Lot 1622. A pair of carved Longquan celadon vases and covers, Ming dynasty, 15th century; 10 in. (25 cm.) high. Estimate: US$12,000 - US$18,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Each vase has a high-shouldered, tapering body carved with a wide band of leafy flower scroll between a band of narrow, upright chrysanthemum petals below and a band of peonies on the shoulder, and each cover has a lotus bud-form knob above stepped petal bands and a diaper band at the rim, all under a glaze of olive-green color that also covers the interior and base of the vases.

Provenance: The property of a European Collector; Christie’s New York, 17 October 2002, lot 76.

Lot 1623. A magnificient and very rare large Longquan celadon ‘phoenix tail’ vase, Yuan dynasty (1279-1368); 28 ½ in. (72 cm.) high. Estimate: US$200,000 - US$300,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

The heavily potted vase has a rounded upper body well carved in relief with leafy peony scroll bearing four large flowers above a band of slender overlapping petals. The trumpet-shaped neck is carved with two peony sprays below horizontal ribbed bands on the underside of the flaring mouth rim. The vase is covered overall and inside the high foot with a glaze of rich sea-green color that thins on the raised areas and falls to the unglazed bottom of the foot that has burnt orange-brown in the firing, Japanese double wood box.

Provenance: Private collection, Japan, acquired prior to 1966. 

Literature: Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Chugoku Bijutsu ten series IV So Gen no Bijutsu, Osaka, 1978, p. 15, no. 1-30.
Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art, Sensei, Bansei and Celadon of Longquan Yao, Izumi, 1996, p. 59, no. 76.

Exhibited: On loan: Osaka Municipal Museum, 1966-2018.
Osaka, Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Chugoku Bijutsu ten series IV So Gen no Bijutsu, 15 October - 12 November, 1978.
Izumi, Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art, Sensei, Bansei and Celadon of Longquan Yao, 5 October - 24 November, 1996.
Osaka, Osaka Municipal Museum, Chugoku Kogei 5000 nen, 7 January - 5 February, 2012. 

Lot 604. A large 'Longquan' celadon-glazed 'lotus' bowl, late Yuan - early Ming dynasty. Diameter 11 1/4  in., 28.6 cm. Estimate 8,000 — 12,000 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

the subtly rounded sides rising at a steep angle from a tapered foot before inverting just below the upright rim, the exterior of the sides molded with upright lotus petals, the interior freely incised with a leafy pattern, covered overall in an unctuous sea-green glaze save for the edge of the foot burnt orange during firing.

Property from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Gregory F. Sullivan

Provenance: Sotheby's New York, 19th November 1982, lot 236.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, New York, 20 mars 2019, 10:00 AM

Lot 605. A large and rare carved 'Longquan' celadon-glazed 'phoenix and lotus' dish, Ming dynasty, 15th century. Diameter 14 3/4  in., 37.5 cm. Estimate 4,000 — 6,000 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

stoutly potted, the rounded sides rising from a short tapered foot to an everted rim, the exterior intricately incised with a lively continuous frieze of phoenix amidst leafy sprays of flowering lotus, covered overall in a rich, lustrous sea-green glaze save for a ring at the base burnt orange during firing.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, New York, 20 mars 2019, 10:00 AM

Lot 606. A carved 'Longquan' celadon-glazed 'Floral' bowl, Ming dynasty, 15th century. Diameter 8 3/8  in., 21.3 cm. Estimate 15,000 — 20,000 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

the deep U-shaped sides decorated around the exterior in relief with scrolling vines issuing luxuriant peony, lotus, and chrysanthemum blooms, slender stems extending alongside and sprouting smaller blossoms and buds, the flowers framed by leaves gently bending outward from the stems, the interior similarly incised surrounding a large flowerhead medallion centering the well, a band of keyfret encircling the foot, covered overall in a sea-green glaze pooling in the recesses, an unglazed ring at the base burnt orange from firing.

Provenance: Sotheby's New York, 6th November 1981, lot 242.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, New York, 20 mars 2019, 10:00 AM

Lot 607. A finely carved 'Longquan' celadon-glazed 'peony' bottle vase, yuhuchunping, Ming dynasty, Hongwu period (1368-1398). Height 13 in., 32.9 cm. Estimate 60,000 — 80,000 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

the elegantly proportioned pear-shaped body rising from a slightly splayed foot, sweeping up to a tall waisted neck and an everted lipped rim, the body boldly carved with four large peony sprays borne on an undulating stem also issuing furled leaves, above a broad lotus lappet band enclosing ruyi heads, with a keyfret border at the foot, the shoulder encircled by a pendent ruyi-head border, with classic scroll, keyfret and upright lappet bands at the neck, applied overall with an even olive-green glaze save for the foot ring.

Provenance: Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 29th November 1976, lot 452.
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Chia.
Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 5th November 1996, lot 635.

Exhibited: Julian Thompson, ‘Chinese Celadons’, Arts of Asia, November-December 1993, p. 70, fig. 14.

Note: This yuhuchunping, with its full blooms loosely carved among lushly rendered foliage, its jade-like glaze and its well-proportioned, elegant shape, exemplifies the Longquan potter’s skill and creativity.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, New York, 20 mars 2019, 10:00 AM

Lot 608. An exceptionally rare 'Longquan' celadon-glazed double-gourd 'peony' vase, Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Height 13 1/8  in., 33.3 cm. Estimate 300,000 — 500,000 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

finely potted with a globular lower section rising to a narrow waist surmounted by a pear-form upper bulb and an upright lipped rim, both the lower and upper bulbs decorated in the round with a lively display of crisply sprig-molded and slip relief decorated scrolling leafy stems issuing luxuriant peony blossoms and tender buds, covered overall with a lustrous, thick sea-green glaze stopping neatly at the foot, the foot rim burnt russet-orange in the firing, Japanese wood box (3).

Provenance: Japanese Private Collection, Kansai.

Note: This vase is remarkable for its crisp and elegant floral decoration, which emerges under an attractive bluish-green glaze and accentuates the harmonious double-gourd shape. Fine details are visible through the glaze, including the veining of the flowers and leaves, and the design is rendered in a subtle and elegant manner. Its graceful form, particularly successful glaze and fine decoration, make this vase stand out among other Longquan vases of the period.

Lot 26. Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), A B, Tower, signed, numbered and dated 'Richter 1987 647-4' (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 55 1/8 x 39 3/8in. (140 x 100cm.) Painted in 1987. Estimate: £3,000,000 - £5,000,000. Price realised £3,131,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.
Private Collection (acquired from the above, 1988).
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York 16 November 2017, lot 62.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, p. 183, no. 647-4 (illustrated, unpaged).
M. Godfrey & N. Serota (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh.cat., London, 2011, p. 136.
D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 3 Nos. 389-651-2 1976-1987, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2013, p. 621, no. 647-4 (illustrated in colour). 

Exhibited: London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter: The London Paintings, 1988, no. 13 (illustrated, unpaged; titled 'Tower 6').

