Art Deco Platinum, Cabochon Sapphire, Diamond and Black Onyx Brooch

The modified rectangular openwork brooch highlighted by 16 buff-topped cabochon sapphires, decorated with numerous small old European-cut diamonds, accented by a stylized key-fret motif set with calibre-cut buff-topped black onyx, with French assay mark, circa 1920, approximately 7.8 dwt.

Bookcover (leg-shing), Tibet, around 1200 AD. Painted and gilded wood, 36 x 14 cm. Photo courtesy Astamangala.

Astamangala, established in 1979, is the only gallery in the Netherlands specializing in ancient art and ethnographical objects from the Himalayan region. The gallery is situated in the world-famous Spiegelkwartier, the Amsterdam centre of art and antiques.

The main focus is on art from the Tibetan Buddhist world, with a large collection of thangkas, sculptures in wood, bronze and copper repoussé, ritual objects, bookcovers, furniture, rugs and textiles from Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Mongolia.

Besides art from the Tibetan Buddhist world we also offer art from Nepal and India, especially bronzes, miniature-paintings on paper and textiles.

Dance mask (cham-bak) of Mahakala, painted paper mache, glue and textile. Tibet, 18th-19th century ( C14 ). 38 cm. Photo courtesy Astamangala

Astamangala. Ancient art from Tibet, Nepal and India. Keizersgracht 574, 1017 EM Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 20 623 44 02 - Email: asta@xs4all.nl - Website: www.astamangala.com.Asian Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Stele of Visnu, India, Pala period, 11th century, black stone, 50 cm. Photo courtesy Buddhist Art.

From an old swiss collection acquired from Dr. Biegler Asian Art, Zurich.

Portrait of Dondrup Sangpo, Abbot of Drepung Monastery, Tibet, 16th century. Bronze, 21 cm. Photo courtesy Buddhist Art.

In 6 years in business Buddhist Art has been offering a wide selection of top quality Khmer and Chinese/Tibetan sculpture as well as selected masterpieces of Thai, Burmese and Lao Art. We are regularly exhibiting at Asia Week in New York,www.asiaweekny.com, Textile and Tribal Art San Francisco, www.caskeylees.com, and at Asian Art in Brussels,www.asianatinbrussels.com.

Buddhist Art. Khmer, Himalayan and South East Asian art. 10625 Berlin, Germany. Tel: +49 173 6561260 - Fax: +49 30 91437067 - Mobile: +49 173 6561260 - Email: buddhist.art@hotmail.com - Website : www.buddhist-art.info. Asian Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Samadhi Buddha, Gilt bronze, Ceylon, Polonnaruva period, 11th-12th century. 17,5 cm h. Photo courtesy Carlo Cristi.

Detail of a silk tunic with birds in trilobed niches and winged royal horses. Polychrome silk, Mon Dvaravati, Central Asia, (Uzbekistan) 7th-8th century ( C14 ). 150 cm length. Photo courtesy Carlo Cristi.

Carlo Cristi. Arte Orientale Tessili. Asian Arts Company SPRL, Rue de Plancenoit 12, 1401 Nivelles, Belgium - Mobile: + 39 335 5933732 - Email: carlocristi@tin.it - Website: asianart.com/carlocristi. Asian Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Cauvisi with Jina Parsvanatha, Madhya Pradesh, India, 10th century. Sandstone; h. 64 cm. Photo courtesy Carlos Cruanas

Provenance: Private European collection acquired 1990. Sothebys London 

Published: Sacred Art of Indic Traditions, 2005

Vaishnava Saint, South India, Vijayanagara period, circa 14th century. Bronze. Heigth: 64 cm. Photo courtesy Carlos Cruanas

Carlos Cruanas has travelled extensively throughout Asia since 1975 and has lived for long periods in India, Nepal and Thailand. His initial anthropological curiosity about the different cultures of the East led him to develop a special interest in Oriental art as an aesthetic manifestation of the divinity and the human need of liberation. Carlos Cruanas consequently specialized in sculpture and paintings of the religious art of three of the most universally known Indian traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Carlos Cruanas. Art of India, Himalaya and South East Asia. Rue Ernest Allard 18, 1000 Brussels, Belgium. By appointment only. Tel: +34 619 474 308 - Mob: +32 489 821800 - Email: carlos@carloscruanas.com - Website: www.carloscruanas.com. Asian Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Blue and White dish painted with two seated figures of Persian, China, Transitional Period, 1640, diameter 32.5 cm. Photo courtesy Duchange & Riché.

Provenance: French Collection

Reference: The Percival David Foundation in the British Museum: “OrientalCeramics.The world's Great Collections – Vol 7 pl 194”

Gild-Bronze figure of Guanyin seated in Dhyanasana, China, Ming Period, XVI° XVII° century. Bronze. Height: 46 cm. Photo courtesy Duchange & Riché.

Provenance: Belgium Collection.

Duchange & Riché. Arts de la Chine et du Japon. Rue Ernest Allard 45, B-1000-Brussels-Belgium. Tel: +322 512 42 18 - Mob: +32 479 833 703 - Email: info@aabru.com - Website: www.aabru.com. Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Relief with Siddhartha and his family, Gandhara, 2nd-3th Century AD. Gray schist. W 43 cm. Photo courtesy Famarte/Farah Massart

Provenance: Private Japanese collection acquired 1974-1976

Published: Isao Kurita, Gandharan Art I, The Buddha's life story, 2003, p. 294, no. 654

Sitting Buddha, Phra Singh. Bronze, cast in the lost wax method, traces of lacquer and gilding, Lan Na Kingdom, Thailand, 16th Century. H 67 cm x W 59 cm. Photo courtesy Famarte/Farah Massart

Provenance: German Collection.

Driven by passion and curiosity of mind, after having obtained my university degree in Roman languages in Antwerp (1992), I began to travel intensively to Asia (India, Tibet, Nepal, China, Indonesia, and Thailand). I imbided the love and interest for Asian antiques also from my parents who- as art collectors- exposed me from childhood onwards to the beauty of these pieces of art. After 15 years of business management experience, I took some major steps in reorienting my life and I decided to devote my passion to South East Asian and Indian art by starting my own antique gallery in Knokke.

Since a few years I have been deepening my knowledge of South East Asian and Indian art by talking with experts, visiting museums and exhibitions, consulting books and scientific articles.

I followed several specialized art history courses in Belgium and I have recently obtained my degree of South East Asian and Indian art at SOAS, the School of Asian and African studies in London.

Famarte specializes in Indian statuary (Hindu, Buddhist and Jain), the Buddhist statuary of Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Thailand and Burma), and authentic decorative objects of value, all of them objects which delight eyes and soul. Beautifully executed in stone, terracotta, stucco or bronze the sculptures have been chosen for their expressive quality and level of artistic craftsmanship. All my items come with certificates of authenticity and additional historical information.

Famarte/Farah Massart. Indian and South East Asian art. Duindistelstraat 16, 8300 Knokke-Heist, Belgium. Tel: +32 495 289 100 Email: art@famarte.be - Website: www.famarte.be. Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

A Chinese wall relief representing a mythical qilin.  Terra cotta. Late Ming to early Qing dynasty, 17th Century. H. 196 X W. 170 cm. TL Tested. Photo courtesy Karim Grusenmeyer

Mucalinda sheltering Gautama Buddha. Sandstone, remains of lacquer, Mon Dvaravati, Thailand, 8th to 9th Century. H 38,5 cm. photo credit Studio Roger Asselberghs-Frédéric Dehaen

Art Loss Register ref # S00031713

Karim Grusenmeyer is a sinologist specialized in exquisite sculpture, objects of beauty and jewelry from China, Southeast- and South Asia.

Khmer and Dong Son art are key domains in our expertise. Our selection is based on originality, rarity, age, condition, and above all, the highest level of artistic taste.

Since 1992 we have been helping collectors to acquire the objects of their dreams. We pursue a relationship based on trust and underpinned by all the professional guarantees of taste, knowledge and integrity. All our items come with a certificate of expertise that provides the buyer with a guarantee of the authenticity, condition and quality of the object acquired.

Karim Grusenmeyer is a member of the 'Chambre Royale des Antiquaires et des Négociants en Oeuvres d'Art de Belgique' since 1993 (membership supported by Gisèle Croës and Bernard Blondeel). In 2010, with the patronage of Jacques Barrère and Jacques Billen, Karim was elected member of the Belgian Chamber of Art Experts.

We have participated at numerous antiques fairs (Maastricht, Paris, London, Brussels).

Karim Grusenmeyer: Exquisite sculpture & objects. Rue Lebeau 14, B1000 Bruxelles, Belgium. Tel: +32 2 514 0337 - Mob: +32 475 475 729 - Email: karim@grusenmeyer.be - Website: www.grusenmeyer.be. Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

An Illustration from a Nayika Series: A Princess Entertained by Musicians. Opaque Watercolour. Heightened with Gold on Paper, India, Guler, circa 1780. Attributed to a follower of Nainsukh, 11 1/8 x 8 in. - 28.5 x 20.5 cm. Photo courtesy Nayef Homsi

Buddha Seated on Lion Throne. Grey Schist, Ancient Region of Gandhara, circa 2nd century, 28 in / 48 cm. Photo courtesy Nayef Homsi

Based in New York City, Nayef Homsi is a dealer of antiquities, works on paper, and fine decorative objects from India, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas. Formerly the Director of the Doris Wiener Gallery, he worked closely with Ms. Wiener, one of the foremost antiquities dealers of her time, in handling the placement of works in leading institutions and collections worldwide.

Nayef Homsi began exhibiting privately in 2012 and organized two major exhibitions of Indian sculpture and painting at Aicon Gallery in March and September. That same year Homsi became a member of the Asia Week New York association. Since the founding of his company in 2011, Nayef Homsi has worked with major collections, institutions, and auction houses in the US and abroad.

Nayef Homsi studied art history and comparative literature at Swarthmore College and received a Master's Degree in painting from City and Guilds of London. Born in Lebanon and raised in Paris, he travels frequently in continental Europe, the United Kingdom, and Asia.

Nayef Homsi: Ancient art of Asia. 671 Leonard Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222, USA. Tel: +1 646 415 1444 - Email: nayef@nayefhomsi.com - Website: www.nayefhomsi.com. Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Sitting Buddha, China, Yunnan province, 13th-14th century.Hard wood covered with lacquer and gold, 39cm high. Photo courtesy Jacques How-Choong.

Archaic vase, China, Han dynasty, circa 1st BC -AD 1st century. Decorated with elaborate and deep engravings of mountains, animals, immortal spirits and fantastic beasts. 28cm high. Photo courtesy Jacques How-Choong.

Jacques How has been collecting and dealing in Chinese and South East Asian art, specialising in particular in rare early Buddhist art (he focuses on Dali Kingdom sculpture), "Barbarian kingdoms" (Dian, Ordos) as well as archaic works of art. His gallery is based in Toulouse France with a new gallery opened in April 2013 in Sablon, Brussels at 19 Rue des Minimes. 

Several museums, Institutions, dealers and private collectors are among his clientele. We will be happy to meet you at the gallery by appointment.

Jacques How-Choong: Oriental art. 16 Rue Peyrolieres, 31000 Toulouse, France. Tel: +33 6 22 96 95 83 - Email: jacqueshowchoong@gmail.com. Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Japanese ginbin– silver teapot. Marked “Mitsukoshi” (Japan's oldest department store). Handle in woven bamboo and lid knob in yamasango (mountain coral), Late Taisho-period (1912-1926). Photo courtesy Kitsune Japanese Art.

Japanese Mino Yoroidokkuri– (“armor scale” style sake bottle), Edo-period,  18th century. H: 21 cm. D: 11.5 cm. Photo courtesy Kitsune Japanese Art.

Kitsune Japanese Art: Japanese art & antiques. Rue des Minimes 55, 1000 Brussels, Belgium. Mobile: + 32 476 87 85 69 - Email: japanese.art@kitsune.be - Website: www.kitsune.be. Art in Brussels. 4 to 8 June 2014

Alberto Giacometti, Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950. Est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million. Photo: Sotheby's

LONDON.- On 5 and 6 February 2014, Sotheby’s London will present over 100 masterworks from a collection that has captivated the imagination of world connoisseurs since it was first unveiled 14 years ago: The Private Collection of Jan Krugier. A survivor of the Holocaust, the legendary art dealer – perhaps best known for his involvement with the work of Picasso – walked through life believing in the redemptive potential of art. Together with his wife, Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, he amassed one of the world's most spectacular collections of works on paper through which he was able to connect particularly closely with the artists he admired the most. 

As he described it: “Marie-Anne and I began gathering works on paper by artists of all periods, their common denominator being an intrinsic timeless quality, a same universal, unique approach to the world and to things. It is also, somehow, an inner voyage, an ardent quest and a summing up of our tastes and our artistic aspirations.” 

These were the works that they chose to hang in their private home. 

Spanning the history of art from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, the group to be offered incorporates powerful works by the greatest names of their time: Goya, Delacroix, Géricault, Corot, Turner, Degas, Manet, Bonnard, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Matisse, Klee, Picasso and Giacometti. 

Many of the works were included in a series of celebrated exhibitions of the Krugier’s private collection, which were shown at museums in Berlin, Venice, Madrid, Paris, Vienna and Munich. 

Commenting on the forthcoming sale of the collection, Helena Newman, Chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, Europe, said: “Jan Krugier’s private collection is testament to a definitive journey in the history of the 20th century. Through it we come close to the mind and soul of this extraordinary man. Each work reflects his erudition, his devotion to art, boundless curiosity and inherent independence from convention. Regardless of their period of creation, these works of artistic genius describe a timeless vision of humanity, with unequaled power of expression. It is extremely rare for a private collection to boast such quality and variety and its appearance on the market will constitute a landmark event in 2014”. 

Together estimated to realise in excess of £24 million (US$39 million), all 119 lots capture what Krugier looked for in art: “a deep spirit, something sacred and deeply experienced”. 

THE ARTWORKS

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI

Alberto Giacometti played a major role in Jan Krugier’s personal life and career. Krugier met the Swiss artist during a summer in the Alps in 1947 when he was himself a young artist. He became a valued confidant and it was he who encouraged Krugier to become an art adviser and gallerist: “After all that you have been through, you do not need a monologue, but a dialogue… You understand artists better than anyone else.” As a collector, Krugier was looking for the “be or not be” in art, as reflected in a group of drawings and sculpture by Giacometti led by the iconic bronze sculpture. The February auctions feature Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950 (est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million). While many have viewed Giacometti’s “walking man” as emblematic of the horrors of World War II, it is also a primary example of the visual depiction of Sartre’s existential man, moving through life, alone, yet free and responsible for his actions. 

The February auctions feature Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950 (est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million). While many have viewed Giacometti’s “walking man” as emblematic of the horrors of World War II, it is also a primary example of the visual depiction of Sartre’s existential man, moving through life, alone, yet free and responsible for his actions. 

Alberto Giacometti, Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil, conceived in 1950. Est. £3-5 million/$5-8 million. Photo: Sotheby's

signed A. Giacometti, numbered 6/6 and stamped with the foundry mark Alexis Rudier Fondeur, Paris; bronze; height: 47cm. 18 1/2 in. Executed in 1950 and cast in bronze in an edition of 6. The present bronze was cast in 1951. 

