolable human sorrow, the bearer of an elemental emotion that is as miraculously and beautifully human to contemplate as it is disturbing to behold.  

Picasso etched the seven states of La femme qui pleure, I on 1 July, three days before completing his mural. The image first appears in all its stark clarity in the present third state, which, together with the final seventh state, were the only two Picasso decided to sign and number in a published edition of fifteen impressions each.  

Pablo Picasso, La femme qui pleure, Paris, 26 October 1937. Formerly in the collection of Sir Roland Penrose; Tate, London. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Picasso, however, was not done with the Weeping Woman. "The one motif he could not relinquish," Judi Freeman has stated, "was that of the weeping woman. Her visage haunted him. He drew her frequently, almost obsessively, for the next several months. She was the metaphor for his private agonies" (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 61). Picasso executed the next series of nearly a dozen drawings of the Weeping Woman, with four oil paintings, between 8 June and 6 July (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 54; fig. 3), before taking his summer holiday in Mougins with Dora and their friends. He returned to the subject in October, culminating in the well-known oil version Femme en pleurs, dated 26 October 1937 (Zervos, vol. 9, no. 73; fig. 4) which Roland Penrose purchased from Picasso in November. Among Picasso's final paintings of 1937 is La Suppliante, dated 18 December (Musée Picasso, Paris); tearless but imploring, her eyes and arms raised to the sky, she is a final echo of the horrified mother in Guernica.  

Dora would remain Picasso's emblematic victim through the ordeal of the German Occupation during the Second World War. "For me she's the weeping woman," Picasso told Françoise Gilot. "For years I've painted her in tortured forms, not through sadism, and not with pleasure, either; just obeying a vision that forced itself on me" (F. Gilot, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 122). As Picasso's biographer, Richardson has taken a more objectively insightful view of their relationship: "The source of Dora's tears was not Franco, but the artist's traumatic manipulation of her. Picasso's obsession with her had intensified [at that time], but to judge by the artist's portrayals of her, it precluded tenderness. Marie-Thérèse was submissive out of love; Dora out of a Sadean propensity" (exh. cat., op. cit., 2011, p. 46). 

Whilst the subject of dance usually suggests elation, Picasso's tambourine woman is frenzied and wild. A great part of this emotive element comes from Picasso's superlative use of technique. The dancer's body has been carved in energetic swathes across the plate, with vigorously scored details adding to the sense of movement. The aquatint work however is subtle and extremely skillful: light and shadow play across the figure, whereas the background is a void of velvety blackness. Printing the background of such a large plate was a considerable challenge, even for his master printer Roger Lacourière. Legend has it that Picasso wanted it printed in Paris, in part to keep the atelier in business in defiance of the Nazi occupation.
(Brigitte Baer, Picasso The Engraver, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1997, p. 43) 

The sale presents Frida Kahlo’s (1907-1954) Dos desnudos en el bosque (La tierra misma), 1939, (estimate: $8,000,000-12,000,000). This small and exquisite surrealist painting depicts a dreamlike scene between two nude women in a forest alluding to Kahlo’s sexuality and identity. Gifted by the artist to Dolores del Río, the celebrated Mexican and American actress from the 1920s, the painting was last seen at market in 1989. This masterpiece has been both highly published and exhibited and last shown at Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life at The New York Botanical Garden, May-November 2015. 

Works by René Magritte (1898-1967) are led by Les profondeurs du plaisir, painted in 1947 (estimate: $4,500,000-6,500,000), a work that Magritte considered one of his masterpieces. The idea for this painting came to Magritte when his wife Georgette stood and looked out the window one summer evening. Another painting by Magritte is L’explication, 1962 (estimate: $1,000,000-2,000,000), from a series where he locates the mystery in ordinary objects—the bottle morphs into a carrot. On a related theme, Femme-bouteille, executed circa 1941 (estimate: $500,000-800,000) is from a series of works where Magritte transformed bottles into other objects--a nude woman with her hair cascading down the back of the bottle. The first owner of the present bottle was the surrealist artist Paul Delvaux who acquired the work from Magritte. The present owner acquired the work at auction in 1972. 