Note: ‘The titles Richter has given this group of fourteen abstract paintings are not descriptive; they refer in a general associative way to his experiences of the city – to the chapels in Westminster Abbey, to the Tower of London’ –Jill Lloyd

A thrilling expanse of complex, layered and beautiful colour, A B, Tower (1987) represents Gerhard Richter’s abstract painting at its captivating best. It is one of an important series known as the ‘London Paintings’ – a group of fourteen works, each named after the various Towers of London and the chapels of Westminster Abbey, that Richter created for his first major commercial show in London at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. Works from the series are now held in the permanent collections of Tate, London; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona. In A B, Tower, using his trademark squeegee technique, Richter has scraped, smeared and marbled into being a chromatic chorus of rich and intricate splendour. A gleaming, fissured veil of silvery grey shimmers under and over a dominant field of emerald green. Streaked vertically like a waterfall or the bark of a tree, its stuttering gaps break onto vivid, volcanic flares of orange and vermillion. Richter’s method of dragging wet-on-wet paint produces a myriad of effects: shadowy static, bold pearls of liquid hue and sharp, rhythmic flashes come together in a symphonic marvel of light, dark and iridescence.

Although linked to the city of London by its title, the painting is entirely unplanned and non-referential. ‘Each picture’, Richter has said of his abstract works, ‘has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or a Readymade) always possesses’ (G. Richter, interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 216). This mighty coherence is on full display in A B, Tower, and the work’s sense of natural ‘rightness’ is palpable. While it yields to no single reading, it is tempting to see in its greys and greens a sense of the titular Tower, palely vertical amid the trees by the Thames riverbank. The painting’s fiery orange hues conjure a sunset-like warmth, recalling the blazing Impressionist light of sky and water in Monet’s own famous London paintings of the Houses of Parliament. Amid these more vaporous effects, its structures of dense, textural darkness have the rough-hewn grandeur of ancient mineral or geological formation, seeming reef-like, oxidised, crystalline. Ultimately, however, this is a work of infinite and wonderful ambiguity. Moving beyond painting as representation, message, or feeling, it magnificently embodies Richter’s conception of ‘painting like Nature, painting as change, becoming, emerging, being-there, thusness; without an aim, and just as right, logical, perfect and incomprehensible’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes, 1985’, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 121).

‘The paintings’, Richter has said, ‘gain their life from our desire to recognise something in them. At every point they suggest similarities with real appearances, which then, however, never really materialise’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, ‘Gerhard Richter. Die Macht der Malerei’, Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20). It is this dance between concrete associations and total mystery that makes works like A B, Tower so compelling. If the painting is a response to London as a physical place, it operates beyond any usual sphere of cognition, exuding an awe-inspiring unknowability. Richter does not offer the traditional, landscape-based Sublime experience of German Romanticism, nor its latter-day incarnation as found in the work of some American Abstract Expressionists (even if he might at first glance appear to share in their methods). Unlike Jackson Pollock’s ‘I am nature’, this painting is no paroxysm of the ego: like a true ‘random slice of Nature’, it in fact has no narrative content at all. It is no portal to a spiritual journey, and it is not a record of gestural bodily abandon. Instead, A B, Tower is an uncertain and unclosed realm in which Richter embraces chance as a way of channelling the incommensurability of the world, and open-endedness as a reflection of reality itself. Throughout an astonishingly diverse painterly career, which over more than half a century has engaged with a broad spectrum of the art of his time and of the past – encompassing sophisticated dialogues with photography, portraiture, landscape painting, Art Informel, Minimalism, Pop and more – Richter has never settled for closure. He is a staunch anti- ideologist, grappling problems from a position of fundamental ambivalence. Works like A B, Tower are part of an ongoing exploration of what painting can do, fuelled by a dogged hope that it still has meaning in contemporary life. As Richter describes it, his basic mission is ‘To try out what can be done with painting: how I can paint today, and above all what. Or, to put it differently: the continual attempt to picture to myself what is going on’ (G. Richter, interview with Amine Haase, 1977, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writingsand Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 92).

Often, Richter’s thinking behind his different abstract series can be illuminated by the figurative works that he created at the same time. In parallel with the abstract ‘London Paintings’ at the 1988 exhibition, Richter displayed a number of photo-paintings of rural German landscapes. As Jill Lloyd observed in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘Frequently the landscape views are empty and distant … There is an even, uneventful distribution of light, and nature is windless and still. Paths and gates lead nowhere in particular, and despite the romantic associations there is a peculiar mood of emotional neutrality, of aimlessness, that pervades the scenes … It is as if we are never allowed to stand at quite the right imaginative distance for our visual and emotive responses to concur; attempts to grasp, to understand, are frustrated’ (J. Lloyd, Gerhard Richter: The London Paintings, exh. cat. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 1988, n.p.). These photo-paintings mercilessly exposed the optical clichés of landscape painting, and, as in many of Richter’s works, made the gulf between reality and any form of representation unnervingly clear. Eerie and impenetrable, they stand in stark contrast to works like A B, Tower, which, stemming from Richter’s greatest abstract period, forge their own painterly dimension of exultant beauty, responsiveness, and freedom. While we might never come to terms with the world, A B, Tower stands as a brilliant affirmation that at least, as Richter himself once said, ‘Art is the highest form of hope’ (G. Richter, ‘Text for a catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982’, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 100).

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London, 6 March 2019

Christie’s is delighted to present three outstanding works by Nicolas de Staël. Widely regarded as one of the most important painters of the 1950s, his thickly-impastoed visions of the world around him played a pivotal role in the European post-War artistic landscape. Within a tragically short career spanning around 15 years, de Staël developed a unique idiom caught between abstract and figurative registers. Remaining conceptually independent from contemporary developments such as Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme, his works are defined by their juxtaposed slabs of colour, which seek to animate their subject through tensions in tone, form and texture. The present selection includes two paintings from 1952: de Staël’s annus mirabilis, which saw his palette assume new levels of vibrancy. Bouteilles stands among the largest and finest in the artist’s series of still-life bottles produced that year, whilst Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes) stems from his celebrated cycle of twenty-five ‘footballer’ paintings. The trio is completed by Barques dans le port of 1955: one of the final paintings completed before his untimely death that year. Depicting the port of Antibes, where the artist latterly occupied a studio, its provenance bears witness to his lasting friendship with his dealer Jacques Dubourg, who would become the recipient of de Staël’s final letter just months later.

Born in St Petersburg in 1914 to an aristocratic family and forced to flee Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, de Staël had led an itinerant existence from a young age. Early travels encompassed Holland, where he discovered Vermeer, Hals and Rembrandt, and France, where he became aware of Cézanne, Matisse, Soutine and Braque – the latter of whom would later become a friend. By the time de Staël settled in Paris in 1938, he had received a thorough education in art history. Friendships with members of the Parisian avant-garde, including Sonia Delaunay, Le Corbusier and Jean Arp, encouraged his tendencies towards abstraction. Gradually he began to develop his singular technique of creating heavily built-up surfaces, often by applying oil paint with a palette knife. By the late 1940s he had consolidated his use of these thick planes and facets of colour, which allowed him to reconcile his respect for European old masters with the progressive ideals of his generation. Having made the leap to totally abstract painting, he began to re-incorporate figuration into his works in the early 1950s – a move that dismayed some European critics, but was greeted with skyrocketing success in America. De Staël felt that his compositions had to make intuitive sense, balancing the abstract and the figurative with natural poise. ‘One moves from a line, from a delicate stroke, to a point, to a patch ... just as one moves from a twig to a trunk of a tree’, he wrote in 1955. ‘But everything must hold together, everything must be in place’ (N. de Staël, quoted in R. van Gindertaël, Cimaise, no. 7, June 1955, pp. 3-8). This conviction has defined his global legacy, and is eloquently expressed in the present three canvases.