Provenance: Private Collection, Switzerland
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York
J. David Settles, New York
Private Collection, Europe
Acquired from the above by the late owner in January 1989

Exhibited: New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, 1985, no. 28, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, 20th Century European Masters, 1985-86, no. 24
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Alberto Giacometti, dibujo-escultura-pintura, 1990-91, no. 243, illustrated in the catalogue (titled L'Homme qui marche III and as dating from 1960)
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 185, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 217, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 177, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 165, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 218, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962, illustration of another cast p. 244 (titled Homme qui marche III)

Note: Giacometti's remarkable Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleil is an instantly recognisable icon of Modern art. Captured in mid-stride, the figure’s weighted front foot is firmly rooted to the base while the other heel lifts off the ground, and the entire figure is defined by the diagonal line of the body as the man’s torso leans forward. Giacometti's creation of this sculpture at the end of the 1940s coincided with his production of other career-defining bronzes, all featuring his signature attenuated figures, either represented alone or in a group. In each case this image of psychological isolation represents Giacometti's most literal attempt to personify his own existential preoccupations in the years following the Second World War. And to the Existentialist philosophers themselves, this very image became the clear and undisputed signifier of the exasperating uncertainty that defined an entire generation.

In the late 1940s, Giacometti was fascinated by spatial relationships and the concept of movement within a single work. The present sculpture was undeniably conceived in an urban context, with the platform on which the figure is depicted derived from the notion of a city square. Referring to the new perception of people and the space surrounding them, Giacometti recounted that, upon leaving a cinema in 1945, he suddenly felt that ‘people seemed like a completely foreign species, mechanical... mindless machines, like men in the street who come and go... a bit like ants, each one going about his own business, alone ignored by the others. They crossed paths, passed by, without seeing each other, without looking... In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and reform living compositions in unbelievable complexity’ (A. Giacometti, quoted in Pierre Schneider, 'Ma longue marche par Alberto Giacometti', in L'Express, Paris, 8th June 1961, pp. 48-50).

Between 1947 and 1950 Giacometti made several sculptures centred on the figure of the walking man or a group of men set on a platform suggestive of a city square. Other sculptures from this period, now widely recognised as the pinnacle of his œuvre, include Homme qui marche sous la pluie (fig. 1), and La Place (fig. 3). In all of their various forms, Giacometti’s walking men were the embodiment of the isolation and anxiety symptomatic of post-war Europe. Frozen in time yet determined to move forward, alone yet unable to escape the urban throng, these solitary figures have come to symbolise the great existential dilemma of the twentieth century. 

Homme traversant une place par un matin de soleilepitomises Giacometti's mature style, developed during the years immediately following the Second World War and characterised by the tall, slender figures for which he is best known. No longer interested in recreating physical likenesses in his sculptures, the artist began working from memory, seeking to capture his figures beyond the physical reality of the human form. Giacometti elongated the vertical axis while reducing the thickness of his sculptures: the man in the present work is thus composed of thin lines, lending the composition a weightless, almost impalpable quality. The image of a man can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the artist himself and, in a wider context of the post-war period, as a reflection of the lonely and vulnerable human condition. The man in this composition is rendered as a lean, wiry figure, a feature of Giacometti's work that reached its ultimate form in the life-sizedL’homme qui marche of 1960 (fig. 4).

Valerie J. Fletcher compared the present sculpture with the closely related Homme qui marche sous la pluie of 1948 (fig. 1): ‘Giacometti once spoke of Man Walking Quickly in the Rain, 1948 and Man Crossing a Square in the Sun [the present sculpture], 1949, as representing himself [...]. In Man Crossing a Square in the Sun, Giacometti made the pose more dynamic by tilting the torso further forward and lengthening the stride; this pose proved to be definitive, for it recurs in the monumental walking men of 1960’ (V. Fletcher,op. cit., pp. 135-136).

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso is certainly the artist most associated with Krugier’s career and his works occupy the core of his collection. Krugier met the Spanish master just once - in Paris in 1947 – but the effect was immediate and intense: Krugier was so deeply affected by Picasso, and in particular by the intensity of his eyes, that he was rendered speechless. Following Picasso’s death in 1973, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the artist’s long-time muse and lover entrusted him with her collection and in 1976, he became the sole agent for the collection of Picasso’s works inherited by the artist’s granddaughter, Marina.

The offering includes 18 works by Picasso, mainly works on paper, covering the key periods in the artist’s career, from 1902 to 1967. The Minotaur – a recurring figure in Picasso’s oeuvre dominates Composition au Minotaure, a gouache on paper executed in 1936 (est. £1.8-2.5 million/$3-4 million). Picasso’s use of the Minotaur as a symbol of the duality of violence and gentleness in all men profoundly echoes the experience of Jan Krugier who “discovered very young that there is a cohabitation of good and evil in human beings” and tried “to find something that sublimates this in the art” he surrounded himself with.

Pablo Picasso ( (1881 - 1973),  Composition (Composition au Minotaure). Est. £1.8-2.5 million/$3-4 million. Photo: Sotheby's

dated 9 Mai XXXVI (lower right); dated 9 Mai XXXVI on the reverse; gouache, pen and ink and pencil on paper; 50.2 by 65.2cm. 19 3/4 by 25 3/4 in. Executed on 9th May 1936.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (inv. 3871)
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Exhibited: New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso. A Retrospective, 1980, illustrated in the catalogue
Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso, Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, no. 228, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Il Minotauro trafitto)
Munich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Pablo Picasso, Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-82, no. 187, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art & Kyoto, Municipal Museum, Picasso, Masterpieces from Marina Picasso Collection and Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., 1983, no. 148, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Minotaur and Women)
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria & Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Picasso, 1984, no. 113, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tübingen, Kunsthalle & Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Picasso: Pastelle, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, 1986, no. 162, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Tokyo, Seibu Art Forum & Ohtsu, Seibu Hall, Pablo Picasso: Collection Marina Picasso, 1990-91, no. 19, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Minotaur and Women)
New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, Tauromaquia, Works by Pablo Picasso, Photographs by L. Clergue, 1991
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Forma. El ideal clásico en el arte moderno, 2001-02, no. 62, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, La Révolution Surréaliste, 2002, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 154, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 189, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Surrealism in Paris, 2011-12, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1932 à 1937, Paris, 1957, vol. 8, no. 286, illustrated pl. 136
The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Surrealism, 1930-1936, San Francisco, 1997, no. 36-060, illustrated p. 287
Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot & Maris-Laure Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, no. 745, illustrated in colour p. 303
Picasso and Greece (exhibition catalogue), Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, 2004, illustrated p. 61 (titled Minotaur Pierced by a Sword)
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso. From the Minotaure to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelona, 2011, no. 800, illustrated in colour p. 252 (titled Dying Minotaur (Composition))

Note: Beautifully detailed and replete with allegorical and mythical imagery, the present work belongs to a series of Minotaur compositions that Picasso completed in May 1936 (figs. 1 & 2). The scene features a cast of characters who by this point were commonly represented in Picasso’s repertoire, but their significance here was much more heavily invested with biographical detail. These three pictures were considered by Picasso as amongst his most treasured works, and remained with him until his death, when the present work was inherited by his granddaughter Marina, and the other two formed part of the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris. ‘If you marked on a map all the routes along which I passed and drew a line to join them together’, Picasso once remarked, ‘it would perhaps take the shape of a Minotaur’ (reprinted in Picasso and Greece (exhibtion catalogue), op. cit., back cover). The present work, executed with transparent washes of colour that enhance the element of fantasy, perfectly exemplifies this statement.

When he completed this picture in the late spring of 1936, Picasso was experiencing a drastic upheaval in his personal life. His marriage to Olga was in shambles, his mistress Marie-Thérèse had recently given birth to the couple’s daughter Maya, and his new love interest, Dora Maar, was now inserting herself within the drama of Picasso’s personal life. The scene depicted in the present work provides a dramatic narrative that can readily be applied to Picasso’s current state of affairs.  On the left appears the unmistakable image of Marie-Thérèse, shrouded by the sail, while the impaled Minotaur, understood to be the alter-ego of the artist who has fallen on his own sword, lies in agony at her feet. The bucking horse, which would appear a year later in Picasso’s harrowing Guernica, could be interpreted as a stand-in for Dora, while the black shadow over the dying beast is perhaps an allusion to the menace of Olga. Rich with interpretive possibility, this picture is one of the most visually engaging from Picasso’s fascinating series that spring.

The image of the Minotaur, a character of Cretan mythology born of the union between Pasiphaë and a bull, first appeared in Picasso's work in a collage of 1928, now at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. In 1933 Picasso executed another version of this subject for the cover for the first issue of Minotaure, a Surrealist periodical published by Albert Skira and Tériade in Paris. It was primarily the hybrid nature of the creature that appealed to Picasso and many Surrealist artists, who delighted in the union of opposing forces embodied in this figure. In a number of Picasso's works throughout the 1930s, including several preparatory sketches for Guernica, the Minotaur is depicted as a ferocious animal, often in scenes of rape and violence. In the present work, however, his fierce character appears at the mercy of the women surrounding him.

It appears that Picasso has conflated several stories of Greek mythology in this intricate composition. The raft on which the Minotaur lies dying alludes to the raft of Odysseus, while the laurel-crowned Marie-Thérèse could be a reference to the virtuous Calypso, the nymph-lover whom Odysseus abandoned in order to return to his wife. A female version of Theseus, who in Plutarch’s telling sails to Crete to slay the Minotaur, waves her lance astride a horse. In the essay ‘The Death of a Monster’, Niki Loizidi provides yet another possible narrative: ‘The presence of a spear leads us directly to the conclusion that the flower-wreathed woman is, as well as being a symbol of classical beauty, a female picador one of the protagonists of the Spanish corrida. In other words, the figure of the young girl combines the beauty of Aphrodite with the strength of an ancient Amazon and also the role in the Spanish bullfight of the picador, who aggressively torments the bull, ultimately delivering the coup de grâce’ (N. Loizidi, ‘The Death of a Monster, or Classicism as Modernism’s path to Self-Knowledge’, in Picasso and Greece (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 61).

Picasso’s power of expression is captured in La Femme qui pleure I, a portrait belonging to a series of weeping women that the artist created in 1937, following the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War (est. £1.2-1.8 million/$ 1.94-2.9 million).

Pablo Picasso ( (1881 - 1973), La Femme qui pleure I. Est. £1.2-1.8 million/$ 1.94-2.9 million. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Picasso (lower right) and numbered 8/15 (lower left); dry point, aquatint, etching and scraper on Montval laid paper; plate size: 69 by 49.5cm.; 27 1/8 by 19 1/2 in., sheet size: 78 by 57.5cm.; 30 3/4 by 22 5/8 in. Executed in 1937. A very fine impression of the seventh, final state.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (inv. 20393)
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Exhibited: Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 139, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 153, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Picasso und die Schweiz, 2001-02, no. 121, illustrated in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 192, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Georges Bloch, Pablo Picasso, catalogue de l'œuvre gravé et lithographié, 1904-1967, Bern, 1971, vol. I, no. 1333, another impression illustrated p. 1170
Felix A. Baumann, Pablo Picasso Leben und Werk, Stuttgart, 1976, no. 255, another example from the edition illustrated p. 138
Brigitte Baer & Bernhard Geiser, Picasso peintre-graveur, Bern, 1986, vol. III, no. 623.6, another example from the edition illustrated p. 123 (incorrectly catalogued as state VI)
Brigitte Baer, Picasso peintre-graveur, addendum au catalogue raisonné, Bern, 1996, no. 623, another example from the edition illustrated p. 561
Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot & Marie-Laure Bernadac, The Ultimate Picasso, New York, 2000, no. 785, another example from the edition illustrated p. 322
Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso. Style and Meaning, 2002, no. 579, another example from the edition illustrated p. 599
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso. From the Minotaure to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelona, 2011, no. 1017, another example from the edition illustrated p. 332 (incorrectly catalogued as state VIb)

Note: La femme qui pleure I is arguably Picasso's most important print and without doubt one of the most significant prints of the 20th Century. The image is highly arresting, emanating a powerful presence both through the sheer physicality of the sitter and through the emotionally charged atmosphere of the work. In 1937 Picasso found himself in a maelstrom of personal and political anguish. It would lead him to create one of his greatest paintings, Guernica (fig. 2), and alongside it the important series of paintings, drawings and prints of the La femme qui pleure. The motif of the Weeping Woman first made an appearance in a drawing towards the end of May and in the coming months became a subject Picasso would return to repeatedly (figs. 3 & 4). Although the composition as it appears in the etching and in many of the paintings does not feature in the finished version of Guernica, it became the vehicle through which Picasso explored many of the themes central to the mural.

In January 1937 Picasso had started work on a pair of etchings in support of the Republican side in the Spanish civil war titled Sueño y mentira di Franco (Dreams and lies of Franco). In the same month he received an invitation to paint a large mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris that summer. He saw the opportunity to make a great political statement and experimented with various possible subjects to achieve this through the spring. On 26th April the German air force, at the request of Franco's forces, repeatedly bombed the Basque town of Guernica, all but levelling the town and killing many civilians. The event caused international outrage and was the catalyst to Picasso finding a subject through which he could channel his own abhorrence and anger at events unfolding in his native country. 

Motivated by a sense of moral outrage and determined to show his support for the Republican cause, Picasso turned to printmaking to more readily disseminate his visual protest. Idiomatically apt, the Weeping Woman spoke directly of the Spanish tragedy, her shattered features fulfilling the role of the modern Mater Dolorosa. On 1st July Picasso began the first state of La femme qui pleure I, outlining the figure with urgent economy. Gradually working on the plate over the course of two days, the image began to evolve. The tones of her face and hair were fleshed out with diverse hatching and aquatint washes until Picasso worked so extensively on the sixth state causing large areas to fall into tenebristic relief. The seventh state was the most accomplished work or the group, balanced between impressively achieved graphic effects and legibility. In total Picasso printed forty proofs, but only the 3rd (fig. 3) and 7th states were numbered and signed by the artist.

As ever in Picasso's art, events in his own life also impacted very significantly on the development of the image providing a creative energy which would work in tandem with his worldly concerns. The turmoil in Picasso's private life would have a vital bearing on the image. Certainly his personal life was more complex than at any time in preceding decades, fraught as it was with the emotionally complex, overlapping relationships with the three women who in one way or another shared his life at this time. The Weeping Woman is often described as a portrait of Dora Maar, his companion since the previous year of whom Picasso said 'For me Dora Maar is the weeping woman'. There are elements of Maar's physical appearance as Picasso depicted her in other portraits from this time evident in this composition. It has also been argued that characteristics belonging to Marie-Thérèse Walter, his mistress and mother to a child born to them in 1936, can also be identified, as well as those of Olga, his wife since 1918 with whom Picasso's relations were at an all-time low. One such example are the sitter's hands which are thought to depict those of both Maar and Walter. Maar, who kept her nails long, pointed and painted red, is represented by the talon-like left hand, whilst the other hand, with the nails bitten down is thought to be that of Marie-Thérèse.

Picasso created this masterpiece in the workshop of Roger Lacourière who enabled Picasso to realise fully the potential of the various processes of the intaglio medium. Beginning in July 1937 Picasso would work the subject through seven states using etching, aquatint and drypoint.