Lot 37C. René Magritte (1898-1967), Les profondeurs du plaisir, signed 'Magritte' (lower right); signed again, dated, titled and numbered '"LES PROFONDEURS DU PLAISIR" (II) MAGRITTE 1947' (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 31 ½ x 39 3/8 in. (80 x 100 cm). Painted in 1947. Estimate: $4,500,000-$6,500,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2016. 

Provenance: Jean Bourjou, Brussels (1954 and until circa 1970).
Private collection, Brussels; sale, Christie's, London, 25 March 1980, lot 50A. 
Private collection, Bologna (acquired at the above sale).
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: L. Piérard, "Magritte, le surréaliste" in Le Peuple, Brussels, 30 January 1948, p. 2. 
Letter from Robert Giron to E.L.T. Messens, 25 March 1954.
R. Barilli, I Surrealismi, Bologna, 1983, p. 42 (illustrated in color; illustrated in color again on the cover).
D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte, Catalogue raisonné, Oil Paintings and Objects, 1931-1948, London, 1993, vol. II, , p. 390, no. 632 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Brussels, Galerie Dietrich, Exposition Magritte, January-February 1948.
Brussels, La Sirène, Oeuvres récentes de René Magritte, October 1953, no. 23.
La Louvière, Maison des Loisirs, René Magritte exposé, March-April 1954, no. 10.
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, René Magritte, May-June 1954, no. 72.
Charleroi, Salle de la Bourse, XXX^e Salon du Cercle Royal Artistique et Littéraire de Charleroi, Rétrospective René Magritte, March 1956, no. 88.
Brussels, Musée d'Ixelles, Magritte, April-May 1959, no. 68.
Liège, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Magritte, October-November 1960, no. 40.
Charleroi, Trent ans de peinture belge, 1920-1950, 1961.
Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Magritte: Cent-cinquante oeuvres; première vue mondiale de ses sculptures, January-February 1968, no. 84.
Ferrara, Gallerie Civiche d'Arte Moderna Palazzo dei Diamanti, René Magritte, June-October 1986, p. 183, no. 19 (illustrated in color).

Note: The present Le profondeurs du plaisir (“The depths of pleasure”) “is a work that Magritte particularly valued,” David Sylvester wrote. “When it was not included by Mesens in his initial selection for the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1954, the first major retrospective, [Magritte] was quick to point out the omission to Robert Giron, who gave Mesens the message in a letter of 25 March 1954 that ‘Magritte considers it as one of his masterpieces’” (cat. rais., op. cit., vol. II, 1993, p. 390). 

The glowing self-assessment that Magritte accorded this sublime epiphany of a painting does indeed take full measure of its intrinsic qualities; it is one that stands out from the larger body of his oeuvre as well. Here the artist set aside the typical approach he employed when creating the imagery in his compositions, in which he would “show objects in situations in which we never encounter them”—as he stated—“given my intention to make the most everyday objects shriek aloud” (“La ligne de vie,” 1938, in cat. rais., op. cit., vol. V, 1997, p. 19). The viewer here neither confronts any startling juxtapositions, nor is left to ponder an irresolvable, mind-bending conundrum. 

One may take pleasure, instead, in contemplating Magritte’s intuition of a profound harmony that connects the human presence with the larger elements of the world around it, in which the many diverse and contrasting aspects of perceived reality have been subsumed into more all-encompassing vision of our existence. “This is how we see the world, we see it outside ourselves, and yet the only representation we have of it is inside us” (ibid., p. 21). The depths of pleasure, Magritte may be telling us, are furthermore the pleasures of the profound—an appreciation of those natural truths we bear within us, which we may draw in from the world as casually as one drinks a glass of water.  