Lot 33. Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), Bouteilles (Bottles), signed 'Staël' (lower left), oil on canvas, 36 ¼ x 28 ½in. (92 x 72.4cm.) Painted in 1952. Estimate: £1,800,000 - £2,500,000. Price realised £4,519,250© Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Jacques Dubourg, Paris.
Private Collection, Nantes.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2011.

Literature: G. Dumur, 'Nicolas de Stael', in Cahiers d'art, no. 27, Paris 1952 (illustrated, p. 213).
R. V. Gindertael, Stael, Paris 1960, pl. 6 (illustrated in colour, n.p.).
J. Guichard-Meili, Nicolas de Stae¨l paintings, Paris 1966, pl. 9 (illustrated in colour).
J. Dubourg & F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, catalogue raisonné des peintures, Paris 1968, no. 421 (illustrated, p. 201).
N. de Stae¨l and J. Dubourg, Lettres a' Jacques Dubourg, London 1981, unpaged.
F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de L’oeuvre Peint, Neucha^tel 1997, no. 351 (illustrated in colour, p. 327).

Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Jacques Dubourg, Hommage à Nicolas de Staël, 1957, no. 13.

Note: ‘A world, de Staël’s world, caught in the painting of a jug, a bottle, a piece of masonry, a landscape, a tree, an event, a nude, a portrait: whatever his subject, the fascination is complete and inescapable’ –Lucia Moholy

Featured in a stellar range of international exhibitions over the past six decades – including Nicolas de Staël: Retrospective de l’oeuvre peint at the Fondation Maeght in 1991, for which it was the catalogue’s cover image, and the major 2003 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou – Bouteilles is a magnificent work dating from Nicolas de Staël’s annus mirabilis of 1952. It is among the largest and most vibrant of a number of still-lifes depicting bottles he made during that year, which also includes Les Bouteilles, now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. In Bouteilles, five bottles in pale grey, cobalt blue and white emerge from a blazing surface of ochre, coral, ultramarine, vermillion and turquoise. Chromatic contrasts are deployed with an expert eye, heightening each hue to Fauvist levels of intensity; the greys glow like embers within a warm aura of red, while blues and oranges turn each other up to near-tropical radiance. A glimpsed underlying ground of khaki green unites the whole. De Staël has applied his paint liberally with a palette-knife, creating near-sculptural layers of impasto. The painting shifts before our eyes: it appears at once as a figurative composition and as an abstract inferno of gestural expression, the schematic bottles dissolving into a maelstrom worthy of Willem de Kooning. This majestic consolidation of abstract and figurative modes is typical of de Staël’s works of 1952, in which he fully realised his unique painterly language. In its astonishing vibrancy and assurance, Bouteilles stands as an exceptional work from the artist’s greatest period.

Jean-Louis Prat, curator of de Staël’s 1991 retrospective at the Fondation Maeght, singled out Bouteilles as illustrative of his achievements as a colourist. ‘Bernard Dorival’, he wrote, ‘has already rightly emphasised what made the turning point of the year 1952: less a return to the figure than a burst of colour, which he thinks was determined by a visit to the exhibition dedicated to the Fauves at the Musée de l’art moderne. His analysis could serve aptly to describe this picture: “the most violent reds ... start to be neighboured ... with ultramarine and Prussian blues, with yellows and oranges ... Rarely has a colourist pushed chromatic daring further, an audacity all the more reckless in its laying down of these vehement tones in vast expanses, united at their highest pitch.” If the famous greys of Nicolas de Staël survive in this canvas, they are no longer dominant, and content themselves with defining three bottles. Exalted by the pure colours, they take on nuances of pearl, or of precious mother-of-pearl. Like jewels, they are set within another colour, surrounded by a halo of the red which pervades the composition and is elsewhere set against a green, just as the blue adjoins a beach of ochre. De Staël seems to be assaulting the very essentials of colour contrasts. In fact, a careful look shows that the old game of superposition has not disappeared and the colour of the background, which resurfaces in places throughout the painting as so many reminders, furthers the unification of harmony’ (J-L. Prat, Nicolas de Staël: Retrospective de l’oeuvre peint, exh. cat. Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence 1991, p. 114).

A turning point in de Staël’s journey towards works like Bouteilles was the large-scale canvas Toits (Roofs) (1951- 52, Centre Georges Pompidou), which displays a faceted, mosaic-like landscape of blacks and greys beneath an upper half suggestive of the sky. Moving away from the pure abstraction of previous works, which were often simply titled Composition, the denotative title Toits opened the work up for a figurative reading. Already, de Staël was making intelligent use of layered colour: warm, yellowish tones offset cooler blue-greys, while one dark ‘roof’ has a red surround similar to those that halo the bottles in the present work. In works like Bouteilles, however, de Staël treated his tones with far greater boldness. Aside from the Fauvist influence imputed by Dorival, the newly incandescent colours of de Staël’s work were heavily informed by his travels through the Bormes region of the south of France in the summer of 1952, where he was astounded by the transformative dazzle of the sunlight. This environment would also lead to his great Mediterranean landscape paintings, which are among the most celebrated works of his career. For de Staël, communicating the impact of the visible world upon the senses was key. His paintings aimed for no extrapictorial meaning: the objects in his still-lifes are never symbolic in their significance, but act as vehicles for visual exploration, rather like Cézanne’s apples. Works like Bouteilles, in their luminous passion for the pure act of seeing, attain a vital force that sets them apart from the abstract-figurative debates of de Staël’s time, and can be better seen as descended from a metaphysical or even Romantic sensibility. As Denys Sutton wrote in 1952, ‘de Staël established in these works his faith in a tangible work, nourished by light. He created “views” that exist in that light haze or semi-darkness that appears when reality and dream come together, or in the mysterious but alert peace of a snowbound world. These are paintings that elevate the spirit to mountainous peaks’ (D. Sutton, Nicolas de Staël, exh. cat. Matthiessen Gallery, London 1952, n.p.).

Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Nicolas de Staël, 1957, no. 41.
Paris, Galerie de Messine, Nicolas de Staël, 1969.
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Nicolas de Staël: Rétrospective de l’oeuvre peint, 1991, p. 114, no. 33 (illustrated in colour on the cover; illustrated in colour, p. 115). This exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Tokyo, Tobu Museum of Art, Nicolas de Staël, 1993, p. 78, no. 24 (illustrated in colour, p. 79). This exhibition later travelled to Kamakura, Museum of Modern Art and Hiroshima, Museum of Art. 
Paris, Le Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Nicolas deStaël, 2003, p. 245, no. 94 (illustrated in colour, p. 132).
Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Nicolas de Staël 1945-1955, 2010, p. 261, no. 19 (illustrated in colour, p. 99).