In harnessing elements from both his personal life and from the darkening political landscape of mid-1930s Europe, La femme qui pleure I is a work that expresses aspects of the human condition, reflecting themes that are at once personal and universal and which continue to resonate today.

Exceptional works from the artist’s classicist period are found in a portrait of a young boy, Tête de jeune homme, executed in 1923 (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million) and a stunning portrait of Dora Maar, Dora Maar à la coiffe from 1936 (est. £350,000-450,000/$600,000-800,000). 

Pablo Picasso ( (1881 - 1973), Tête de jeune homme. Est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Picasso (lower right); dated 11-12-2-23 on the reverse; Conté crayon on paper; 63.5 by 47.5cm., 25 by 18 3/4 in. Executed in Paris on 11th-12th February 1923.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (inv. 3289)
Marina Picasso (the artist's granddaughter; by descent from the above)
Acquired from the above by the late owner

Exhibited: Venice, Centro di Cultura di Palazzo Grassi, Picasso, Opere dal 1895 al 1971 dalla Collezione Marina Picasso, 1981, no. 150, illustrated in the catalogue
Munich, Haus der Kunst; Cologne, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle; Frankfurt, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Pablo Picasso, Sammlung Marina Picasso, 1981-82, no. 134, illustrated in the catalogue
Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art & Kyoto, Municipal Museum, Picasso, Masterpieces from Marina Picasso Collection and Museums in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., 1983, no. 109, illustrated in the catalogue
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria & Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Picasso, 1984, no. 83, illustrated in the catalogue
Madrid, Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, Picasso 1923, Arlequin con espejo y La flauta de Pan, 1995-96, no. 6, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Visage de 3/4 gauche)
Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Picasso and the Mediterranean, 1996-97, no. 64, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Visage de 3/4 gauche)
Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Picasso: The Italian Journey 1917-1924, 1998, no. 174, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (titled Visage de trois quart gauche)
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 130, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 145, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 178, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Picasso und die Schweiz, 2001-02, no. 79, illustrated in colour in the catalogue.
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 157, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 143, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 179, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Christian Zervos, Dessins de Pablo Picasso 1892-1948, Paris, 1949, no. 86, illustrated p. 59
Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso, œuvres de 1923 à 1925, Paris, 1952, vol. 5, no. 13, illustrated pl. 7
The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture. Neoclassicism II, 1922-1924, San Francisco, 1996, no. 23-029, illustrated p. 115
Josep Palau i Fabre, Picasso. From the Ballets to Drama (1917-1926), Barcelona, 1999, no. 1318, illustrated in colour p. 361
John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, illustrated p. 223

Note: An intimate rendering of the face of a young man, Tête de jeune homme belongs to a group of drawings and paintings of a young male model, possibly a dancer, that Picasso executed at the end of 1922 and early 1923 (figs. 1 & 3). It is a remarkable example of the artist's creative versatility and exemplifies the Neo-Classical stylisation he favoured over Cubism in the 1920s. His emphasis during these years was on the strength of line and the monumentality of form, and his figures often resembled the classical sculpture that he encountered on trips to Italy and Fontainebleau during those years. When he applied this particular style to more intimate renderings, the results were often stunning. The subtle details of the young man's face are captured here with the most skillful and precise draughtsmanship, resulting in a work of art that is at once distinctly modern and eternally beautiful. As Picasso once said about his own work, 'To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was' (quoted in Picasso: The Classical Period (exhibition catalogue), C&M Arts, New York, 2003, p. 21). 

This beautiful drawing is distinctly a product of Picasso's Neo-Classical style that characterised his work in the years following the First World War. The term 'Neo-Classical' refers to the artist's conscious affiliation with the art of the Greek and Roman era and his attempt to incorporate a similar formal precision and clear draughtsmanship into his art. Picasso's focus on the Classical age was a product ofrapel à l'ordre, a movement that dominated avant-garde art in France during this time. Its overarching socio-political goal was to cast France as the centre of the new 'golden age' of civilisation. This post-war cultural preoccupation could not have come at a better time for Picasso, who had all but exhausted Cubism by this point and was looking for a new way to challenge himself. Together with Jean Cocteau, Picasso traveled to Italy in 1921 to study the Latinate origins of art in Naples and Pompeii. 

According to John Richardson, one of the objects that had the most profound effect on him was the head of the Antinous from the second century (fig. 2), whose features appear in several of his head studies from the early 1920s. Richardson explains: 'Picasso occasionally gives her idealized classical features a look of Olga, or his American friend Sara Murphy, or his former fiancée Irène Lagut, or conceivably, one of the nannies Olga hired and fired. The same with the men in Picasso's Classical work. Their features are mostly based on those of another of the Farnese marbles, the celebrated Antinous. Once again, Picasso uses this as a base to which he adds glimpses of real people: himself, Gerald Murphy and a professional model – possibly a Diaghilev dancer called Nicolas Zverev – who seems to have posed for the artist while recovering from an injury to his leg. A very fine example of this series is the drawing of a man's head [the present work]. References to the Farnese marbles would recur whenever Picasso's imagery took on a classical tinge' (J. Richardson, ibid., p. 13). 

Throughout his œuvre, Picasso's depictions of male figures are most often invested with autobiographical significance, as Richardson notes. For example, Pipes of Pan, also completed in 1923, is widely regarded as a depiction of the artist's alter-ego, and the present composition offers a similar interpretation. With both of these works and his Neo-Classical compositions in general, 'he established a synthesis between the ancient world and the modern world – a synthesis that celebrates the new Mediterraneanism which he and the Murphys claimed with some justice to have inaugurated' (ibid., p. 20).

EDGAR DEGAS

The collection is also distinguished by masterful Impressionist works, including a sublime pastel by Edgar Degas depicting a woman at her toilette – a theme central to the artist’s oeuvre which underlines his mastery of pastel. Dating from circa 1893, Femme s’essuyant les pieds is a work of genius in its subtlety of line and the boldness of its composition (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million). 

Edgar Degas (1834 - 1917), Femme s’essuyant les pieds, circa 1893. Est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million. Photo: Sotheby's

stamped Degas (lower left), pastel on paper laid down on board, 45.7 by 58cm., 18 by 22 7/8 in. Executed circa 1893.

Provenance: Estate of the artist (sold: Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, Atelier Degas, 2ème Vente, 11th-13th December 1918, lot 63)
Charles Comiot, Paris (acquired by 1927)
Yolande Mazuc, Caracas
Wildenstein & Co., New York (acquired from the above in 1947)
Mr & Mrs Morris Sprayregen, Atlanta (acquired by 1956)
Jacqueline & Matt Friedlander, Moultrie, Georgia (acquired by 1978. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 14th November 1984, lot 17)
Philip & Muriel Berman, Allentown, Pennsylvania (purchased at the above sale. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 4th November 2004, lot 42)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: New York, Wildenstein & Co., Loan Exhibition of Degas, 1949, no. 82
Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art, Degas, 1950
New York, Wildenstein & Co., The Nude in Paintings, 1956, no. 29
Atlanta, The High Museum of Art, Drawings from Georgia Collections, 19th & 20th Centuries, 1981, no. 17
Atlanta, The High Museum of Art (on extended loan, 1984)
Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Degas in Philadelphia Collections, 1985
Ottawa, Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada & New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Degas, 1988-89, no. 312, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1895)
Collegeville, Ursinus College, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, A Passion for Art: Selections from the Berman Collection, 1989
Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 69, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 116, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud; Florence, Palazzo Strozzi & Vienna, Albertina Museum, Impressionismus - Wie das Licht auf die Leinwand kam, 2008-10, no. 274, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Edgar Degas, The Late Work, 2012-13, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: François Fosca, 'La Collection Comiot', in L'Amour de l'Art, Paris, April 1927, illustrated p. 111
Paul-André Lemoisne, Degas et son œuvre, Paris, 1946, vol. III, no. 1137, illustrated p. 659
Jean Crenelle, 'The Perfection of Degas', in Arts, New York, April 1960, illustrated p. 40
John Updike, Just Looking, New York, 1990, illustrated in colour p. 111

Note: Femme s’essuyant les pieds belongs to Degas’ remarkable series of pastels of female nudes after a bath. One of the artist’s most iconic subjects, the bather began to appear with increasing frequency in his work from the early 1880s. In his works on the subject of women at their toilette, the artist often depicted them in the process of washing or, as in the present pastel, drying various parts of their body, which allowed him to explore unusual contortions of the nude. The present work, executed around 1893, depicts a bather leaning against her tub and drying her feet. Degas executed several versions of the same pose, rendering the model from different vantage points in the room (figs. 1 & 2). Here the view appears to be from slightly above the figure, an angle that accentuates the broad expanse of her back. The practice of repeatedly painting and drawing a given subject allowed Degas to study the pose from different angles and to gain a better understanding of the beauty and complexity of human anatomy.

Unlike his pictures of the ballet and the racetrack, Degas’ bather scenes were usually staged in the artist’s studio. Nevertheless, this pastel effectively recreates the spontaneity of the act and the voyeuristic experience of watching a woman at her toilette. To create a sensation of warmth in the room after the bath, Degas uses rich pastels of reds and oranges. Leaning against the bath tub, the model is positioned on what appears to be a lush, oriental rug, executed in short brushstrokes of orange, blue and white tones. Her upper body is bent over as she reaches for her foot, and her face is hidden from the viewer. While in some similar compositions Degas rendered the bather in the presence of another female (fig. 3), in this work she is depicted alone and at close view, emphasising the intimacy of the image.

In painting the nudes and semi-nudes, whom Degas studied so assiduously, the artist was interested in exploring the female body, rather than in representing his sitters as individuals. He rarely personified them, and concentrated instead on depicting the human form in a variety of rituals and movements. Commenting on Degas’ fascination with the representation of the human body, his contemporary Georges Jeanniot noted: ‘Degas was very concerned with the accuracy of movements and postures. He studied them endlessly. I have seen him work with a model, trying to make her assume the gestures of a woman drying herself, tilted over the high back of a chair covered with a bath towel. This is a complicated movement. You see the two shoulderblades from behind; but the right shoulder, squeezed by the weight of the body, assumes an unexpected outline that suggests a kind of acrobatic gesture, a violent effort’ (G. Jeanniot, quoted in Robert Gordon & Andrew Forge, Degas, New York, 1988, p. 223).

This work is a wonderful example of Degas' mastery of pastel, the medium that would dominate his œuvre during the last decades of his life. By the time that he executedFemme s’essuyant les pieds, his approach to the subject of the bather had become bolder and more confident than that demonstrated in his compositions from the 1880s, and he employed the medium of pastel with a greater sense of spontaneity. Much like the crosshatching colour techniques of the old masters, Degas emphasised the interlacing and layering of colour, resulting in the zigzagged and striated appearance of the present work. The success of his late pastels of bathers and their importance in the artist’s œuvrewas acknowledged by John Rewald: ‘In his […] important pastels of dancers and nudes, he was gradually reducing the emphasis on line in order to seek the pictorial. Resorting to ever more vibrant colour effects, he found in his pastels a means to unite line and colour. While every pastel stroke became a colour accent, its function in the whole was often not different from that of the impressionist brush stroke. His pastels became multicoloured fireworks where all precision of form disappeared in favour of a texture that glittered with hatchings’ (J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism, New York, 1973, p. 566)

PAUL CÉZANNE

A group of post-impressionist works is spearheaded by three dazzling watercolours by Cézanne - a medium that the artist considered as a unique means of expression in its own right and which allowed him to combine drawing and painting. Executed in 1902-1904, Femme Assise (Madame Cézanne) is one of Cézanne’s late masterpieces in the medium. Its timeless beauty appealed to a series of prominent collectors before Jan Krugier, including Ambroise Vollard, Paul Rosenberg and Robert von Hirsch (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million).

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Femme Assise (Madame Cézanne), 1902-1904. Est. £1-1.5 million/$1.5-2 million. Photo: Sotheby's

watercolour and pencil on paper, 49 by 37.2cm., 19 1/4 by 14 5/8 in. Executed in 1902-04.

Provenance: Ambroise Vollard, Paris
Adams Brothers, London (acquired from the above by 1946)
Private Collection, London
Paul Rosenberg, New York
Robert von Hirsch, Basel (acquired from the above in November 1951. Sold: Sotheby's, London, 27th June 1978, lot 838)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: London, Tate Gallery; Leicester, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery & Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Paul Cézanne: An Exhibition of Watercolours, 1946, no. 25
Tübingen, Kunsthalle & Zurich, Kunsthaus, Paul Cézanne Aquarelle 1866 -1906, 1982, no. 101, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, L'Œuvre ultime de Cézanne à Dubuffet, 1989, no. 6, illustrated in the catalogue
Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand-Palais, Cézanne, 1995-96, no. 169, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1895)
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 122, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, 1999, no. 141, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 140, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La passion du dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 124, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 95, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 125, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Ambroise Vollard, Paul Cézanne, Paris, 1914, illustrated p. 125 (titled Etude pour un portrait de femme)
Lionello Venturi, Paul Cézanne Aquarelles, Oxford, 1934, illustrated pl. 14
Lionello Venturi, Cézanne, son art - son œuvre, Paris, 1936, vol. I, no. 1093, catalogued p. 276; vol. II, no. 1093, illustrated pl. 316 (titled Portrait de femme and as dating from 1895-1900)
Lionello Venturi, Paul Cézanne, Water Colours, London, 1943, illustrated pl. 14 (as dating from 1895-1900)
William Rubin (ed.), Cézanne: The Late Work, New York, 1977, pl. 21, illustrated p. 229
Galerie Jan Krugier (ed.), Dix ans d'activité, Geneva, 1983, no. 17
John Rewald, Paul Cézanne, The Watercolours. A Catalogue Raisonné, London, 1983, no. 543, illustrated
Cézanne: Finished - Unfinished (exhibition catalogue), Kunstforum, Vienna & Kunsthaus, Zurich, 2000, fig. 1, illustrated p. 192
Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors (exhibition catalogue), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2004, fig. 36, illustrated in colour p. 89
Susan Sidlauskas, Cézanne's Other. The Portraits of Hortense, Los Angeles & London, 2009, no. 59, illustrated in colour p. 202

Note: Executed in 1902-04, Femme assise is a remarkable example of Cézanne’s mature œuvre. It belongs to the climactic phase in Cézanne’s artistic production, during which he executed a number of his best works that were to have a pivotal influence on the development of twentieth century art. In this watercolour, depicting a woman in profile seated at a table, the artist reduced his palette to a combination of blue, green and orange tones; his broad brushstrokes are contained within the thin blue outlines, setting the woman, table and chair apart from the more loosely rendered background.

Femme assise was probably executed at Les Lauves, where Cézanne purchased a plot of land in 1901 and built a studio to which he moved in the autumn of the following year. John Rewald discussed the setting of the present work: ‘Vague indications in the background show that the woman seated at the same table was posed in the open, doubtless on the terrace in front of Cézanne’s Lauves studio […]. In the absence of guiding pencil lines, all outlines have been retraced with a blue brush. Occasionally, particularly in the lower sleeve, these brush lines are repeated numerous times, while in the back of the chair and in some other places they are applied in short, staccato strokes such as appear frequently in the artist’s watercolours of his last years [fig. 1]. But where the brush does not trace lines, it spreads washes in a superbly broad and sweeping fashion’ (J. Rewald, op. cit., p. 221).