René Magritte, Le monde des images, 1950. Sold, Christie’s London, 20 June 2012, lot 57. © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The idea for the essential image in this painting came to Magritte, as his wife Georgette explained to Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, when she and the artist were visiting Willy van Hove, their friend and a collector, on a summer evening. Georgette stood up and looked out the window. Magritte later described this simple moment of inspiration in his record book Titres, 1948: “In the—apparently banal—circumstances in which this woman finds herself, it would seem that the depths of pleasure can be achieved” (cat. rais., op. cit., vol. II, 1993, p. 380). Magritte made a preliminary sketch in a letter to Pierre Andrieu dated 19 August 1947. The surrealist writer Paul Nougé had already suggested to Magritte the title—Les profondeurs du plaisir.  

Magritte painted the first version of this subject later that summer and sold it directly to a Belgian collector in November 1947 (Sylvester, no. 620). A second version—the present painting, likewise titled, moreover numbered on the reverse “(II)”—“was painted in the last weeks of 1947,” Sylvester surmised (ibid., p. 390). The first version having already been sold, Magritte painted the second larger canvas, this time in a wide landscape format, in order to include the image in the Exposition Magritte that opened at Galerie Dietrich, Brussels, in January 1948.  

René Magritte, Le plagiat, 1940. Sold, Christie’s, London, 6 February, 2013, lot 110. © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

There is in the ordinary act of drinking water, as Magritte infers in this painting, a natural but miraculous process of transubstantiation: this liquid sustenance becomes the body. That which is most profoundly essential for life is also the most ordinary of pleasures. The simple truth of this revelation, the consequence of such a commonplace occurrence as his wife standing up to step before a window, did in no way involve a problem to be solved, in the manner which Magritte would customarily undertake a picture he might have in mind. Here was as serendipitous an opportunity for a powerful idea as Magritte could want, like that of picking up a found object and instantly realizing the work of art that one might create from it. The beautiful simplicity in this process of the imagination, he likely considered, was no less a masterpiece than the resultant art work itself. 

The contrasts upon which Magritte created the composition in Les profondeurs are of the most fundamental, elemental kind. The setting is a familiar one in Magritte’s figure and still-life subjects. The architecture of a wide stone balcony, as if taken from Roman antiquity, separates the interior realm and the human presence within it from the vast sea and sky beyond; it is a “window,” but without glass, posing no barrier between these spaces. The presence of the slim crescent moon, aglow in its halo, betokens the infinite expanse of the greater cosmos. Notice how the distant horizon line mysteriously drops slightly to the right side of the woman as she drinks, as if she were emptying the unfathomable sea into herself. A luminous, hazy light, like an all-enveloping atmosphere of omnipresent consciousness, suffuses all of these spatial realms and melds them as one.  

In many paintings of the pre-war period, as in Le miroir universel, 1938-1939 (Sylvester, no. 465), Magritte had conjured “la magie noire... an act of black magic to turn a woman’s flesh into sky,” as he explained in a letter to Breton dated 22 June 1934 (quoted in ibid., p. 187). The fluorescence of pale light in Les profondeurs, on the other hand, may be likened to a kind of “white” magic, stemming from powers that are beneficent and of natural origin.  

René Magritte, Le miroir universel, 1938-1939. Sold, Christie’s, New York, 12 November 2015, lot 22C. © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The lessening of strident pictorial tensions and the noticeable absence of any combative confrontation between objects or elements suggests in Les profondeurs the resurgence of a serenely classical aspect in Magritte’s art. The Second World War had ended two-and-a-half years earlier, and the artist could now put behind him the most pressing anxieties of the previous decade. This classical tendency moreover reveals itself as a reaction to the stylistic pastiches through which Magritte expressed pictorial ideas during his impressionist or so-called “Renoir” period while the war was in progress. He then painted, for himself and his friends, pictures that might offer the mind an escape from a world fraught with menace. No longer threatened, he could again plumb, undistracted, the depths of more profoundly edifying matters, and contemplate the truths he discovered therein.  