Lot 34. Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), Barques dans le Port (Boats in the Harbour), signed ‘Staël’ (lower left), oil on canvas; 28¾ x 39¼in. (73 x 99.7cm.) Painted in 1955. Estimate: £1,400,000 - £1,900,000. Price realised £2,411,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Jacques Dubourg, Paris.
Private Collection, Paris (thence by descent)
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: J. Dubourg and F. de Staël (eds.), Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue raisonné des peintures, Paris 1968, no. 1041 (illustrated, p. 384).
C. Zervos, ‘Nicolas de Staël’, in Cahiers d’Art, no. 30, 1955, (illustrated, p. 272).
P. Granville, ‘Nicolas de Staël, le déroulement de son oeuvre témoigne d’un destin libre et nécéssaire’, in Connaissance des Arts, no. 160, June 1965 (illustrated in colour, p. 97).
B. Dorival, ‘Un homme libre: Nicolas de Staël’, in XXe Siecle, no. 39, December 1972 (illustrated, p. 37).
D. Marchesseau, ‘Nicolas de Staël… jusqu’au bout de soi’, in Jardin des Arts, no. 212–213, July–August 1972 (illustrated, p. 15).
G. Dumur, Nicolas de Staël, Paris 1975 (illustrated in colour, p. 82).
F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint, Neuchâtel 1997, no. 1068 (illustrated, p. 632).

Exhibited: Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Nicolas de Staël 1914–1955, 1956, p. 24, no. 87. 
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Nicolas de Staël 1914–1955, 1956, p. 21, no. 42 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Berne, Kunsthalle Bern, Nicolas de Staël, 1957, no. 79.
Geneva, Galerie Motte, Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955): Peintures et dessins, 1967, p. 26, no. 41 (illustrated, p. 29).
Paris, Jacques Dubourg, Hommage á Nicolas de Staël, 1969, no. 20.
Saint-Paul, Fondation Maeght, Staël, 1972, p. 162, no. 96 (illustrated in colour, p. 144).
Zurich, Galerie Nathan, Nicolas de Staël, Gemälde und Zeichnungen, 1976–1977, no. 24 (illustrated in colour, unpaged).
Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Nicolas de Staël, 1981, no. 112 (illustrated in colour, p. 132). This exhibition later travelled to London, Tate Gallery.
Saint-Paul, Fondation Maeght, Nicolas de Staël: Rétrospective de l'oeuvre peint, 1991, pp. 166 and 203, no. 84 (illustrated in colour, p. 167). This exhibition later travelled to Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (illustrated in colour, p. 169).

Note: ‘On the ramparts of Antibes, the workshop where he settled down to work in September of 1954 overlooks the sea, where he would go to contemplate infinity while marvelling at the massive solitary silhouette of the square fortress built by Vauban above the port’ –Germain Viatte

Lot 35. Nicolas de Staël (1914-1955), Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes), signed 'Staël' (upper left); signed and dated 'Staël 52' (on the reverse), oil on masonite, 22 ½ x 30 3/8in. (57 x 77.2cm.) Executed in 1952. Estimate: £2,000,000 - £3,000,000. Price realised £2,891,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Theodore Schempp/ M. Knoedler and Co., New York.
Lee A. Ault, New York (acquired from the above in 1953).
Mr and Mrs Burton Tremaine, New York (acquired from the above in 1956). 
Galleria Galatea, Turin.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1972.

Literature: M. Seuphor, La Peinture abstraite sa geneses son expansion, Paris 1962, no. 183 (illustrated in colour with incorrect orientation, p. 130).
J. Dubourg and F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël: catalogue raisonné de peintures, Paris 1968, no. 403 (illustrated with incorrect dimensions, p. 197).
F. de Staël, Nicolas de Staël: catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre Peint, Neuchâtel 1997, no. 419 (illustrated with incorrect dimensions, p. 352).

Exhibited: New York, M. Knoedler and Co., Nicolas de Staël: Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs, 1953, no. 33.

Note: ‘His entire studio was cluttered with drafts of all sizes, inspired by this spectacle: here the captain of the French team, there the parade of players on the pitch, there the extraordinary scissor-kick of a player almost falling; everything, as if aflame, in chords of blue and red, skies, men articulated violently, localised and general movement, greens, yellows, a kind of “conquest of the air”’ –Pierre Lecuire

A jewel-like vision of colour and movement, Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes) (1952) is a scintillating work from one of the great moments of Nicolas de Staël’s career. It has been held in the same private collection for over forty years. On 26 March 1952, de Staël and his wife watched a historic football match between France and Sweden at Paris’s Parc des Princes stadium. Enthused by this spectacle of athletic vigour and saturated, floodlit colour, the artist immediately embarked on a series of twenty-five ‘footballer’ paintings. This particular work bears exceptional provenance: it was shown in de Staël’s acclaimed first New York solo show at Knoedler & Co. in 1953, and later owned by the influential New York collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine. Other works from the series are held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Musée des Beaux Arts, Dijon; the Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas; and the Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny. Employing his signature thick facets of oil paint, de Staël created bright, dynamic compositions that straddled the abstract and the figurative, reflecting the influence of Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1438-40) – which he had seen in London’s National Gallery a few months previously – as much as of the abstraction of Parisian avant-gardists such as Matisse, whose collaged works like The Snail (1953) share in the bold, angular planes of de Staël’s painting. Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes) employs a rhythmic counterpoint of blue, red, white and black palette-knife strokes to conjure a throng of players upon a deep green pitch, gathered around a sun-like yellow ball at the centre. Touches of black convey arms and legs poised mid-action; set against a swathe of darkness above, the striking contrast of the blacks, whites, reds and blues makes the floodlit drama of the stadium palpable. De Staël captures his scene with stunning economy and clarity, uniting the vivid excitement of the beautiful game with the physical and chromatic thrills of painting itself.

Writing to his friend René Char a fortnight after the match, de Staël’s exhilaration remained at fever pitch. ‘My dear René, Thank you for your note, you are an angel, just like the boys who play in the Parc des Princes each evening … I think of you often. When you come back we will go and watch some matches together. It’s absolutely marvellous. No one there is playing to win, except in rare moments of nervousness which cut you to the quick. Between sky and earth, on the red or blue grass, an acrobatic tonne of muscles flies in abandon, forgetting itself entirely in the paradoxical concentration that this requires. What joy! René, what joy! Anyway, I’ve put the whole French and Swedish teams to work, and some progress starts to be made. If I were to find a space as big as the Rue Gauguet, I would set off on two hundred small canvases so that their colour could sing like the posters on the motorway out of Paris’ (N. de Staël, Letter to René Char, 10 April 1952, quoted in F. de Staël, ed., Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue Raisonnéde l’Oeuvre Peint, Neuchâtel 1997, p. 975). It was clearly not just the tumult of energetic motion and blazing hues that delighted him, but also the heroic action of the players, who enter a Zen-like state of self-abandon and total presence when immersed in the game. Just such a paradoxical poise can be said to characterise de Staël’s painting, which at once depicts a figurative subject and attains a new, musical dimension through the dance of flat shapes that make up its surface. ‘I do not set up abstract painting in opposition to figurative’, he once explained. ‘A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space’ (N. de Staël, quoted in Nicolas de Staël in America, exh. cat. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. 1990, p. 22). De Staël had been developing this approach since 1949, moving away from total abstraction; works like Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes), which transposes the speed, muscle and colour of the football match into a mosaic-like tableau of interacting abstract forms and tones, mark its brilliant culmination.