John Rewald has commented that the identity of the sitter inFemme assise is unknown, and that the same model sat for Cézanne’s oil Portrait de femme of 1902-06 (Private Collection; formerly in the collection of the Norton Simon Foundation, Los Angeles). However, Carol Armstrong identified the sitter of the present composition as the artist’s wife, Madame Cézanne. Discussing this watercolour, she wrote: ‘In his portraiture and genre painting, Cézanne worked between watercolour and oil, but rarely did his watercolours serve as sketches towards his oils. One exception might be Seated Woman (Madame Cézanne) of around 1902-4 [the present work], which relates both to works like Young Italian Woman at a Table in the Getty Museum [fig. 2] and to many of Cézanne’s seated portraits of this period – all works that confirm his interest in the body that sits at and leans upon the still-life table’ (C. Armstrong in Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 90).

In her book Cézanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, the art historian Susan Sidlauskas argues that the subject of the present work may well be the artist's wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne. Sidlauskas links this watercolour to an earlier oil,Madame Cézanne au jardin of 1879-80 (fig. 3): 'Her oversize hands anticipate the proportions of Seated Woman [...]. Taches of green and blue radiate around this "figure at a table," surrounding her with an aureole of color, as if she is generating the color strokes herself' (S. Sidlauskas, op. cit., p. 205), a feature reminiscent of the semi-circular strokes of watercolour that form a halo around the upper body of the woman in the present work. Sidlauskas wrote of Hortense's recurring presence in Cézanne's art: 'She is […] indisputably, stubbornly, there, over and over - a constant figure who inspired an array of variations that present her as newly made every time. Cézanne kept coming back to her in his work. In Seated Woman, if I am right, he came back one last time. She sits at the table that provided the stage for so many of the artist's still-life arrangements and was at the center of his studio, at the center of his practice. By being there, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne sat with her husband, and became his art' (ibid., p. 211). 

Executed in patches of watercolour in contrasting hues,Femme assise is a testament to Cézanne’s virtuosity in this medium, as well as to his remarkably modern vision. By using the most minimal pictorial means, with patches of colour suggesting folds in the woman’s dress and the subtle effects of light and shadow caused by them, the artist is able to render the volume of the woman’s body and the elements that surround her, investing the areas of bare paper with an equal pictorial and compositional value as line and colour. In combining these positive and negative spaces and juxtaposing cool and warm tones, Cézanne achieved a sense of volume and space that makes his mature watercolours a unique achievement in modern art.

PAUL KLEE

Watercolour inspired some of Paul Klee’s most exquisite works, as seen in Mit dem Eingang, a magnificent example of his “magic square” paintings, realised in 1931 (est. £300,000-500,000/ $500,000-800,000) and Vollmond in Mauern from 1919 (est. £300,000-500,000/$500,000-800,000).

Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), Mit dem Eingang (With the Entrance), 1931. Est. £300,000-500,000/ $500,000-800,000. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Klee (upper right), titled, dated 1931 and numbered S. 5 on the artist's mount; watercolour on paper laid down on the artist's mount; image size: 45.5 by 35cm., 17 7/8 by 13 3/4 in., mount size: 59.5 by 42.6cm., 23 1/2 by 16 7/8 in. Executed in 1931.

Provenance: Hans & Erika Meyer-Benteli, Bern
Berggruen & Cie., Paris (acquired from the above in 1956)
Hendrickx Collection, Brussels (acquired from the above in 1957)
Hamilton Galleries, London
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired in 1960)
Klaus Dohrn, Frankfurt (acquired from the above in 1965)
Sale: Galerie Wolfgang Ketterer, Munich, 23rd May 1977, lot 1048a
Fridart Foundation, Amsterdam (sold: Sotheby's, London, 29th June 1988, lot 359)
Yoyoi Gallery, Japan (purchased at the above sale)
Ogawa Museum of Art, Tokyo (acquired in 1991. Sold: Christie's, New York, 19th November 1998, lot 577)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Klee, 1963, no. 41, illustrated in colour in the catalougue
Paris, Galerie Tarica, Paul Klee, 1963, illustrated in the catalogue
Southampton, Southampton City Art Gallery; Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery & Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery, Sounds of Colour, 1982-85, no. 18
Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie., Paul Klee. Traces de la mémoire, 1998-99, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 159, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 168, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 168, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 153, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 166, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature :The Artist's Handlist, 1931, no. 165 (S. 5)
The Artist's Handlist, 1932, no. 251 (W 11)
François Choay, 'Sur l'ambiguité fondamentale de la peinture contemporaine', in Cercle d'Art Contemporain, Zurich, 1960, illustrated p. 102
Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee, Catalogue raisonné, Bern, 2002, vol. 6, no. 5570, illustrated p. 119

Note: Mit dem Eingang, centred on a single rectangle of colour, and populated by dashes of bright colour overlaying a softly hued ground, possesses a lyrical quality unique to the works of Paul Klee. The artist’s experimental approach to painting sought to represent a synthesis of sound and colour - thereby becoming ‘polyphonic’. In works such as Mit dem Eingangand Polyphonie (fig. 1) Klee achieved this by reviving the Neo-Impressionist practise of pointillism. Discussing the emergence of the pointillist pictures in the early 1930s, Christine Hopfengart suggests: Their common feature is the screen-like application of coloured dots on the painted surface, similar in appearance to the divisionist works of late-Impressionist painters such as Georges Seurat or Paul Signac at the turn of the nineteenth century. […] Unlike Seurat, Klee’s concern with his pointillist experiments was not to reproduce the visible spectrum of colour in the manner of an ‘improved camera’, but to artistically exploit the investigations of simultaneous and complementary contrasts that he had intensively pursued in the context of his teaching at the Bauhaus’ (C. Hopfengart, Paul Klee. Life and Work, Bern, 2012, p. 236).

Paul Klee (1879 - 1940), Vollmond in Mauern (Full Moon within Walls), 1919 . Est. £300,000-500,000/ $500,000-800,000. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Klee, dated 1919 and numbered 210 (lower right); watercolour on chalk-grounded gauze laid down on card; image size: 25.5 by 21cm., 9 7/8 by 8 1/4 in. (oval). Executed in 1919

Provenance: Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Munich (acquired in July 1920)
Kuno Sponholz, New York
Herwin & Hildegarde Schaefer, San Rafael (acquired in 1949. Sold: Christie's, New York, 29th November 1998, lot 746)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: Munich, Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Paul Klee, 1920, no. 231
Geneva, Galerie Jan Krugier, Ditesheim & Cie, Paul Klee. Traces de la mémoire, 1998-99, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 153, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection,1999, no. 167, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 163, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La Passion du Dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 150, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke aus der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 160, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Literature: Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee, Catalogue raisonné, Bern, 1999, vol. 3, no. 2274, illustrated p. 130

Note: Vollmond in Mauern is an exceptional example of Klee’s dramatic interpretation of architectural landscapes. Composed as an oval - the contrasting facets of colour representing the roofs and walls of a town - the present work epitomises the approach Klee’s art took after the First World War (fig. 1). The innovative use of plaster-covered gauze gives the work a wonderfully rich texture and vibrancy, and also echoes the architectural essence of the work. Discussing the pictures produced during this important period, Will Grohmann writes: 'Viewed superficially the pictures of 1919 are combinations of planes remotely reminiscent of analytical Cubism. Actually, however, they are based on a translucent network of straight lines which intersect at right or acute angles and produce a structure of planes. The 'story', if it exists at all, is worked in and expands the facts by including fate in the composition. Klee's attitude is existentialist in that he repeatedly faces the void, re-creates the universe, and accepts fate. All the paintings of 1919 are stigmatized by fate, represented by houses, windows, trees and stars, rarely by animals or human beings. The associative elements that usually determine the title are not the point of departure; nor are the forms, or at least only those that leave room for association. Klee's whole universe is indeed embraced by form, but it is a form filled by the universe, and from this balance springs the fullness and precision of his pictures' (W. Grohmann, Paul Klee, London, 1954, pp. 152 & 159).

Describing the present work Anita Beloubek-Hammer writes: ‘This oval structure of coloured shapes has a precious appearance, like a polished stone sparkling in the light, with the prismatic subdivision of its surface enclosing the yellow disc of the moon. Its sparkle radiates into its environs; in contrast, around the picture’s border, a night-time blue dominates. […] Angles, surfaces and colour contrasts produce a certain spatial effect, a complex, relief-like space of colour that is constructed without beginning and end, like the construction of the universe. The artist certainly had this metaphor in mind, for the years 1919-20 stand out in his œuvre as the period of "cosmic" pictures’ (A. Beloubek-Hammer, in The Timeless Eye – Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection(exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 344). 

FRANCISCO DE GOYA

Jan Krugier was both a connoisseur of art and humanity and his collection mirrors his lifelong quest for works that involve the viewer both visually and intellectually. Krugier once confessed that looking at drawings helped him overcome demons of the past and Francisco de Goya’s remarkable depiction of a man with a distressed expression entitled Loco (Madman) would probably have been be one of them (est. £700,000-900,000/$1.2-1.5 million). This prodigious drawing – one of four by Goya in the sale - is among the most powerful and extraordinary late works of the painter contained in the “Bordeaux albums”, an ensemble of works drawn during the artist’s exile in France, between 1824 and his death in 1828.

Francisco de Goya (1746 - 1828), Loco (Madman), Est. £700,000-900,000/$1.2-1.5 million. Photo: Sotheby's

inscribed Loco and Calabozo (lower centre) and numbered by the artist 17 (upper right); black chalk and lithographic crayon on paper; 19.1 by 14.6cm., 7 9/16 by 5 3/4in.

Provenance: Hyades Collection, Bordeaux
J. Boilly, Paris (sold: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 19th-20th March 1869, lot 48 (album de 20 dessins)
Leurceau Collection
Alfred Ströhlin, Lausanne
A.S. Drey (1939)
Zdenko Bruck, Buenos Aires
Private Collection
Sale: Kornfeld & Klipstein, Berne, 18th June 1980, lot 473
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Literature: August Mayer, 'Some Unknown Drawings by Francisco Goya', in Master Drawings, vol. IX, June 1934/March 1935, p. 20
Pierre Gassier & Juliet Wilson, Vie et Oeuvre de Francisco Goya, l'Oeuvre complet illustré, Fribourg, 1970 (English ed. 1971), no. 1725, illustrated
Pierre Gassier, Les Dessins de Goya, Les Albums, Fribourg, 1973, no.G17, illustrated
Galerie Jan Krugier, Dix Ans d'Activité, Genève, 1983, no.1
Françoise Garcia & Francis Ribemont, Goya Hommages. Les années bordelaises, 1824-1828, (exhibition catalogue), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 1998, illustrated fig. 12

Note:
Goya: Drawings from the Private Albums
Goya is believed to have begun to compile the first of his Private Albums of drawings in 1796, when visiting the Duchess of Alba, and he continued this new and extraordinary artistic expression until his death in 1828. During these last thirty years of his life, he drew some 550 sheets, collected into eight albums, which in the most intimate way describe Goya’s vision of humanity, with freedom of imagination and unequalled power of expression. The album drawings, generally of a totally spontaneous nature, are therefore a form of ‘visual journal’, not intended to be seen by the general public, like the artist’s prints or paintings, but only to be shared with an intimate and private circle of friends. It is not known why, at the peak of his career as a painter, Goya turned to this new and totally personal form of expression, revealing a very private aspect of his mind, but one possible factor may have been that in 1793, following a near-fatal illness, he lost his hearing. But whatever the reasons, he embarked at this time on an entirely new way of communicating, through a rich variety of highly animated images, many shocking and brutal, depicted with Goya’s unique and acute observation of the world around him, often reflecting an intense sensibility to the political and moral issues of his time, and manifesting at every turn the painter’s astonishingly fertile imagination.

All four drawings by Goya in this sale of the Krugier-Poniatowski collection (the following three lots, and lot 113 in the sale on 6th February) were originally part of these celebrated Private Albums. 

In the unprecedented exhibition, Goya, drawings from his private albums, held at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2001, Juliet Wilson-Bareau presented and examined the eight Private Albums in depth, and although she stressed in her introduction to the catalogue that we will never really know exactly how the albums were actually composed in Goya's own time, the exhibition revealed a great deal about their genesis, composition and subsequent fortunes after the artist's death.  The drawings do not all seem to have been contained in albums from the very beginning; some were apparently kept loose by the artist in folders, and were probably only bound together by him at a later stage.  All the pages of each album were, though, ultimately numbered by Goya himself, except those of the first, smaller notebook, the Sanlúcar album (A).  After Goya’s death, the eight albums that he left were divided up and remounted twice, and since the late 19th century their pages have become widely dispersed, in public and private collections throughout the world.  It appears that Goya's son, Javier, initially consolidated the eight original Private Albums into just three large volumes after his father's death in 1828, but essentially respected the page order established by his father.  After Javier's death in 1854, the albums passed in turn to his son, Mariano Goya y Goicochea, before being acquired by Federico de Madrazo together with his brother-in-law Román Garretta y Huerta.  It seems it was Madrazo who removed Goya's drawings from the three larger volumes assembled by Javier, splitting them into groups to be either sold or kept for his own collection.  Those that he chose to keep were renumbered, disregarding the original order of the pages, and pasted down onto distinctive sheets of pink paper (see two of the drawings in the Krugier-Poniatowski collection: 'Visiones' and A hunter and his dog on the alert, lots 27 and …), and these pages were in turn bound into three new albums.  (For a full account of the later history of the Albums, after Goya’s death, see the 2001 Hayward Gallery, London, exhibition catalogue, Goya, drawings from his private albums, pp. 24-25). 

The eight original albums were first extensively reconstructed in 1973 by Pierre Gassier (Les Dessins de Goya, Les Albums, Fribourg 1973), building on the basis of his 1970 monograph on the artist, co-authored by Juliet Wilson, which included all the album sheets known at that time.  The standard classification of the sheets and the albums, using letters from A to H, was, however, first established much earlier, by Eleanor Sayre in her pioneering studies on Goya’s albums, written in the late 1950s (see in particular E. Sayre, 'An Old Man Writing. A Study of Goya's Albums', Boston Museum Bulletin, LVI, 1958, pp. 116-36).  With great intuition and a keen understanding of Goya's motivation, Sayre outlined a very original, and still entirely valid, way of looking at this great variety of images and subjects, describing these as Goya's ‘journal-albums’.  She wrote: ‘Goya in his fifties …. evolved a singular use for drawing albums. They were not notebooks containing a casual assembly of portrait heads, drapery studies and compositions sketches.  Neither were they any longer sketchbooks preserving the intermittent record of places he saw and picturesque figures which might be used again. They had been transmuted by him into journals -- drawn not written -- whose pictorial entries of varying length pertained predominantly to what Goya thought rather than what he saw’. 

‘Loco’- ‘Calabozo’
This remarkable sheet, Loco, and also the following lot, Young Woman in white fallen to the ground, are among the hugely powerful, extraordinary late works of Goya that originate from the last two of the artist's Private Albums, now known as Bordeaux albums I and II (traditionally albums 'G' and 'H'). The drawings were made while the artist was in exile in Bordeaux, between the time of his arrival there together with his companion Leocadia Weiss in the autumn of 1824 and his death in 1828.