A revival of classical discipline is further evident here in the De Stijl-like framing grid that emerges from Magritte’s use of vertical and horizontal compositional axes. He moreover exercised discretion and restraint in his use of color to create a muted nocturnal ambiance. Most importantly, however, Magritte imbued the figure of the partly nude woman with a warmly humanistic classicism; he treated her maturity with tender respect, bathing her in the soft glow of moonlight. Magrittte here transformed his wife Georgette into a latter-day Venus, the sea-born goddess, daughter of the moon, her body forever subject to the ebb and flow of ocean tides.  

In the preface to the catalogue for the 1948 Galerie Dietrich exhibition, in which Les profondeurs du plaisir (II) was first shown, the poet Nougé wrote: “Moving from the most fluid, the most luminous or the most murky profundity to the organization of that profundity... this is what throws the spectator into a world of new feeling” (quoted ibid., p. 152).

Lot 12C. René Magritte (1898-1967), L’explication, signed ‘Magritte’ (lower left); signed again, dated and titled 'Magritte 1962  L’EXPLICATION”' (on the reverse), gouache on paper, 14 x 10 ¾ in. (35.6 x 27.3 cm). Painted in 1962. Estimate: $1,000,000 – $2,000,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2016. 

Provenance: Arturo Schwarz, Milan (acquired from the artist); sale, Nuova Brera Arte, Milan, November 1963. 
Anon. sale, Sotheby’s, London, 1 April 1987, lot 402.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner. 

Literature: Letter from R. Magritte to A. Iolas, 26 September 1962. 
Letter from R. Magritte to A. Bosmans, 1 November 1962. 
Statement of account from R. Magritte to A. Iolas, 1 January 1963.
D. Sylvester, ed., René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Gouaches, Temperas, Watercolours and Papiers Collés, 1918-1967, London, 1994, vol. IV, p. 245, no. 1513 (illustrated). 

Exhibited: Milan, Galleria Arturo Schwarz, Magritte, December 1962.
Rome, L'Attico, Magritte, 9 January 1963.
Turin, Galleria Notizie, Magritte: opere scelte dal 1925 al 1962, March-April 1965, p. 12 (illustrated).
Rome, La Medusa, Studio d'Arte Contemporanea, René Magritte: selezione di dipinti dal 1925 al 1962, June 1965, no. 4 (illustrated).
Brussels, Galerie Isy Brachot, Le Surréalisme en Belgique I, April-July 1986, no. 20 (illustrated).
New York, Arnold Herstand & Co, René Magritte: Paintings, November-December 1986, pp. 38 and 46 (illustrated in color).
Paris, Musée Maillol, Magritte tout en papier, March-June 2006, p. 64 (illustrated in color, p. 65). 

Note: “So I decided, around 1925, that from then on, I would paint only objects with all their visible details,” Magritte declared in a 1938 lecture (“La ligne de vie,” trans. D. Sylvester, cat. rais., op. cit., 1997, vol. V, p. 18). Following this basic notion of seeking the mystery in ordinary things, Magritte has concocted in L’explication, from a wine bottle and a carrot, a hybrid phenomenon in which each of the original objects, related only in the semblance of shape, appears in a state of metamorphosis from one into the other, merging aspects of both. The result suggests another thing altogether, unrelated to either component—perhaps, most dramatically and unforeseen, the glowing, heated nose cone of an artillery shell.  

The process at work here is fundamental to Magritte’s creative means; as David Sylvester pointed out, “The image of the carrot-bottle seems to be a perfect exemplification of Magritte’s method of ‘elective affinities’. Both the definitive title and the title [Marcel] Mariën noted that [Paul] Nougé had suggested, ‘Un discourse de la methode’/ ‘Discourse on method’, might perhaps be allusions to its paradigmatic nature” (cat. rais, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, no. 764, p. 185).  