De Staël’s insistence on figurative subject matter was met with some consternation in Europe, where figuration was seen as outmoded. Upon his first American solo exhibition at Knoedler & Co. in 1953, however, the artist found a warmer reception. Less concerned than French viewers with the abstraction-figuration dilemma – a formal debate which held scant interest for de Staël himself – the audience in New York responded to the powerfully-expressed emotion of his works. Shown alongside such major 1952 paintings as Le Parc de Sceaux (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C) and Figures au bord de la mer (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf), Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes) was part of a display of de Staël’s work at its very best. Reviews were plentiful and positive, and the show a huge commercial success. ‘In Europe today’, reported Time magazine, ‘de Staël is ranked among the most important “young” artists. Manhattan critics, pleased to have something really new to write about, trowelled on the praise. “Majestic”, said the Times. Said Art News: “One of the few painters to emerge from postwar Paris with something to say, and a way of saying it with authority.” Manhattan buyers were just as complimentary in a more practical way; by week’s end the show was a near sellout’ (‘Say it with Slabs’, Time, 30 March 1953, p. 68). Attaining a unique compression of passionate vitality and pure pictorial power, Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes) is an icon of this triumphant peak of de Staël’s practice. 

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London, 6 March 2019

Lot 28. Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Concetto spaziale, Attese, signed, titled and inscribed ‘l. Fontana “Concetto spaziale” “Attese” 1+1-XYZZA’ (on the reverse), waterpaint on canvas, 35¼ x 45 7/8in. (89.5 x 116.5cm.) Executed in 1960. Estimate: £2,000,000 - £3,000,000. Price realised £2,291,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Galleria Arco d’Alibert, Rome. 
Paolo Nazzaro Collection, Rome.
Bernard Cats, Brussels. 
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005. 

Literature: E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Generale, vol. I, Milan 1986, no. 60 T 117 (illustrated, p. 333). 
E. Crispolti, Lucio Fontana, Catalogo Ragionato de Sculture, Dipinti, Ambientazioni, tomo I, Milan 2006, no. 60 T 117 (illustrated, p. 502). 

Exhibited: Roma, Palazzo delle Exposizioni, X Quadriennale: 2. Situazione dll'arte non figurativa, 1973. 

Note: ‘I have invented a formula that I think I cannot perfect. I succeeded in giving those looking at my work a sense of spatial calm, of cosmic rigor, of serenity with regard to the infinite. Further than this I could not go’ –Lucio Fontana

Spanning over a metre in width, Concetto spaziale, Attese (1960) is a spectacular early example of Lucio Fontana’s tagli or ‘cuts’, which the artist began making in late 1958 and would dominate the triumphant final decade of his practice. The tagli were a philosophical gesture, and creative rather than destructive: in cutting the canvas open, Fontana transcended centuries of picture-plane-bound art history to reveal the infinity of space beyond, in which he saw the limitless future of mankind in the ‘spatial era.’ Having first pierced the canvas with buchi (‘holes’) in 1954, Fontana spent some years experimenting with surface ornamentation including glass fragments, impastoed paint and glitter before arriving at the serenity of the monochrome tagli, which constitute the refined apex of his adventurous, constantly evolving formal vocabulary. Its beguiling pure white surface incised with a quartet of vertical incisions, the present work stands among the most inventive early examples within the series. The cuts alternate in a paired dance between greater and shorter lengths, brought to life by their supple, curving motion. This balletic, near-calligraphic arrangement is distinguished by its powerful rhythmic character, exemplifying the drama and elegance with which Fontana deployed his conceptual innovation.

Although he experimented with a wide range of hues in his works, white was Fontana’s ultimate colour of choice for the tagli. Towards the end of his life, he was awarded the Grand Prize at the 1966 Venice Biennale for an installation of twenty white canvases potent in their simplicity, each presenting a single vertical incision down the centre. Creating a stark, pristine contrast with the abyssal blackness of his cuts, white also represented for Fontana a ‘ground zero’ that could open up previously unimagined freedoms, ideas and potentials in the postwar era. Works like the present, their slashed surfaces opening up the fourth dimension in spiritual union with the astronauts who were making bold new steps into space, offer an optimistic vision of man’s potential in the unfolding infinity of the universe. ‘When I sit down to contemplate one of my cuts, I sense all at once an enlargement of the spirit,’ Fontana said. ‘I feel like a man freed from the shackles of matter, a man at one with the immensity of the present and of the future’ (L. Fontana, quoted in L. M. Barbero, ‘Lucio Fontana: Venice/ New York’ in Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York, exh. cat. Guggenheim Museum, New York 2006, p. 23).

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London, 6 March 2019

Lot 32. Pierre Soulages (b. 1919), Peinture 162 x 130cm, 16 octobre 1966, signed 'Soulages' (lower right); signed, titled and dated ‘SOULAGES 16 Oct 66 162 x 130’ (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 63 ¾ x 51in.(162 x 130cm.) Painted in 1966. Estimate: £1,500,000 - £2,000,000. Price realised £1,811,250.© Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Galerie de France, Paris.
Private Collection, Italy.
Art Emporium Gallery, Vancouver.
Private Collection, Vancouver.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Literature: P. Encrevé, Soulages, L'oeuvre complet Peintures II. 1959-1978, Paris 1995, p. 17, no. 588 (illustrated in colour, p. 171).

Exhibited: Zurich, Gimpel and Hanover Galerie, Soulages, 1967, no. 6 (illustrated, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to London, Gimpel Fils Gallery and Paris, Galerie de France. 
Montreal, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Soulages, 1968. This exhibition later travelled to Québec, Musée National Des Beaux-Arts Du Québec.
Buenos Aires, Museo de Bellas Artes, Paris y el arte contempora´neo, 1972. This exhibition later travelled to Montevideo; Santiago; Lima; Bogota; Quito; Caracas and Mexico.
Paris, Galerie Pascal Lansberg, Soulages, 2016, p. 26 (illustrated in colour, p. 27).