The present, immensely strong image of a man armed with a stick, eyes wide open in a violent yet distressed expression, arm raised and ready to strike, has been linked, because of the title, ‘Loco’ (Madman), as well as the image, to the group of drawings by Goya depicting people in lunatic asylums.  The subjects of album G are very varied, but it contains fifteen such studies of mentally ill people, described by Goya with incredible subtlety and skill, in what have become some of the artist’s most revered images. His acutely accurate depictions of these subjects suggests Goya was deeply interested in mental illness, and also that he must have obtained access to the closed institutions where these people were held, to observe them at first hand. 

Still legible, however, beneath the inscription Loco is the artist's first idea for the drawing's title: Calabozo (The Dungeon).  In fact, Goya placed this sheet among the earlier images of album G, rather than within the later sequence of drawings of the mentally ill, and it seems that he initially conceived this as an image of a prisoner, whose circumstances have led to madness and extreme violence.  At some later stage, though, once the layout of the album had been determined, he seems to have felt that the furious madness expressed by the man was in fact the essential driving force of this image, and that his physical location and the origins of his madness were less significant, changing the drawing's title accordingly (though not, as on some occasions, its numbering).  This is an illuminating example of the relationship between words and images in Goya's album drawings, so many of which have titles inscribed by the artist, and of the challenges the artist faced in capturing the essence of his visual messages in words.  All the drawings in Album 'G' have short captions of this type, in many cases just a single key word, and these frequently ironic titles initiate a different kind of relationship with the drawing, involving the viewer both visually and intellectually in Goya’s complex emotions. 

The pages of this album are all numbered by Goya at the upper corner, the highest number being 60, and are all executed on French paper in black crayon, a choice of medium that is in contrast with the pen and ink and/or wash that the artist used throughout the preceding albums.  In her 2001 exhibition catalogue, Juliet Wilson-Bareau carefully analysed Goya’s various and creative techniques, and the great sophistication in his choices of paper and media, and she suggests (op. cit., p. 22) that this choice of black chalk for the Bordeaux album drawings could have offered the aging artist a medium that was versatile, yet also easier to control.  Another factor, though, could have been Goya's late interest in lithography, a technique of printmaking with which the vibrant and pictorial effects of chalk, at least as he used it, had much in common.  As Wilson-Bareau wrote (ibid., p. 145): 'The drawings, in black chalk or crayon, constitute a brilliantly inventive set of ‘newcaprichos’, as Goya himself intimated in his letter to his friend Ferrer in Paris...’    

As Pierre Gassier noted, the treatment of the cell in which the figure finds himself in the present drawing can be compared with the setting seen in two of Goya’s other drawings depicting madmen, from the same album, 'Loco Africano' (G. 34) and 'Loco' (G. 36), in both of which the human figure also stands out more or less brightly lit, against a very dark area of black chalk (Gassier, op. cit., 1973, pp. 565-66, reproduced pp. 532, 534).  Sigrid Achenbach, writing in the Krugier-Poniatowski exhibition catalogues, points out, though, that unlike the other two images mentioned by Gassier, the flight of stairs included in the present composition clearly identifies this space as a prison.  Here, the artist depicts a man in a state of profound mental distress while trying to free himself from his captivity, and the use of intense light to sculpt the figure emerging from the darkness behind further heightens the powerful drama of the scene.  With astonishing skill and dexterity in the use of the chalk, the image is worked out with extreme freedom, but closer examination reveals, as is so often the case in Goya’s drawings, that the artist has in fact made significant changes to the composition, in particular to the position of the man’s arms, which were initially behind his back.  Such continuous reworking and revising of his drawings is a characteristic and fascinating aspect of Goya’s draughtsmanship. His incredible ability to work out his developing thoughts while actually drawing, and his extreme confidence in being able to transform his images during this creative process, to give form to his ultimate ideas (see also Visiones, lot 27 below) mark Goya as perhaps the first truly modern artist, for whom art was fundamentally an expression of his innermost thoughts.  Here, Goya chooses to express himself in a particularly extreme and dramatic way, and the 'Loco', with his wild and desperate gesture, is one of the strongest and most iconic images of the artist’s final years.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres described drawing as the “probity of art” and his work features strongly in Krugier’s private collection. In Three studies for the figure of Stratonice, Ingres works towards the final, eloquent depiction of the figure of Stratonice in his painting, Antiochus and Stratonice, commissioned in 1834 by the Duc d’Orléans, and completed in 1840. With its pensive mood, great technical variety and instinctively brilliant mise-en-page, this drawing - in some ways strikingly modern - is as profoundly beautiful and revealing as any that Ingres ever made. It captures the essence of his genius and shows how he created forms that, to quote Baudelaire, naturally attain the ideal (est. £350,000-450,000/$600,000-800,000). 

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 - 1867), Three studies for the figure of Stratonice. Est. £350,000-450,000/$600,000-800,000. Photo: Sotheby's

signed Ingres (lower left) and inscribed in various places with notations regarding lighting; pencil and black chalk, with stumping, on paper; 39.4 by 28.4cm., 15 1/2 by 11 1/4 in.

Provenance: Private Collection, Paris
Gallery Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York
John R. Gaines, Louisville, Kentucky (sold: Sotheby's, New York, 18th November 1986, lot 27)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner

Exhibited: Louisville, Kentucky, The J.B. Speed Art Museum, In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of J.A.D. Ingres, 1983, no. 17
New York, Jan Krugier Gallery, The Presence of Ingres, Important Works by Ingres, Degas, Picasso, Matisse and Balthus, 1988, no. 28
Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin & Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Linie, Licht und Schatten. Meisterzeichnungen und Skulpturen der Sammlung Jan und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 1999, no. 69, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Timeless Eye. Master Drawings from the Jan and Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski Collection, 1999, no. 81, illustrated in colour in the cataogue
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Miradas sin Tiempo. Dibujos, Pinturas y Esculturas de la Coleccion Jan y Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2000, no. 95, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, La passion du dessin. Collection Jan et Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2002, no. 86, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Vienna, Albertina Museum, Goya bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2005, no. 14, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Das Ewige Auge - Von Rembrandt bis Picasso. Meisterwerke der Sammlung Jan Krugier und Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski, 2007, no. 80, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Note: In this astonishingly beautiful sheet of studies, deeply classical yet in many ways also strikingly modern, Ingres works towards the final, eloquent depiction of the figure of Stratonice in his painting, Antiochus and Stratonice, commissioned in 1834 by the Duc d’Orléans, and completed in 1840 (fig. 1). To the right of the sheet he studies, in an unusual and evocative combination of pencil and black chalk, the entire, nude figure, exploring two different positions for her left leg. The technique in much of this figure is extremely refined, with delicate pencil strokes creating fine modulations of tone, but the face and shoulders are delineated very differently, with bold, almost sharp, strokes of black chalk that give the whole figure a great intensity of expression, and a subtly exotic aspect. Beside the woman’s shoulders and waist there are, characteristically, a few notes regarding lighting and colour (‘clair’, 'demi teinte'), which draw us still further into the artist’s creative process. To the left of the main figure, Ingres studies again, and in slightly more detail, the figure’s right arm, breasts and left shoulder, and then, in the lower left part of the sheet, he repeats her face, this time making extensive use of stumping to create continuous tonal gradations and therefore a greater sense of lighting and three dimensionality – an impression reinforced by the fact that the artist has lightly written the word ‘lumière’ on the figure’s forehead. With its pensive mood, great technical variety and instinctively brilliant mise-en-page, this drawing is as profoundly beautiful and revealing as any that Ingres ever made.

From the very outset of his long career, Ingres was clearly strongly drawn to the subject of Antiochus and Stratonice, taken from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, the text of which he copied in his Notebook X. With its fashionably classical setting, yet totally contemporary themes of erotic, somewhat oedipal desires, political intrigue and generational conflict, the story was ideally suited to the cultural milieu of the time, and Ingres’ teacher, Jacques-Louis David, chose it for the painting with which he won the Prix de Rome in 1774. Plutarch’s text also provided the basis for Méhul’s ‘comédie héroïque,' Stratonice, which premiered in May 1792, and was revived regularly under the Empire. Ingres is known to have owned a copy of the script of this production, and even before his departure for Rome, he made two drawings of the subject. Established in Rome, Ingres announced in January 1807 that he would make a painting representing the story of Stratonice, but the appearance of this work is unknown, as the painting disappeared following the sale of the artist’s effects after his death in 1867. It is generally thought, though, that it followed the composition of a drawing in the Louvre (RF 1440). Two other early drawings of the subject survive, in Montauban and Boulogne, but Ingres’ next major exploration of the theme came only in 1834, when the Duc d’Orléans commissioned him to paint the subject, as a pendant to Delaroche’s painting, The Death of General Guise. Presumably in connection with this commission, Ingres painted the unfinished oil sketch now in Cleveland, in which we see for the first time the distinctive pose of Stratonice that the artist explores in the Krugier-Poniatowski drawing. This composition was then developed into the more complex and elaborate final painting, delivered to the Duc d’Orléans in 1840, and now in Chantilly (fig. 1). This was not, though, the end of the artist’s interest in this evocative subject. In 1858-60 he made a revised version of the earlier, simpler Cleveland sketch, executing a painting in oil on paper, which in 1983 was in a Philadelphia collection. Finally, Ingres made a reversed variant of the Chantilly painting, executed in a complex combination of oil, graphite and watercolour on paper laid down on canvas, a work, now in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, which is dated 1866, just one year before the artist’s death.

Given that Ingres was an artist who drew constantly throughout his career, and that he explored the subject of Antiochus and Stratonice a number of times over a period of almost 70 years, it is not, perhaps, surprising that there are many surviving drawings relating to his various versions of the subject. The great corpus of Ingres drawings in Montauban contains no fewer than 115 such studies (Vigne, 1995, nos. 37-151), and others are also to be found in various collections around the world. One that deserves particular mention, though, in relation to the Krugier-Poniatowski drawing is a fine sheet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. 63:66), which is a drapery study for the figure of Stratonice, showing her in more or less exactly the same pose as in the present drawing, but fully clothed (fig. 2). The comparison of the two drawings highlights the way that Ingres, in any drawing, focussed almost clinically on certain aspects of the subject in hand. In the New York drawing of Stratonice the figure’s features and emotions hardly exist, and the focus is entirely on the rendering of the forms and lighting of the drapery – treated with utter brilliance, but without any attempt to address the emotional aspects of the subject. In the Krugier drawing, by contrast, the twin foci are the pathos of the story, and the physical beauty of the protagonist, Stratonice. When a prodigiously gifted draughtsman like Ingres turns his attentions to those aspects of a subject, it is not surprising that the resultant drawing is one of the most moving and beautiful that he ever made.

Pablo Picasso, Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, 20 November 1955. Estimate: £15-20 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014.

LONDON.- Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in London on 4 February 2014 sets the bar for rare and important works from distinguished sources to be offered at auction this season. Presenting discerning, informed and passionate international collectors with 48 lots spanning almost a century, the sale is led by Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, 1955 by Pablo Picasso, which comes to the market for the first time in over 55 years (estimate: £15-20 million). The sale features works from exceptional collections including: Modern Masters: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection, an historic group led by a magnificent still life by Juan Gris, Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, 1915 (estimate: £12-18 million) and Piet Mondrian’s iconic Composition No. 2 with Blue and Yellow, 1930 (estimate: £8-12 million); Trois homes qui marchent I, one of Alberto Giacometti’s famous multi-figure compositions, dating to the height of his oeuvre, from The Property of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sold to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund (estimate: £6.2-8 million); Les cylindres colorés, 1918, by Fernand Léger, formerly in the collection of Louis Carré, the celebrated art dealer who was closely associated with the artist (estimate: £5-7 million); and Property from the Estate of Ayala Zacks Abramov, featuring Henry Moore’s Mother and Child with Apple (estimate: £2.5-3.5 million). The enduring appeal of the Impressionist era is exemplified by L’Eglise de Varengeville; soleil couchant, 1882, by Claude Monet (estimate: £4-7 million). Estimates range from £150,000 to £20 million, with a pre-sale estimate of £94,150,000 to£134,900,000. Christie’s evening auctions of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist Art on 4 February have a total pre-sale estimate of £137.1 million to £199.5 million. 

Jay Vincze, International Director and Head of The Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Christie’s London: “This stellar sale presents international collectors and institutions with rare opportunities to acquire exceptional works with illustrious provenance by key impressionist and modern masters. The global market for this category continues to expand and deepen year on year, underpinned by passion for the beauty of the period and an increasingly far reaching appreciation and understanding of the importance of late 19th century and early 20th century art movements. We are very privileged to be offering the distinguished private Swiss collection which includes a magnificent still life by Juan Gris as well as some of the most important examples of De Stijl works ever to be seen on the market, many of which were acquired directly from the artists, with whom the collectors had significant relationships. We are also very honoured to be offering Picasso’s powerful portrait of his great love Jacqueline Roque, which comes to auction for the first time in over 55 years. Such a major work from this important series has not been seen at auction since ‘Femme accroupie au costume turc, Jacqueline’ was sold at Christie’s New York for $30.8 million in November 2007.” 

Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, 20 November 1955, is one of a small group of portraits by Pablo Picasso showing Jacqueline Roque in the costume of an ‘odalisque’, a woman of the harem (estimate: £15-20 million). Having met Jacqueline three years earlier, this painting dates from relatively early in their relationship and is a colourful, sexually charged celebration of Jacqueline, whom Picasso would marry six years later and who would become one of the most important muses of the artist’s life. The theme of the odalisque derived from Picasso’s variations upon Eugène Delacroix’s celebrated masterpiece, Les femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, now in the Louvre, Paris. Picasso had created his own versions of Les femmes d’Alger from December 1954 until early 1955 in his studio in the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris; returning to the theme with relish later that year. The present painting is one of a series of pictures in which he painted a single woman dressed as an odalisque, taking his cues from Delacroix, from Ingres, from himself and crucially from Henri Matisse who had died the previous year; the connection between this theme and the heady, orientalised world of languorous sexuality of Matisse’s fictive harem scenes is immediately recognisable. 

Pablo Picasso, Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, 20 November 1955. Estimate: £15-20 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014.

signed 'Picasso' (upper right); dated and numbered '20.11.55. II' (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 36¼ x 28¾ in. (92 x 73 cm.).Painted in 1955

Provenance: Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (no. 7161), by whom acquired directly from the artist.
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (no. 1791), by whom acquired from the above.
Private collection, Munich, by whom acquired from the above in 1958, and thence by descent.
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION

Literature: C. Zervos, 'Transmutations et unité fondamentale dans les oeuvres récentes de Picasso', in Cahiers d'Art, Paris, 1957 (illustrated p. 27).
C. Zervos, Pablo Picasso, Oeuvres de 1953 à 1955, vol. 16, Paris, 1965, no. 533 (illustrated pl. 182).
The Picasso Project, ed., Picasso's Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings and Sculpture, The Fifties I, 1950-1955, San Francisco, 2000, no. 55-234, p. 345 (illustrated).
E. Mallen, ed., Online Picasso Project, Sam Houston State University, OPP.55:255 (accessed 2013).