René Magritte, L’explication, 1952. Sold, Christie’s, New York. 11 May 1995, lot 369. © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

André Breton had found in his reading of Le Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) a memorable statement which seemed to anticipate the emerging surrealist program—Lautréamont (the pseudonym of Isadore-Lucien Ducasse) had described an experience as marvelous “as the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table” (A. Lykiard, trans., Cambridge, Mass., 1994, p. 193). Max Ernst ran with this idea in his collages, having observed that “the association of two, or more, apparently alien elements on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry” (quoted in C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, London, 1964, p. 298).  

Magritte had employed an art of abrupt juxtaposition in creating the imagery of his early work, through the mid-1930s. He then discovered a more subtle means of inducing the shock of the ordinary by instead revealing an unexpected affinity between objects. “One night in 1936, I woke up in a room where there happened to be a bird sleeping,” he recounted. “A splendid misapprehension made me see the cage with the bird gone and replaced by an egg. I had grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, because the shock I experienced was caused precisely by the affinity between the two objects: the cage and the egg, whereas previously I had provoked the shock of bringing together totally unrelated objects” (“La ligne de vie,” op. cit., 1997, p. 16).  

René Magritte, Sky with two men conversing, 1964. Sold, Christie’s, London, 20 June 2012, lot 68. © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The first version of L’explication is an oil painting Magritte created in 1951, which the artist’s dealer Alexandre Iolas sold the following year to the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Sylvester, no. 764). It is fortunate that the artist created two subsequent versions of this subject, likewise titled, in 1952 (no. 782; sold Christie’s, New York, 11 May 1995, lot 369; and no. 784), because the Rio de Janeiro picture was destroyed by fire in July 1978. A fourth version of the three objects, also dated 1952, is set before a window which initially overlooked a Thames landscape; Magritte subsequently repainted the background to show a metal curtain and grelots (Sylvester, no. 783).

Lot 13C. René Magritte (1898-1967), Femme-bouteille, oil on glass bottle. Height: 11 ¾ in. (29.8 cm.). Painted circa 1941; unique. Estimate: $500,000 – $800,000. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2016. 

Provenance: Paul Delvaux, Brussels (acquired from the artist).
Hardy Amies, London (gift from the above); sale, Sotheby & Co., London, 29 November 1972, lot 82.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner. 

Literature: D. Sylvester and S. Whitfield, René Magritte: Catalogue Raisonné, Oil Paintings and Objects, 1931-1948, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 438, no. 693 (illustrated).

Private collection. Photo: courtesy Brachot Gallery, Brussels. © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Note: “The creation of new objects, the transformation of known objects,” Magritte declared, “...such in general were the means devised to force objects out of the ordinary, to become sensational, and so to establish a profound link between consciousness and the external world” (“La ligne de vie,” lecture, 1938, trans. D. Sylvester, cat. rais., op. cit., vol. V, 1997, p. 20). Having resolved to cultivate such metamorphoses in the imagery of his paintings, Magritte also shared the surrealists’ fascination in creating independent, personalized objects from found things. He contributed to theExposition surréaliste d’objets at the Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, in 1936 a small trompe l’oeil painting of a wedge of cheese, framed and placed under a borrowed countertop glass dome (Sylvester, no. 682). He also painted commercially produced plaster casts of the Vénus de Milo, and the death masks of Napoleon and Pascal (nos. 673-678, 687 and 701). 

While painting the plaster casts, Magritte conceived the idea of employing a far more ubiquitous, mass-produced ready-made, the glass wine bottle. The present object is a claret bottle (used for Bordeaux wines, which the artist appears to have favored) on which Magritte rendered in oil colors the image of a part-length standing nude woman, enveloped on her sides and back in cascading tresses of hair, a subject which aptly became known as a Femme-bouteille. Painted circa 1941, the present work is among the earliest of these objects, which Magritte continued to create during the remainder of this career, the last in 1964 (Sylvester, nos. 1084 and 1085). Having documented twenty-seven painted bottles, and surmised circumstantially the existence of several more, David Sylvester suspected there were numerous others, unknown and probably lost to breakage.  