Note: ‘Black … has always remained the base of my palette. It is the most intense, most violent absence of colour, which gives an intense and violent presence to colours, even to white: just as a tree makes the sky seem more blue’ –Pierre Soulages

With its glistening black beams punctuated by glints of white and ochre, Peinture 162 x 130cm, 16 octobre 1966 is a bold large-scale painting by Pierre Soulages. Stretching over a metre and a half in height, it offers a scintillating vision of light and darkness, distinguished by its horizontal layering of tonalities. Executed in 1966, the work demonstrates the artist’s consummate mastery of his medium during a period of international acclaim. Hailed on both sides of the Atlantic, Soulages embarked upon a string of significant exhibitions during the 1960s: 1966 saw the opening of his retrospective at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curated by James Johnson Sweeney, as well as a presentation of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, that summer. The present work made its debut the following year, and was subsequently included in his 1968 touring exhibition originating at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Seeking neither to conjure emotions nor to document the physical act of painting, Soulages is fascinated by the balancing of abstract contrasts, creating resonant textural force fields emptied of all external references. With sweeping, near-calligraphic strokes – created using a variety of tools – he paints and repaints the surface of his canvases, simultaneously adding and stripping away layers of pigment. Inspired less by his American Abstract Expressionist contemporaries than by the timeless majesty of prehistoric and Romanesque art, works such as the present rejoice in the raw, unadulterated power of their materials. ‘I cover and discover surfaces’, Soulages explains; ‘... I am telling nothing’ (P. Soulages, quoted in R. Vailland, ‘Comment travaille Pierre Soulages’, L’Oeil, No. 77, May 1961, p. 7).

Soulages’ paintings demonstrate a complex understanding of colour and form. The artist frequently recalls a childhood episode when he was spreading black ink upon white paper. A friend of his older sister asked what he was painting; she laughed when he replied ‘snow’. He later surmised that he had been trying to render the white paper more white, luminous and snow-like via its contrast with the black ink. ‘Black … has always remained the base of my palette’, he has explained. ‘It is the most intense, most violent absence of colour, which gives an intense and violent presence to colours, even to white: just as a tree makes the sky seem more blue’ (P. Soulages, quoted in J. Johnson Sweeney, Pierre Soulages, Neuchâtel, 1972, p. 13). Soulages works on the premise that our perception of colour is dependent on its shape, density and consistency: as such, it lies beyond the limits of language. ‘Gauguin already expressed it perfectly, when he said that a kilo of green is more green than a hundred grams of the same green’, he professed (P. Soulages, quoted in ‘Peindre la peinture’, Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir: Entretiens avec Françoise Jaunin, Lausanne, 2014, pp. 12-13). Thus, each stroke of the present work is conceived as a unique entity, cast in a play of endless variation with its neighbouring elements. By using the same descriptive format for his titles – painting, dimensions, date – Soulages allows the viewer’s perception of the artwork to be guided solely by the shifting dynamics of its abstract surface.

Though his paintings are superficially comparable with those of artists such as Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, Soulages feels little affinity with his American contemporaries. When he first visited New York in 1957, Motherwell proposed that Abstract Expressionism could only truly be understood by Americans. Soulages retorted that ‘An art should be understood, loved and shared by anyone, anywhere in the world … I believe that in art, there are fundamentally only personal adventures that go beyond the individual, and even beyond his culture’ (P. Soulages, quoted in ‘Peindre la peinture’, Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir: Entretiens avec Françoise Jaunin, Lausanne, 2014, p. 31). Championing a universal appreciation of image-making, Soulages’ inspirations date largely from the earliest chapters of its history, including the 20,000-year-old cave paintings of Lascaux and the Neolithic stone carvings that populated his native region of Rodez in Southern France. He was also deeply influenced by a visit to Sainte-Foy de Conques, a famous Romanesque abbey church near his hometown. The experience of standing beneath the 11th-century building’s huge barrel vault, with its narrow shafts of light and cloak of warm darkness, would remain with him throughout his career. ‘My pictures are poetic objects capable of receiving what each person is ready to invest there according to the ensemble of forms and colours that is proposed to him’, he explains. ‘As for me, I don’t know what I am looking for when painting … it’s what I do that teaches me what I’m looking for’ (P. Soulages, quoted in Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir: Entretiens avec Françoise Jaunin, Lausanne 2014, p. 14).

Lot 24. Pierre Soulages (b. 1919), Peinture 73 x 100cm 17 mai 1964, signed 'Soulages' (lower right), oil on canvas, 28 ¾ x 39 3/8in. (73 x 100cm.) Painted in 1964. Estimate: £500,000 - £700,000. Price realised £971,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Kootz Gallery, New York (acquired in 1964).
Galerie de France, Paris (acquired in 1970).
Acquired from the above and thence by descent to the present owner.

Literature: P. Encrevé, Soulages, L'oeuvre complet Peintures II. 1959-1978, Paris 1995, pp. 17, 316 and 317, no. 539 (illustrated in colour, p. 154).
P. Ungar, Soulages in America, New York 2014 (installation view illustrated, p. 101).

Exhibited: New York, Kootz Gallery, Soulages at Kootz, 1965.
Toulouse, Galerie Protée, Soulages, 1972. 

Note: ‘A painting by Pierre Soulages is like a chord on a vast piano struck with both hands simultaneously – struck and held’ –James Johnson Sweeney

With its bold, calligraphic bars of black latticing a field of luminous ochre, Peinture 73 x 100cm, 17 mai 1964 is an exquisite example of Pierre Soulages’ uniquely resonant abstract painting. Soulages had first made unified linear compositions in the late 1940s, realising in them the guiding principle of his art – ‘The duration of the line having disappeared, time was static in these signs made by summary and direct strokes of the brush; movement is no longer described; it becomes tension, movement under control, that is to say dynamism’ (P. Soulages, quoted in J. Johnson Sweeney, Soulages, New York, 1972, p. 22). He experimented with sonorous chiaroscuro effects throughout the 1950s, and gradually began to create complex, translucent colour through scraping away layers of impasto. The present painting displays the radiant, smoky interplay of shadow and light typical of his 1960s work. Broad, interlocking black strokes are dragged vertically and horizontally against a smooth ochre ground; this top-heavy, largely horizontal structure, cut through by a commanding diagonal, forms an imposing yet delicately balanced presence. Varied opacities conjure a rich variety of tone and texture, with swathes of dark, tarry oil paint offset by areas dragged into delicate translucency. This exalting of his material’s innate qualities is characteristic of Soulages, who makes every decision based on the painting in front of him. He paints not as a philosopher, narrator or ideologue, but as a painter. Nor, despite winning early acclaim in America during the art world’s focal shift from Paris to New York in the 1950s, is he an Abstract Expressionist. Uninterested in communicating his emotions or states of being, he does not aim to record gesture or movement in his brushstrokes. He instead arranges contrasts into a single, forceful surface that is to be apprehended in its totality. As the artist himself says: ‘I do not depict, I paint. I do not represent, I present’ (P. Soulages, quoted in ‘Peindre la peinture’, Pierre Soulages: Outrenoir: Entretiens avec Françoise Jaunin, Lausanne 2014, p. 16).