Exhibited: Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Maîtres d'Art Moderne, September - October 1958.
Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne, on loan 1975-2009.
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Picasso, las grandes series, March - June 2001, no. 9, p. 362 (illustrated p. 223).

Notes: Pablo Picasso painted Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil on 20 November 1955. This picture is one of a small group of portraits showing Jacqueline Roque in the costume of an 'odalisque', a woman of the harem. The identification of the model is clear from comparison with other works from the selected series, and also with portraits that Picasso had created of her during the course of 1954 and 1955; indeed, a little over a year before he painted Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, he had drawn an intimate image of Jacqueline's face showing the nose, as here, facing to the right while the rest appeared predominantly orientated towards the left. That had been one of Picasso's early depictions of Jacqueline: while they had met in 1952, when she was assisting Suzanne Ramié in the workshop in Vallauris where Picasso made his ceramics, it was only later in 1953 that she had become established as the artist's partner, especially following the final rupture with Françoise Gilot in September that year. Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil therefore dates from relatively early in this relationship and is a colourful, tender celebration of Jacqueline, whom Picasso would marry six years later and who would become one of the most important muses of the artist's entire life.

In Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, Picasso has shown Jacqueline in the exotic garb of a woman of the seraglio. The theme of the odalisque derived from Picasso's variations upon Eugène Delacroix's celebrated masterpiece, Les femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, now in the Louvre, Paris. Picasso had created his own versions of Les femmes d'Alger from December 1954 until early 1955 in his studio in the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris. In Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil, painted at the end of 1955, Picasso has returned to the theme of the odalisque with relish: this is one of a series of pictures in which he painted a single woman dressed as an odalisque, taking his cues from Delacroix, from Ingres, from himself, and crucially from Henri Matisse. In this string of portraits, Picasso created a new sequence of variations, showing Jacqueline sometimes more figuratively, sometimes less. She appears in profile in some pictures, facing the viewer in others, here sitting upon a chair, there upon the floor. Picasso appears to have been playfully exploring the pictorial potential of Jacqueline's striking features, for instance by inverting the nose in Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil or, in another work painted six days later and sold at Christie's New York in November 2007, by creating a heavier, more stylised impression of the head. 

Picasso had long been intrigued by Delacroix's works. Gilot would recall a visit to the Louvre with Georges Salle, when Picasso had been given the chance to compare his own works to the Old Masters there. Picasso 'then asked to see some of his paintings beside Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus, The Massacre of Chios andThe Women of Algiers,' Gilot wrote. 'He had often spoken to me of making his own version of The Women of Algiers and had taken me to the Louvre on an average of once a month to study it... I asked him how he felt about the Delacroix. His eyes narrowed and he said, "That bastard. He's really good"' (F. Gilot & C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, Toronto & London, 1964, p. 203). This shows the extent to which the idea of tackling Delacroix had gestated within Picasso over the decades. However, it was perhaps a number of external influences and events that finally prompted him to confront it in his own series of works, and later in the portraits of Jacqueline such as Femme au costume turc dans un fauteuil. One of these was Jacqueline (whose resemblance to the woman squatting to the right of the composition in Delacroix's original had been noted by several people) and another was the death of Matisse.

It was at the end of 1954 that Matisse had died. He and Picasso, the two towering giants of twentieth-century art, had increasingly found solace in each other's company during their later years, having earlier enjoyed a more thorny friendship heavily spiced with rivalry. Picasso was more and more willing to admit to Matisse's brilliance, even going so far as to declare that, 'All things considered, there is only Matisse’ (Picasso, quoted in J. Golding, 'Introduction’, pp. 13-24, Cowling et al., ed., Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., London, 2002, p. 24). When Matisse died, Picasso initially appeared to be in denial, refusing to answer the phone to hear the news, let alone to attend the funeral. Now, deprived of any contemporaries with whom to discuss the nature and ramifications of art, Picasso sought out the company of the long-departed masters, be it Delacroix, Edouard Manet or Diego Velazquez. Picasso, made aware of the issue of his own legacy and standing in the history of art, especially during a period of international retrospectives that were causing a constant re-evaluation of his impact upon the development of painting, turned to the pantheon of painters of the past for inspiration, company and conversation. At the same time, he was placing himself all the more firmly within that firmament. 

Modern Masters: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection

Modern Masters: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection comprises an exceptional and historic group of works which will be offered across all four King Street sales on 4 and 5 February. Collections often reflect their collectors’ tastes and histories, but seldom do they also reflect their friendships and relationships as much as the 22 works of art assembled by a private Swiss couple. Behind almost all of these works are tales of friendship, as the collectors came to know many of the artists who are represented, meeting a number of the leading figures of the avant garde from the 1920s onwards. Living a reality confined merely to dreams for many, they were able to meet Constantin Brancusi, to see Pablo Picasso’s Guernica while it was in its studio, to support the impoverished and embattled Piet Mondrian and to entertain Hans Arp on a regular basis. Two published authors, who were authorities in their field, the couple were prominent in the cultural milieu of Switzerland and Europe as a whole, particularly in the middle decades of the 20th century. The collection is led by a magnificent still life by Juan Gris, Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, 1915 (estimate: £12-18 million) and Piet Mondrian’s Composition No. 2 with Blue and Yellow, 1930, which is an historic example of the radical Neo-Plastic aesthetic that Mondrian had developed during the previous decade and which reached a pinnacle at this time (estimate: £8-12 million). Coming to the market for the first time, the collection as a whole is expected to realise in excess of £30 million.

Juan Gris (1887-1927), Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, 1915. Estimate: £12-18 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014.

signed and dated ‘Juan Gris 3-15’ (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 45.7/8 x 35.1/8 in. (116.5 x 89.3 cm.). Painted in March 1915

Provenance: Galerie de L'Effort Moderne [Léonce Rosenberg], Paris (no. 5114).
Dr Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, Lausanne, by whom acquired in November 1925.
Gisela M. Reber, Lugano, 1926.
Galerie Gasser, Zurich, circa 1944.
Professor Dr Wilhelm Löffler, Zurich, by 1955.
Private collection, Zurich, a bequest from the above in 1972, and thence by descent to the present owners.
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

Collections often reflect their collectors' tastes and histories, but seldom do they also reflect their friendships and relationships as much as this exceptional, historic group of works of art assembled by a private Swiss couple. Behind almost all of these works are tales of friendship, as the collectors came to know many of the artists who are represented here.

The couple in question were not artists in their own rights, yet were prominent in the cultural milieu of Switzerland - and indeed Europe - especially in the middle decades of the Twentieth Century. Two published authors - indeed, authorities - they met a number of the most prominent figures of the avant garde from the 1920s onwards. They were able to meet Constantin Brancusi, to see Pablo Picasso's Guernica while it was in its studio, to help to support the impoverished and embattled Piet Mondrian and to entertain Hans Arp on a regular basis. Each of the works therefore serves as a relic of deeply personal bonds between the collectors and the artists whom they admired.

Of course, not all the works in the collection were from artists whom they knew. One of the rare exceptions to this rule, the magnificent still life by Juan Gris, Nature morte à la nappe aux carreaux was in fact beyond their financial means when it was available for sale in Switzerland; instead of buying it, they were able to advise an acquaintance, the eminent Professor Doctor Wilhelm Löffler, who had known little about art and still less about such an avant garde monument of Cubism, with such enthusiasm that he bought it for himself… yet, when he died, he bequeathed it to them, stating that he had only ever considered it a permanent loan. This is a reflection of the incredible generosity of spirit of the couple in question, which was clearly appreciated by many with whom they came into contact.

Looking at the collection, it is interesting to note the architectural dimension that is often present. The couple who assembled these works were often in contact with people from that milieu, and so it seems only natural that they should have acquired works that are either architectural in character, such as the Mondrian and the Vantongerloo, or which were the creations of artists involved with architecture and design, such as Le Corbusier and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Indeed, those artists spent time with the couple on the SS Patris II, which had become an extra location for the fourth Congrès Internationale d'Architecture Moderne. The ship, wending its way from Marseilles to Athens, where the congress itself was to take place, became a de facto conference in its own right, stopping along the way to view various sites. This gave the collectors and the artists and architects alike, such as Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Ernö Goldfinger and others, a chance to begin or to deepen their acquaintances. It is this type of glancing insight into the cultural world of Europe during those turbulent decades at the middle of the Twentieth Century that this collection provides. It has faultless historical credentials, it provides insights into the personalities of the artists and the collectors, and it also reflects their daring, now justified support of modern art itself, ranging across Cubism, Dada, Purism and Surrealism.

Literature: Cahiers d’Art, Paris, 1927, no. 4-5 (illustrated p. 172).
C. Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1931 (illustrated p. 375).
Cahiers d’Art, Paris, 1933, no. 5-6 (illustrated).
D.H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work, London, 1947 (illustrated pl. 21).
J.T. Soby, Juan Gris, New York, 1958, pp. 50 & 61 (illustrated p. 60).
D.H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work, New York, 1968 (illustrated p. 107).
D. Cooper, Juan Gris, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, vol. I, Paris, 1977, no. 127, p. 194 (illustrated p. 195).

Exhibited: Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Internationale Kunst Ausstellung, June – September 1926, no. 374.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Juan Gris, April 1933, no. 50 (illustrated).
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Europäische Kunst 13-20 Jahrhundert aus Zu¨rcher Sammlungen, June – August 1950.
Bern, Kunstmuseum, Juan Gris, October 1955 – January 1956, no. 23.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, on loan April - December 1982.
Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, Juan Gris, December 1992 – February 1993, no. 46 (illustrated p. 203).

Notes: Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux (The checked tablecloth) is a large-scale landmark painting by Juan Gris dating from 1915, a watershed year in which he shifted further from his earlier Analytical Cubism to the more lyrical Synthetic Cubism. The importance of this picture is reflected in the fact that it has featured in a number of significant collections since its execution, including that of one of the greatest patrons of Cubism, Dr G.F. Reber of Lausanne. Gris' move away from Analytical Cubism is demonstrated in the sheer exuberant energy of Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, which features an explosion of objects, seemingly radiating from a point in the lower centre of the composition. There is a sense of dynamism to this composition, accentuated by its sheer size, which is at odds with the more static still life works that he often created; this was a characteristic that marked out his pictures of 1915 in particular. Indeed, it was making specific reference to Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux and another work from the same year that Gris' friend, dealer and biographer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler later wrote: 'Apparently Gris' ideal of architectural grandeur can only be realised with a static subject. But during the summer of 1915 he produced a series of pictures which are full of movement' (D.H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: His Life and Work, trans. D. Cooper, London, 1969, p. 126).

In fact, Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux was painted not in the Summer of 1915, as Kahnweiler suggested, but instead in March, only a few months after Gris had returned to Paris following some months in the South of France after the outbreak of the First World War. This marked a new period in Gris' work, as he himself acknowledged in a letter to Kahnweiler written on 26 March 1915, during the same month that Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux was painted: 'I think I have really made progress recently and that my pictures begin to have a unity which they have lacked till now. They are no longer those inventories of objects which used to depress me so much' (Gris, quoted in C. Green, Juan Gris, London & New Haven, 1992, p. 51). This was a shift that has been noted by a number of critics as well. Of the transition of which Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux is such a prominent example, Kahnweiler explained, 'Gris finally gave up presenting the beholder with a great variety of information (acquired by empirical observation) about the objects which he displayed. He now offered a synthesis: that is to say, he packed his knowledge into one significant form, a single emblem. True conceptual painting was born' (Kahnweiler, op. cit., 1969, p. 126). Meanwhile, James Thrall Soby wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1958, in which Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux was reproduced although not included in the show itself:

'... for sheer variety his work of 1915 is outstanding. The strange, lovely fluorescence of The Checked Tablecloth is a long cry from the splintered complexity of the Still Life. And in connection with the compositional arrangement of the former picture, mention should be made of Gris' passion for triangles. Lipchitz has told the writer that Gris revered the triangle because it is "so accurate and endless a form." He added that once when he and Gris found a triangular-shaped drinking glass, the latter explained: "You see we are influencing life at last"' (J.T. Soby, Juan Gris, exh. cat., New York, 1958, pp. 50-57).

Those triangles help to banish any sense of the static from Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux: the various objects appear to emanate like a fan from the point down in the middle of the composition, at the bottom. At the same time, this anchoring point helps to give the impression of pictorial unity that increasingly characterised his pictures. The growing focus on coherence is clear in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux in its inclusion of various objects which are shown almost in relief against the uncluttered background, heightening the sense of cohesion. Douglas Cooper himself noted the less fragmentary nature of Gris' compositions from this time, and the greater certainty in his treatment of the spaces between the objects. Thus, Gris revealed his confidence in paint handling and composition even during a period of extensive pictorial experimentation.

Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux has a vibrancy which is accentuated by the checkering of the tablecloth, which extends into various other fields within the composition. This is a parallel version of the chessboard which featured in several of Gris' works from this period. This was a significant part of the transition from Analytical Cubism: where that earlier means of representation had involved constructing the image of the subject through a scaffolding-like armature, now the grid took on a new appearance, playfully embraced in the form of this tablecloth or, elsewhere, the chessboard; it even appears in the background of Guitare sur une table in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo in the flagstones of the floor. At the same time, it allowed Gris to introduce the formality of the gridded armature by other means.

Against this framing device, he has shown, using a deliberately extensive and versatile variety of means, a number of objects in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux. Some, like the grapes, the wood grain or the Bass label, are shown in an almost literal manner, while others are more stylised, for instance the glasses, depicted as fragmented and almost metallic objects, or the spectral cups, saucers and guitar, which are presented in part through deceptively simple white outlines. This range of approaches to verisimilitude is given more emphasis by the life-like scale of the composition. The variety of means of representation explored in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux cuts to the heart of the transition that was taking shape in Gris' work at this time: while some objects are painted in a manner that echoes his earlier use of collage, a technique which had drawn him away from Analytical Cubism and towards a more legible aesthetic, others hint at a new idealism.

Increasingly, Gris was seeking out an almost Neo-Platonic version of his objects, no longer trusting to observation alone, but instead to memory, experience and indeed concept - hence Kahnweiler's declaration that these works marked the beginning of his 'conceptual' phase. Where Cubism had formerly been seen by Gris, and also his fellow artists, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as an almost objective means of recording the world, more and more he was seeking out a modern form of classicism that cut to the heart of existence. The outlines of the guitar and the cups in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux emphasise this notion: they are idealised yet also all the more evocative for the viewer. Nonetheless, they contain shard-like facets of 'materiality', be it in the wood of the guitar or the slivers of white and shadow of the porcelain cups and the bowl.

In Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, there is a grounded quality to the depiction of the fruit and the label of the bottle of stout. The latter in particular harks back to the recent works involving collage, such as Verres et journaux of the previous year, now in the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Echoing the introduction of 'reality' of those works, the label in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux has been meticulously painted to the point that it approaches trompe-l'oeil. Meanwhile, the Beaujolais label in the background and the newspaper in the foreground - a staple of Gris' works - reveal a deliberately painterly quality, despite evoking those earlier collage-based works. This painterly dimension is only heightened by the increasing use of Pointillist dabs of colour, which convey a sense of shading in various areas of the picture and which would, over the following year, become increasingly dominant.