Some of these bottles bear images of the sky, fire, or other motifs that Magritte adapted from his paintings on canvas; there are also three bottles that incorporate pastiches Magritte created in homage–tongue-in-cheek or otherwise–after synthetic cubist paintings of Picasso (Sylvester, nos. 699, 700 and 1070). Female nudes adorn a third of these objects; according to the artist’s wife Georgette, the first bottle Magritte painted depicts this subject, a work which the artist kept and she continued to retain after his death (Sylvester, no. 690). Countering suggestions in earlier literature that Magritte had been already painting bottles during the 1930s, Sylvester dated the artist’s initial effort to the autumn of 1940, noting that Magritte had recently mentioned the idea in a letter written at that time to the British collector Edward James, then residing in New York. Sylvester also noted that the blond, Lady Godiva-like hair seen in the first bottle shows up in the painting La connaissance naturelle, known to have been completed in early 1941 (Sylvester, no. 488).  

“The painted bottles idea you mentioned in your letter of last autumn is an extremely good one,” James wrote back to Magritte on 23 May 1941. The artist was then living in war-time Brussels under the German occupation; there were only limited opportunities to sell his art, but America had not yet entered the war and was still open to trade from Europe. “You will sell a lot at good prices,” James advised. “This is exactly New York taste and Hollywood’s as well. People in New York were, at least before the war, more sophisticated than in London. I don’t know why, but for the last 15 years there has been more taste for this sort of fantasy in New York” (quoted in cat. rais., op. cit., 1993, vol. II, p. 86). In an undated letter to Magritte’s friend Louis Scutenaire, presumably sent in early November 1941, the artist mentioned jokingly, “The news is that I have a commission from Paris for 50 bottles, but the work causes me positively superhuman exhaustion” (quoted in ibid.). There was, of course, no such order, and any dream that Magritte may have entertained of shipping painted bottles to New York came to naught when Pearl Harbor was bombed on 7 December 1941, and the United States declared war on the Axis powers.  

Scutenaire and his partner Irène Hamoir received in March 1942 the bottle they had requested (Sylvester, no. 694); the early trade in these works most often took place between the artist and his friends. Such was the case for the presentFemme-bouteille, which Magritte either gave or sold to his compatriot Paul Delvaux. “We do not know when,” Sylvester has written, “but we do know that relations between the two artists were at their best during the war years” (ibid., p. 438). Delvaux subsequently gave this Femme-bouteille to Hardy Amies, famed as a fashion designer and dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II, in gratitude for his service during the war as a covert British agent working with the resistance in Brussels. Amies sold this bottle at London auction in 1972, when it was acquired by the present owner.  

The most charming of the painted bottles are les femmes, which proved to be the subject most often in demand. The raised neck and wide shoulders characteristic of a wine or spirit bottle well suit this object for use in simulation of the human figure. Magritte overcame the impediment of the bottle’s straight “masculine” sides by painting the woman’s long hair from top to bottom along her sides, and pinching the contours along each flank in frontal view, thus giving the semblance of feminine curvature to her figure. The addition of painted shadows completed the illusion.  

The affinity that Magritte revealed in this appearance of shared form–woman as bottle, or vice-versa–is essential to the viewer’s immediate recognition of the Femme-bouteille idea and the pleasure that one takes in pondering this visual simile. Magritte, as usual, held still more metaphorical tricks up his sleeve to deepen this connection of one idea with the other, as he suggested in the first picture in which he introduced a Femme-bouteille as an object painted into the composition. In the gouache L’inspiration, 1942 (Sylvester, no. 1174), a reconsideration of Le portrait, 1935 (no. 379), Magritte has placed a Femme-bouteille on a dining table, as the presumed accompaniment to a meal about to be served.  

René Magritte, L’inspiration, 1942. Private collection. Artwork: © 2016 C. Herscovici, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Bridgeman Images.