1964 was an important year for Soulages, who had by this point reached renown on both sides of the Atlantic. He showed works in several major group exhibitions, including 56-64, Painting & Sculpture of a Decade at the Tate, London; Documenta III in Kassel; and the Pittsburgh International, where, alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Victor Pasmore and Antonio Saura, he was awarded the 1964 Carnegie Prize for painting. That same year, Soulages refused to participate in Galerie Charpentier’s annual L’École de Paris exhibition – which he had shown in on several previous occasions – because he felt it was excluding the work of many young French abstractionists who considered worthy of attention. Even as American Pop Art was gaining prominence on the global stage (an advance marked by Robert Rauschenberg’s infamous Golden Lion win at the 1964 Venice Biennale, much to the dismay of French critics), Soulages’ single-minded dedication to his vision charged European painterly debates with continued relevance. ‘In the years of great dissipation that we are experiencing,’ wrote the French critic Dora Vallier, ‘where art seems to be losing touch with its essence, where palliatives of “originality” supplant authentic creation, it seems to me necessary to underline the effort of a painter who, in seeking his truth, dug down in painting until, taking support of its very foundations, he could seize and reveal to us one of the aspects of the twentieth century’ (D. Vallier, ‘Aux antipodes de l’angoisse: Soulages ou l’enracinement de la peinture’, XXe Siècle, no. 23, Paris, 1964).

James Johnson Sweeney, an early champion of Soulages as director of the Guggenheim in the 1950s, wrote memorably that ‘A painting by Pierre Soulages is like a chord on a vast piano struck with both hands simultaneously – struck and held’ (J. Johnson Sweeney, Pierre Soulages, New York, 1972, p. 5). This apt simile captures the sustained, singular intensity of Soulages’ work. It is important to distinguish chord from melody: unlike the gestural sequences of Abstract Expressionism, a work like Peinture 73 x 100cm, 17 mai 1964 offers no itinerary to be followed, no temporal anecdote of the artist’s feelings poured onto the canvas. Neither lyrical, personal or sentimental, it is instead a single, resonant surface of overall structural energy. Soulages never paints ‘from his head’ with something already in mind, but rather responds to the paint in front of him, working directly with its viscosity, translucency and colour to build a ‘sign’ that can be apprehended in an instant. The artwork must not be an illusion, but a presence. To apply the paint, Soulages uses house-painters’ brushes or wide, flat scraping tools that he constructs himself, purposely eliding the expressive dimension of the gestural trace. Always using the same neutral format for his titles – painting, dimensions, date – he keeps any extrapictorial meaning firmly at bay, letting the experience of the picture be governed solely by the unique, unfixed dynamic of its abstract forms. Soulages’ conception of art’s universal, timeless dimension was heavily informed by the rough-hewn grandeur of the prehistoric and Romanesque art that inspired him as a youth in the south of France. ‘It’s fascinating to think that as soon as man came into existence, he started painting’, he says. ‘… I’ve always loved black, and I realized that, from the beginning, man went into completely dark caves to paint. They painted with black too. They could have painted with white because there were white stones all over the ground, but no, they chose to paint with black in the dark. It’s incredible, isn’t it?’ (P. Soulages, quoted in Z. Stillpass, ‘Pierre Soulages’, Interview Magazine, 7 May 2014). Remarkable in its concise power, Peinture 73 x 100cm, 17 mai 1964 is charged with textural life, dark brilliance and condensed energy; anticipating the ultimate breakthrough of the all-black Outrenoir canvases commenced fifteen years later, it reveals Soulages not only as a master of black, but also of light. 

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London, 6 March 2019

Lot 1619. A rare Longquan celadon Guan-type octogonal stem cup, Yuan-Ming dynasty (1279-1644); 3 ¼ in. (8.4 cm.) high. Estimate: US$30,000 - US$50,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

The cup has flaring, faceted sides supported on a spreading stem foot encircled by a narrow collar, and is covered overall with a clear glaze of pale olive tone suffused with an extensive, icy crackle that thins on the raised areas. Together with a catalogue, Inki: hai, wan, taku tokubetsu tenji (The Special Exhibition of Vessels: Cups, Bowls and Cup Stands), Kuboso Museum, Izumi, 1989; Japanese wood box inscribed by ceramic scholar Fujioka Ryoichi (1909-1991).

Lot 1620. A large carved Longquan celadon tripod censer, Ming dynasty (1368-1644); 12 in. (30.4 cm.) diam. Estimate: US$6,000 - US$8,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

The heavily potted censer raised on three mask-form legs is carved on the exterior with a band of floral scroll on a wave-pattern ground, and is covered overall with a sea-green glaze except for the base and the center of the interior, exposing the body burnt orange in the firing.

Lot 1621. A carved Longquan celadon dish, Ming dynasty (1368-1644); 11 ¾ in. (29.8 cm.) diam. Estimate: US$7,000 - US$9,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

The dish is carved in the center with a medallion of trellis pattern surrounded by floral scrolls in the well. The dish is covered inside and out with a thick glaze of sea-green tone, except for a wide ring on the base which has burnt orange in the firing.

Property from the Caddle Family Collection.

Provenance: Kwok Gallery, Singapore, 1992. 

Lot 1622. A pair of carved Longquan celadon vases and covers, Ming dynasty, 15th century; 10 in. (25 cm.) high. Estimate: US$12,000 - US$18,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Each vase has a high-shouldered, tapering body carved with a wide band of leafy flower scroll between a band of narrow, upright chrysanthemum petals below and a band of peonies on the shoulder, and each cover has a lotus bud-form knob above stepped petal bands and a diaper band at the rim, all under a glaze of olive-green color that also covers the interior and base of the vases.

Provenance: The property of a European Collector; Christie’s New York, 17 October 2002, lot 76.

Lot 1623. A magnificient and very rare large Longquan celadon ‘phoenix tail’ vase, Yuan dynasty (1279-1368); 28 ½ in. (72 cm.) high. Estimate: US$200,000 - US$300,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

The heavily potted vase has a rounded upper body well carved in relief with leafy peony scroll bearing four large flowers above a band of slender overlapping petals. The trumpet-shaped neck is carved with two peony sprays below horizontal ribbed bands on the underside of the flaring mouth rim. The vase is covered overall and inside the high foot with a glaze of rich sea-green color that thins on the raised areas and falls to the unglazed bottom of the foot that has burnt orange-brown in the firing, Japanese double wood box.

Provenance: Private collection, Japan, acquired prior to 1966. 

Literature: Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Chugoku Bijutsu ten series IV So Gen no Bijutsu, Osaka, 1978, p. 15, no. 1-30.
Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art, Sensei, Bansei and Celadon of Longquan Yao, Izumi, 1996, p. 59, no. 76.

Exhibited: On loan: Osaka Municipal Museum, 1966-2018.
Osaka, Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, Chugoku Bijutsu ten series IV So Gen no Bijutsu, 15 October - 12 November, 1978.
Izumi, Kuboso Memorial Museum of Art, Sensei, Bansei and Celadon of Longquan Yao, 5 October - 24 November, 1996.
Osaka, Osaka Municipal Museum, Chugoku Kogei 5000 nen, 7 January - 5 February, 2012. 