Looking at the fruit, beer, wine and guitar in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, the viewer could be mistaken for interpreting this rich and lyrical cornucopia as a reflection of a world of plenty, of sensation, of music. Instead, Gris was painting against the backdrop of the First World War and his many deprivations. As a Spanish national, Gris was not called up for service in his adopted home, France. However, he was also unable to return to Spain, as he had neither carried out national service nor paid the necessary tax in order to be exempt from it. Before the First World War had begun, he had travelled with Josette to the South of France, staying first in Collioure and then in Céret. There, he was surrounded by a number of artists and friends, several of whom helped to support him, as his dealer, Kahnweiler, was barely able to help him - as a German national, he was unable to return to France, having left shortly before the outbreak of hostilities. Various arrangements arose to assist Gris: Henri Matisse, with whom Gris had spent a great deal of time in the South, had returned to Paris and arranged for Gertrude Stein and a New York sculptor and dealer, Michael Brenner, to give Gris a stipend. However, he was loath to go against the spirit of the contract he had made with Kahnweiler. He thus found himself between a rock and a hard place until he was released from Kahnweiler and took up a contract with Léonce Rosenberg.

It was in the context of this extended period of personal upheaval that Gris created Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux and a number of other celebrated works, many of which are filled with a similar zest for life. These include Nature morte et paysage - Place Ravignan, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pipe et journal, "Fantomas", now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and even the moderately more austere Le petit déjeuner in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, which nonetheless glows with an intense palette. In Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, Gris has refracted and diffracted the various colours present, in part through his use of the grid, adding an extra dimension of movement to the entirety, lending it an electric sense of buzzing energy. There is a firework-like intensity to its surface that prefigures some of the more Pointillist works of the following year such as Journal et compotier in the Yale University Art Gallery. All this opulence strikes a perplexing note when seen against the biographical details of Gris' life at that time: despite his black mood, he was creating colourful, sensual pictures. Perhaps the fruit, beer and wine were objects to which he aspired, images of hope and plenty in a time of scarcity; they may also have reflected his own desire to escape from the conflict-torn world and into his pictures, as was reflected in his final letter to Kahnweiler from the war years:

'I must apologise to you for discussing things which, at the present grave moment, must appear to you purely silly. But I have worried so much that I am now going to shut myself off and think of nothing but my work. I don't want to hear anything more, especially as everything which is now happening seems to me both useless and devoid of good sense' (Gris, quoted in Kahnweiler, op. cit., p. 28).

However, in Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, Gris has not entirely succeeded in blocking out the War: in the depiction of Le journal, a publication which appeared in a number of Gris' pictures during and after his period using collage elements, Gris has deliberately shown the ominous subtitle: 'Communiqués officiels'. He has thus allowed a rare, tangential glimpse of the war to enter Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, doubtless reflecting his own concerns, not least for the friends and colleagues about whose wellbeing he was anxious, in particular Braque, who had suffered a serious head wound while serving on the Front.

Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux was first owned by Kahnweiler's successor as Gris' dealer, Léonce Rosenberg, who himself was not exempt from service and therefore had to juggle his career with his military activities (for some time, he was attached to the British forces as an interpreter for the Royal Flying Corp). It was then acquired by Dr Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, one of the most celebrated of Cubist patrons of the 1920s in particular. Reber had originally collected works by earlier artists including Paul Cézanne, but the discovery of Cubism was a revelation for him, and he assembled a formidable collection of works by the first tier of the movement, Picasso, Braque, Léger and of course Gris. He gradually filled his home, the Château de Béthusy in Lausanne, with their pictures. While his collection diminished following the Crash of 1929, which left his finances dented, and also the Second World War, he nonetheless retained an impressive number of museum-class pictures. Indeed, many of the works he held are now in public collections throughout the world, and the reputation of Cubism was assisted by loans he made to some of the most important surveys of the movement.

Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux was later owned by Professor Dr Wilhelm Löffler, a well-known expert in internal medicine who was also an important pioneer in a number of treatments. The Zurich-based Löffler was also distinguished by inclusion in Thomas Mann's correspondence: in a 1955 letter to Theodor Adorno, Mann wrote that he had been diagnosed by the doctor (T. Mann, The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955, trans. & ed. R. & C. Winston, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1975, p. 479). During the same year, he also treated King Tribhuvan of Nepal. As well as Nature morte à la nappe à carreaux, Löffler's collection featured an early Futurist masterpiece by Giacomo Balla, a 1911 painting by Wassily Kandinsky entitled Saint George as well as a work on paper, and also a formidable group of pictures by Paul Klee including his Stricken City of 1936, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow. Estimate: £8-12 million. 

signed with the initials and dated ‘PM 30’ (lower centre); signed and inscribed ‘HAUT Composition No. II P.MONDRIAN’ (on the frame); oil on canvas; in the artist’s frame; 19.7/8 x 19¾ in. (50.5 x 50.2 cm.). Painted in 1930.

Provenance: Private collection, Zurich, by whom acquired directly from the artist in 1931, and thence by descent to the present owners.
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

Literature: M. Seuphor, Piet Mondrian, Life and Work, New York, 1956, no. 514.
C.L. Ragghianti, Mondrian e l’arte del XX Secolo, Milan, 1962, no. 338.
C. Giedion-Welcker, Schriften 1926-1971, Stationen zu einem Zeitbild, Mit Briefen von Arp, Chillida, Ernst, Giacometti, Joyce, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Schwitters, Cologne, 1973, no. V (illustrated).
A. Roth, Begegnungen mit Pionieren: Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann, Auguste Perret, Henry van de Velde, Basel, 1973, no. 35, pp. 160-161 (illustrated p. 161).
M.G. Ottolenghi, L'opera completa di Mondrian, Milan, 1974, no. 394.
J.M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian, Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of 1911-1944, vol. II, New York, 1998, no B 225, p. 357 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts, L’Art Vivant en Europe, April – May 1931, no. 383.
Basel, Kunsthalle, Konstruktivisten, January – February 1937, no. 49.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Ausländische Kunst, July – September 1943, no. 611.
Basel, Kunsthalle, Konkrete Kunst, March – April 1944, no. 173.
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Mondrian, February – April 1955, no. 117.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Mondrian, May – July 1955, no. 96 (illustrated p. 53).
Zurich, Kunsthaus, on loan April - December 1982.
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Piet Mondrian 1972-1944, December 1994 - April 1995, no. 129; this exhibition later travelled to Washington, National Gallery of Art and New York, Museum of Modern Art.

Notes: Painted in 1930, Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow is an historic example of the radical Neo-Plastic aesthetic that Piet Mondrian had developed during the previous decade and which reached a pinnacle at this time. Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow forms part of a group of fewer than a dozen paintings from the late 1920s and early 1930s in which he used approximately the same armature of black lines with different colour effects, revealing his own satisfaction with this grid format. In part because of these works, this period of his career has been described as, ‘the peak of Mondrian’s classicism’ (Y.A. Bois et al., ed., Piet Mondrian 1872–1944, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 237). Other examples of works from the group are now in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, the Kunstmuseum Winterthur and the Beyeler Foundation, Riehen. Of these, several feature repetitions or variations of the same format; however, Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow is the only one to balance the colour in the upper left area with another in the lower right: in many of the other pictures from this group, the right-hand colour element is shown in the upper of the two small planes.

For Mondrian, the Neo-Plasticism which he pioneered was a means of bringing equilibrium to art and to life. Over the previous decades, he had developed an increasingly spiritual understanding of the role of art and its ability to contain universal truths. Already a trained and experienced artist at the turn of the century, he had begun to imbue his images of the Dutch landscape with an increasing mystical glow in the early 1900s. This became all the more marked during his trips to Walcheren, an artists’ colony which he had first visited with Jan Toorop. There, he had become intrigued by the almost formal manner in which landscape could be divided into various elements, and pared down to the horizontal and the vertical. The focus on these lines saw Mondrian gradually dissolving the world, for instance in his seascapes, into a shimmering, grid-like latticework that was the precursor of his Neo-Plasticism.

Mondrian had moved to Paris only a couple of years before the First World War; he had intended to make the French capital his base, but had been visiting his native Netherlands at the outbreak of hostilities, and so did not go back until after the end of the war. It was in 1919 that he returned to France, re-immersing himself in the avant garde and fully advancing the ideas he had developed during the war years, in isolation from the pioneers of Cubism in France who had earlier influenced him. Now the grids of his ‘Cubist’ works were freed from form, paving the way for the Neo-Plastic ideas that underpin Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow.

Only a year after Mondrian had painted Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow, he wrote that, ‘the new art uses forms in the manner of art (not in the manner of nature): it employs them only for their purely plastic value. It has realised what the art of the past attempted to do. In the new art, forms become increasingly neutral in the measure that they approach the universal’ (P. Mondrian, The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, H. Holtzman & M.S. James, ed., London, 1986, p. 246). Mondrian felt that form, and the depiction of form, essentially obstructed the ability of line and colour to express equilibrium. This equilibrium was to be sought as a type of enlightenment, a state that rose above the ‘tragic’, which itself was a state of disequilibrium..

Similarly, by painting a composition that was devoid of representation, that had been stripped of any sense of fictive space, Mondrian was creating a work that avoided emotions and subjectivity. He did not want to root himself in figuration, but instead sought to create an artwork that was more universal, that was not tied to interpretations but that instead was grounded, as much as art can be, in universal truths. To this end, his palette had gradually been refined over the decade he had spent based in Paris, and many of the half-tones that had earlier featured in his work had been replaced by the primary colours, alongside black, white and occasionally grey. Similarly, all except right-angled lines had been expunged from his vision: the only diagonals appeared occasionally in works painted on escutcheon-like diamond canvases, yet even in them, the lines were either rigidly horizontal or vertical.

In Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow, that rightangled structure can clearly be seen in the lines, most of which are of approximately the same width, which act like the leading in a stained glass window, emphasising the purity of colour within each grid, be it yellow, blue or white. Nonetheless, this format of painting, as exemplified here and in the other works using a similar template, manages to give a sense of the diagonal by other means, lending a feeling of upward motion that may relate to Mondrian’s desire for Man to rise to a higher form of existence, as reflected in some of his Theosophist beliefs and illustrated in earlier works such as Evolution.

In Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow, the lower-left and upper-right sections appear to be squares, the latter larger and therefore giving a sense of progression. This is echoed by the shapes on the other side. In the context of these pictures, this composition has sometimes been referred to as ‘scissored’ because of the way that the square surface area has been divided. It is through this scissoring that Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow achieves its delicate yet poetic balance, its sense of equilibrium, and therefore contains some of the idealism sought so avidly by Mondrian. In Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow, this is all the more the case, as the presence of the colour in the lower-right section, rather than the one above it (as is the case in its fellow works) heightens the directional sense of the picture, emphasising its diagonality and therefore its sense of rising thrust.

Mondrian’s dedication to his Neo-Plastic concepts was reflected in his life as well as his art. He was fascinated by jazz and dancing, enjoying the disruption of melody and seeing it as a near parallel to the abandonment of form in his pictures. Many of his works were named after dances and music, such as the foxtrot or boogie woogie. In his beliefs, he wrote extensively, trying to preach his new gospel, a notion that perhaps had its beginnings in his Calvinist upbringing. Certainly, the austere structure of pictures such as Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow can be seen to have Calvinist overtones as well as revealing an artist who was removing all that was superfluous in the quest for an underlying truth, a process that found its parallel in the search for common denominators that underpinned Theosophy, where various religions were viewed as incorporating beliefs that might point towards a single one.

For Mondrian, the structures that formed the foundation of his paintings also extended to his life. This was palpable not only in his love of jazz, but also in the rigour of the decoration of his studio in Paris. Hilla Rebay, who visited him there with Félix Fénéon and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in June 1930, the year that Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow was painted, would write to Rudolf Bauer, saying of
Mondrian:
‘He hardly paints. He constructs 2 or 4 squares, but he is a wonderful man, very cultivated and impressive. He lives like a monk, everything is white and empty, but for red, blue, and yellow painted squares, that are spread all over the room of his white studio and bedroom. He also has a small record player with Negro music. He is very poor, and already 58 years old, resembles Kandinsky but is even better and more alone. Moholy loves him and venerates him in his quiet, intense way’ (Rebay, quoted in Y.A. Bois et al., ed., Op. Cit., p. 240).

Rebay bought one of Mondrian’s works, in part ‘to keep the wolf from the door of a great, lovable man’. Indeed, he was financially embattled enough that the following year, a group of his friends and admirers including Hans Arp, Walter Gropius and Moholy-Nagy all joined forces to raise funds for him through a lottery. Part of this was due to Mondrian’s painting process: during this period, he created only around ten paintings per year (only nine are listed from 1930 in the catalogue raisonné of his work). This reflects the rigour that he applied to his work while also explaining the relative rarity of his pictures.

This studio, with its moveable squares affixed to the walls, was photographed in 1929 with several of Mondrian’s works in the foreground, including one that resembled Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow (this is in fact believed to have been the similarly-named Composition No. 2 with Yellow and Blue of 1929, now in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen). Pictures of Mondrian’s studio were published several times during his life, including in Palet in 1931, which reproduced the photograph in question. It revealed the immersive manner in which Mondrian lived his life, surrounded by his beliefs.

This studio impressed many of its visitors, not least Alexander Calder, who met Mondrian in 1930 and visited his working set that year, around the time that Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow was painted. For him, the studio was a revelation and an epiphany: ‘My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as a result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930. I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of colour he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature. I told him I would like to make it oscillate – he objected’ (Calder, quoted in C. Giménez & A.S.C. Rower, ed., Calder: Gravity and Grace, London, 2004, p. 52). Calder would go on to create his ‘Mobiles’ following this encounter - putting fields of colour into motion. However, for Mondrian, his objection was that the colours were already fast enough. This is exemplified in Composition No. II with Blue and Yellow, where the two fields of colour, the blue and the yellow, which have an intense dynamism that is propelled by their containment within the black-bounded planes.

The Property of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sold to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund

Trois homes qui marchent I by Alberto Giacometti is an early lifetime cast of one of the artist’s famous multi-figure compositions, showing three men passing each other as though in a street (estimate:£6.2 - 8 million). This work was conceived around 1948 and cast by 1951. It dates from what is considered to be the height of Giacometti’s creative powers, a window of several years during which he honed the iconic vision of elongated, stick-thin figures for which he is now famed, producing a string of masterpieces tapping into this new artistic solution. It is a reflection of the importance of this work that casts of it are held by several museums, as are casts of many of the related works from the era. Offered by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Sold to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund, having been gifted by Sidney Janis in 1967, this work provides the market with a remarkable opportunity. Of all Giacometti’s subjects, it is perhaps the striding man that is most recognised; its iconic status is emblematic of Giacometti himself, who often wandered around Paris’ streets, a 20th century flâneur. In the present work, the three figures are weaving their way past each other, connected yet isolated; it is the perfect embodiment of city life and the human condition during the post-war years of existentialism. 