Lot 604. A large 'Longquan' celadon-glazed 'lotus' bowl, late Yuan - early Ming dynasty. Diameter 11 1/4  in., 28.6 cm. Estimate 8,000 — 12,000 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

the subtly rounded sides rising at a steep angle from a tapered foot before inverting just below the upright rim, the exterior of the sides molded with upright lotus petals, the interior freely incised with a leafy pattern, covered overall in an unctuous sea-green glaze save for the edge of the foot burnt orange during firing.

Property from the Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Gregory F. Sullivan

Provenance: Sotheby's New York, 19th November 1982, lot 236.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, New York, 20 mars 2019, 10:00 AM

Lot 26. Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), A B, Tower, signed, numbered and dated 'Richter 1987 647-4' (on the reverse), oil on canvas, 55 1/8 x 39 3/8in. (140 x 100cm.) Painted in 1987. Estimate: £3,000,000 - £5,000,000. Price realised £3,131,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019

Provenance: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.
Private Collection (acquired from the above, 1988).
Anon. sale, Sotheby's New York 16 November 2017, lot 62.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Literature: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.), Gerhard Richter, Werkübersicht/Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, p. 183, no. 647-4 (illustrated, unpaged).
M. Godfrey & N. Serota (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh.cat., London, 2011, p. 136.
D. Elger (ed.), Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné Volume 3 Nos. 389-651-2 1976-1987, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2013, p. 621, no. 647-4 (illustrated in colour). 

Exhibited: London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter: The London Paintings, 1988, no. 13 (illustrated, unpaged; titled 'Tower 6').

Note: ‘The titles Richter has given this group of fourteen abstract paintings are not descriptive; they refer in a general associative way to his experiences of the city – to the chapels in Westminster Abbey, to the Tower of London’ –Jill Lloyd

A thrilling expanse of complex, layered and beautiful colour, A B, Tower (1987) represents Gerhard Richter’s abstract painting at its captivating best. It is one of an important series known as the ‘London Paintings’ – a group of fourteen works, each named after the various Towers of London and the chapels of Westminster Abbey, that Richter created for his first major commercial show in London at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. Works from the series are now held in the permanent collections of Tate, London; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona. In A B, Tower, using his trademark squeegee technique, Richter has scraped, smeared and marbled into being a chromatic chorus of rich and intricate splendour. A gleaming, fissured veil of silvery grey shimmers under and over a dominant field of emerald green. Streaked vertically like a waterfall or the bark of a tree, its stuttering gaps break onto vivid, volcanic flares of orange and vermillion. Richter’s method of dragging wet-on-wet paint produces a myriad of effects: shadowy static, bold pearls of liquid hue and sharp, rhythmic flashes come together in a symphonic marvel of light, dark and iridescence.

Although linked to the city of London by its title, the painting is entirely unplanned and non-referential. ‘Each picture’, Richter has said of his abstract works, ‘has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of Nature (or a Readymade) always possesses’ (G. Richter, interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 216). This mighty coherence is on full display in A B, Tower, and the work’s sense of natural ‘rightness’ is palpable. While it yields to no single reading, it is tempting to see in its greys and greens a sense of the titular Tower, palely vertical amid the trees by the Thames riverbank. The painting’s fiery orange hues conjure a sunset-like warmth, recalling the blazing Impressionist light of sky and water in Monet’s own famous London paintings of the Houses of Parliament. Amid these more vaporous effects, its structures of dense, textural darkness have the rough-hewn grandeur of ancient mineral or geological formation, seeming reef-like, oxidised, crystalline. Ultimately, however, this is a work of infinite and wonderful ambiguity. Moving beyond painting as representation, message, or feeling, it magnificently embodies Richter’s conception of ‘painting like Nature, painting as change, becoming, emerging, being-there, thusness; without an aim, and just as right, logical, perfect and incomprehensible’ (G. Richter, ‘Notes, 1985’, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 121).

‘The paintings’, Richter has said, ‘gain their life from our desire to recognise something in them. At every point they suggest similarities with real appearances, which then, however, never really materialise’ (G. Richter, quoted in S. Koldehoff, ‘Gerhard Richter. Die Macht der Malerei’, Art. Das Kunstmagazin, December 1999, p. 20). It is this dance between concrete associations and total mystery that makes works like A B, Tower so compelling. If the painting is a response to London as a physical place, it operates beyond any usual sphere of cognition, exuding an awe-inspiring unknowability. Richter does not offer the traditional, landscape-based Sublime experience of German Romanticism, nor its latter-day incarnation as found in the work of some American Abstract Expressionists (even if he might at first glance appear to share in their methods). Unlike Jackson Pollock’s ‘I am nature’, this painting is no paroxysm of the ego: like a true ‘random slice of Nature’, it in fact has no narrative content at all. It is no portal to a spiritual journey, and it is not a record of gestural bodily abandon. Instead, A B, Tower is an uncertain and unclosed realm in which Richter embraces chance as a way of channelling the incommensurability of the world, and open-endedness as a reflection of reality itself. Throughout an astonishingly diverse painterly career, which over more than half a century has engaged with a broad spectrum of the art of his time and of the past – encompassing sophisticated dialogues with photography, portraiture, landscape painting, Art Informel, Minimalism, Pop and more – Richter has never settled for closure. He is a staunch anti- ideologist, grappling problems from a position of fundamental ambivalence. Works like A B, Tower are part of an ongoing exploration of what painting can do, fuelled by a dogged hope that it still has meaning in contemporary life. As Richter describes it, his basic mission is ‘To try out what can be done with painting: how I can paint today, and above all what. Or, to put it differently: the continual attempt to picture to myself what is going on’ (G. Richter, interview with Amine Haase, 1977, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writingsand Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 92).

Often, Richter’s thinking behind his different abstract series can be illuminated by the figurative works that he created at the same time. In parallel with the abstract ‘London Paintings’ at the 1988 exhibition, Richter displayed a number of photo-paintings of rural German landscapes. As Jill Lloyd observed in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘Frequently the landscape views are empty and distant … There is an even, uneventful distribution of light, and nature is windless and still. Paths and gates lead nowhere in particular, and despite the romantic associations there is a peculiar mood of emotional neutrality, of aimlessness, that pervades the scenes … It is as if we are never allowed to stand at quite the right imaginative distance for our visual and emotive responses to concur; attempts to grasp, to understand, are frustrated’ (J. Lloyd, Gerhard Richter: The London Paintings, exh. cat. Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London 1988, n.p.). These photo-paintings mercilessly exposed the optical clichés of landscape painting, and, as in many of Richter’s works, made the gulf between reality and any form of representation unnervingly clear. Eerie and impenetrable, they stand in stark contrast to works like A B, Tower, which, stemming from Richter’s greatest abstract period, forge their own painterly dimension of exultant beauty, responsiveness, and freedom. While we might never come to terms with the world, A B, Tower stands as a brilliant affirmation that at least, as Richter himself once said, ‘Art is the highest form of hope’ (G. Richter, ‘Text for a catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982’, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962-1993, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 100).

Christie's. Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, London, 6 March 2019