Alberto Giacometti, Trois homes qui marchent I. Estimate:£6.2 - 8 million. This work was conceived around 1948 and cast by 1951. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014. 

signed 'A Giacometti’ (on the side of the platform); inscribed with the foundry mark ‘Alexis.Rudier Fondeur Paris’ (on the base); ronze with dark and light brown patina. Height: 28 ½ in. (72.4 cm.). Conceived in 1948-1949 and cast by 1951

Provenance: Galerie Maeght, Paris, by whom acquired directly from the artist in 1951.
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (no. 8672), by whom acquired from the above in April 1960.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, a gift from the above in 1967.
THE PROPERTY OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, SOLD TO BENEFIT THE ACQUISITIONS FUND

Literature: J. Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1962 p. 245 (another cast illustrated).
R.J. Moulin, Giacometti: Sculptures, New York, 1964, pl. 5 (another cast illustrated).
R. Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1971, no. 126, pp. 126 & 307 (another cast illustrated).
W. Rubin, Three Generations of Twentieth-Century Art: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, no. 30, pp. 110-111, 184 (illustrated pp. 111 & 226).
B. Lamarche-Vadel, Alberto Giacometti, Paris, 1984, no. 183, p. 129 (another cast illustrated).
Y. Bonnefoy, Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of his Work, Paris, 1991, no. 305, pp. 330-333 (another cast illustrated p. 333).
S. Pagé, Alberto Giacometti: Sculptures, Peintures, Dessins, Paris, 1991, p. 192 (another cast illustrated).
A. Schneider, ed., Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, New York, 1994, no. 53 (another cast illustrated).
D. Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, London, 1994, no. 193, pp. 149, 150 & 252 (another cast illustrated p. 193).
A. González, Alberto Giacometti: Works, Writings, Interviews, Barcelona, 2006, p. 86 (another cast illustrated p. 87).
V. Wiesinger, ed., The Studio of Alberto Giacometti: Collection of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris, 2007, no. 484, p. 364, fig. 500 (illustrated in installation view of the Alberto Giacometti exhibition at Galerie Maeght, 1951; illustrated again p. 389 in the installation view of European Artists from A to V, Sidney Janis Gallery, 1961).
M. Brüderlin & T. Stooss, eds., Alberto Giacometti: The Origin of Space, Germany, 2010, p. 127 (another cast illustrated).

Exhibited: Kassel, Documenta II, July - October 1959, no. 1, p. 75 (illustrated).
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, XXth Century Artists, October - November 1960, no. 22 (illustrated).
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, European Artists from A to V, January - February 1961.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, 2 Generations: Picasso to Pollock, March - April 1964.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, January 1968 - August 1970; this exhibition later travelled to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Portland Museum of Art, the Pasadena Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Basel, Kunsthalle, London, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Berlin, Akademie der Kunste.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Painting and Sculpture Galleries, May 1974 - January 1975.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Exhibition of paintings, sculpture and drawings, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Alberto Giacometti, January 1976, no. 4.
Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, July - September 1981.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Painting and Sculpture Galleries, May 1984 - April 1986.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Sculptors’ Drawings, April - September 1986.
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Painting and Sculpture Galleries, September 1986 - July 1992.

Notes: 'In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture or painting. Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another. They unceasingly form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity' (Giacometti, quoted in R. Hohl, 'Form and Vision: The Work of Alberto Giacometti', pp. 13-46, Alberto Giacometti: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., New York, 1974, p. 31).

Renè Magritte, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (The hunters at the edge of night), 1928. Estimate: £6-9 million© Christie’s Images Limited 2014

LONDON.- A key date on the international art calendar, Christie’s highly anticipated annual evening sale of The Art of The Surreal will take place on 4 February, presenting the most valuable group of works to be offered in the category to date. The auction is led by the most important early Magritte to come to auction in a generation, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (The hunters at the edge of night), 1928, which has recently been part of the Museum of Modern Art’s 2013 exhibition Magritte, The Mystery of The Ordinary, 1926-1938 (estimate: £6-9 million). Comprising 54 lots, the sale features works from many important international collections including: Femmes et oiseaux (Women and Birds), 1968 (estimate: £4-7 million), offered from Miró– Seven Decades of His Art; the most significant work by Carlo Carrà to come to auction, Solitudine (Solitude) (estimate: £2.5-3.5 million), offered from Modern Masters: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection; and Le regard intérieur (The inner gaze) by René Magritte (estimate: £500,000-700,000) offered from The Collection of the Late Mrs T. S. Elliot. A rich and varied sale which is tailored to meet the current tastes of the ever growing number of discerning global collectors of this movement, La Vénus endormie, 1943, by Paul Delvaux (estimate: £1.2-1.6 million) is offered alongside other notable works by De Chirico, Dalí, Domínguez, Ernst, Arshile Gorky, Man Ray, Tanguy and Dorothea Tanning. Estimates range from £40,000 to £9 million, with an overall pre-sale estimate of £42,960,000 to £64,550,000. Christie’s evening auctions of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist Art on 4 February have a total pre-sale estimate of £137.1 million to £199.5 million. 

Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie’s: “25 years on from holding the inaugural standalone Dada and Surrealism sale and 14 years since Christie’s established its annual auction in the field, the global demand for this pioneering movement continues to go from strength to strength. Surrealist art now commands the attention of the international art market from across many collecting categories, from Old Masters to Contemporary art. We are proud to present this rich array of exemplary works, led by a monumental early Magritte and the most significant work by Carlo Carrà ever to come to auction, alongside the outstanding works from the landmark offering of the collection ‘Miró– Seven Decades of His Art’.” 

Following the continuing strength of demand for works by Renè Magritte (1898-1967) at Christie’s in February 2013, a further group of nine remarkable works by the Surrealist master will be offered in the upcoming auction, led by Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (The hunters at the edge of night), 1928, which is the cover lot of The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale catalogue. Offered at auction for the first time, it is the most important early Magritte to come to auction in a generation (estimate: £6-9 million). Prior to recently being part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Magritte, The Mystery of The Ordinary, 1926-1938, this work featured in many of the most important monographs and exhibitions dedicated to Magritte, beginning within his own lifetime. It was loaned by a succession of owners who were closely involved with Magritte himself: Gustave Van Hecke, E.L.T. Mesens, Claude Spaak and, from the mid-1950s, the famous William Copley. 

Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, 1928, was painted in the most fruitful year of Magritte’s entire career, during the time that Magritte was based in Paris in order to be closer to the Surrealist group around André Breton. It is a reflection of the importance of Magritte’s early Surreal works that so many of them are now in museum collections around the world. Of the pictures that Magritte painted in 1928, only around one fifth were painted on the large scale of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, which was done in the largest format of canvas that he used that year, indicating his appreciation of the importance of its subject. It has been suggested that the atmosphere of this work may owe itself to the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Magritte devoured his writings, not least in the famous translation by Charles Baudelaire, and several of his pictures appear to make references to them. In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the walls may recall those in The Pit and the Pendulum, a short story at the end of which hot walls are enclosing the protagonist, approaching ever closer. The sense of tension in this work is accentuated by the bulkiness of the figures, adding a sheer physicality to their efforts to free themselves. 

Renè Magritte, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit (The hunters at the edge of night), 1928. Estimate: £6-9 million © Christie’s Images Limited 2014

signed 'Magritte’ (lower right); titled (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 31 7/8 x 45 5/8 in. (81 x 116 cm.). Painted in 1928

Provenance: Galerie L'Epoque (E.L.T. Mesens), Brussels, by August 1928.
Galerie Le Centaure (P.G. van Hecke), Brussels, by whom acquired from the above in January 1929.
E.L.T. Mesens, Brussels, by whom acquired in 1932 at the liquidation of the above.
Claude Spaak, Brussels, by 1933 and until at least June 1934.
E.L.T. Mesens, London.
William and Noma Copley, Chicago, by whom acquired from the above circa 1956-1957.
Acquired from the above by the present owner on 19 October 1978.
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION

Literature: Letter from Paul Nougé to René Magritte, in Lettres surrealistses, April 1928, no. 145.
Postcard from René Magritte to E.L.T. Mesens, 22 August 1928.
Variétés, Brussels, no. 7, 15 November 1928, p. 365 (illustrated).
A.De Ridder, La jeune peinture belge, de l’impressionnisme à l’expressionnisme, Antwerp, 1929, p. 39 (illustrated).
L. Scutenaire, Magritte, Chicago, 1958, no. 34.
P. Waldberg, René Magritte, Brussels, 1965, p. 128 (illustrated).
Exh. cat., Magritte, London, 1969, p. 60.
A.M. Hammacher, René Magritte, London, 1974, p. 90 (illustrated p. 91).
R. Calvocoressi, Magritte, Oxford, 1984, no. 22 (illustrated).
D. Sylvester & S. Whitfield, René Magritte, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, Oil Paintings, 1916-1930, Antwerp, 1992, no. 228, pp. 279-280 (illustrated p. 279).
D. Sylvester, J. Bouniort & M. Draguet, Magritte, Houston, 2009, p. 185 (illustrated).
S. Gohr, Magritte, Attempting the Impossible, Antwerp, 2009, no. 188, p. 128 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Brussels, Galerie l’Epoque, René Magritte, January 1928.
Brussels, Salle Giso, E.L.T. Mesens & E. van Tonderen présentent seize tableaux de René Magritte, February 1931, no. 12, p. 12.
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts, Exposition René Magritte, May – June 1933, no. 9.
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts, Exposition Minotaure, May – June 1934 no. 70.
New York, Julien Levy Gallery, René Magritte, January 1938, no. 7.
Knokke, Casino Communal, Ve festival belge d’été, expositions René Magritte-Paul Delvaux, August 1952, no. 9.
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Dertien belgische schilders, October – November 1952, no. 57.
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts, René Magritte, May – June 1954, no. 21, p. 25.
Venice, XXVII Biennale di Venezia, June – October 1954, no. 35, p. 227.
Antwerp, Stedelijke Feestzaal-Meir Antwerpen, Kunst van heden, salon 1956, October 1956, no. 102, p. 11.
Little Rock, Arkansas Art Center, Magritte, May – June 1964.
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, René Magritte, Le mystère de la réalité, August – September 1967, no. 21, p. 74 (illustrated p. 75).
Stockholm, Moderna Museet, René Magritte, October – November 1967, no. 15, p. 6.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Magritte, December 1977, no. 2.
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Rétrospective Magritte, October - December 1978, no. 75 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Paris, Musée national d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, January - April 1979.
Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Rétrospective Magritte, January – April 1979, no. 75, (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to to Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, October - December 1978.
Humlebaeck, Louisiana Museum, René Magritte, September 1983 – January 1984, no. 31, p. 49.
London, The Hayward Gallery, The Southbank Centre, Magritte, May – August 1992, no. 37 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, September – November 1992, Houston, The Menil Collection, December 1992 – February 1993, and Chicago, The Art Institute, March – May 1993.
Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, René Magritte, Die Kunst der Konversation, November 1996 – March 1997, no. 3, p. 253 (illustrated p. 89).
Paris, Musée national d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, La revolution surréaliste, March – June 2002, p. 437 (illustrated p. 186).
Paris, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Magritte, February – June 2003, p. 76 (illustrated p. 77).
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Magritte, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938, September 2013 – January 2014, no. 53, p. 247 (illustrated p. 114).

Notes: René Magritte's Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit is one of his iconic early Surrealist paintings, having featured in many of the most important monographs and exhibitions dedicated to his work, beginning within his own lifetime. Indeed, already only a few years after it was painted, it was being included on a regular basis in exhibitions of Magritte's pictures, to which it was lent by a succession of owners who were closely involved with Magritte himself: Gustave Van Hecke, E.L.T. Mesens, Claude Spaak and, from the mid-1950s, William Copley. Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was painted in 1928, during the time that Magritte was based in Paris in order to be closer to the Surrealist group around André Breton. That year was the most fruitful of Magritte's entire career, reflecting the sense of enlightenment that had descended upon him as he created masterpiece after masterpiece, tapping into a rich seam of ideas and inspiration. It is a reflection of the importance of these early Surreal works by Magritte that so many of them are now in museum collections around the world. Of the pictures that Magritte painted in 1928, only around one fifth were painted on the large scale of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, which was done in the largest format of canvas that he used that year, indicating his appreciation of the importance of its subject.

Many of the works that Magritte created in and around 1928, during his stay in the French capital, combined the poetic transformations of the everyday world that had already become his hallmark with a certain dark intensity, and even violence. Looking at several pictures from this period, for instance the two versions of Les jours gigantesque which appears to show a struggle as a prelude to a rape, Les amants with its heads covered in winding sheets, or L'idée fixe with its stalking hunter in one of the quadrants of the composition, there was a clear under- or over-tone of suspense, anxiety or violence at play. This may reflect Magritte's own personality, his preferences and his background; at the same time, it appears in tune with Breton's diktat, published in Nadja the same year Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was painted, that, 'Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all' (A. Breton, Nadja, R. Howard, trans., New York, p. 160). Robert Hughes summed up the 'convulsive' energy of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit when he declared:

'for panic, one need go no further than Magritte's Hunters at the Edge of the Night, 1928, with its two stocky, armed and booted chasseurs writhing in apprehension at the sight of an empty horizon. We see their fear but, inexplicably, not what they are afraid of' (R. Hughes, 'Introduction', pp. 5-8, The Portable Magritte, New York, 2001, p. 7).

In the catalogue raisonné of Magritte's works, it was suggested that the atmosphere of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit may owe itself to the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Magritte devoured his writings, not least in the famous translation by Charles Baudelaire, and several of his pictures appear to make references to them. In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the walls may recall those in The Pit and the Pendulum, a short story about a victim of the elaborate torture techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, at the end of which hot walls are enclosing him, approaching ever closer (see D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, London, 1992, p. 279). Certainly, the crepuscular light appears to hint at the departing day and the oncoming night, adding a somewhat Gothic dimension to the scene with the hunters, who have themselves become the hunted, caught as though in some monumental trap. They are held fast by the wall into which their own bodies appear to have been partially absorbed: the hunter on the left has lost his foot, while the other's head is missing, seemingly immured. These fragmentary figures recall the intriguing overlapping man and woman of Les jours gigantesques, showing their common heritage. Indeed, in the catalogue raisonné of Magritte's works, it has been surmised that Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was painted after Les jours gigantesques and was part of an almost narrative development that arched through his pictures that year, in this case ending at Le genre nocturne, a missing painting that shows a woman covering the void where her head should be with her hands, while standing next to a void in the wall.

In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the sense of tension is accentuated by the bulk of the figures, adding a sheer physicality to their efforts to free themselves. This struggle is likewise made all the more mysterious and dramatic by the gap to the right, where the barren landscape stretches towards the distant, glowing horizon. The corner of wall at which these hunters are standing is made all the more enigmatic by this contrast between confinement and space. According to a letter apparently written by Magritte's friend Paul Nougé around April 1928 and almost certainly discussing this picture and therefore giving its date some certainty, that composition may have changed at some point: 'Thank you so much for drawing me a picture of your latest canvas. I find it absolutely remarkable,' he wrote to the artist.

'I admire the care you have taken to particularise the event, to endow it, by the precision of certain details, with the maximum of concrete reality, thus guaranteeing, to my mind, the intensity of its effect. I also commend the precaution you have taken to eliminate that third figure which might have produced the impression of a "well-made" picture. I understand this all the better since I have often had occasion to modify in a similar way prose pieces whose perfection was becoming embarrassing, because I felt it might charm or arrest attention to the detriment of what I really wanted to achieve' (Nougé, quoted ibid., p. 279).

Reducing the composition to only two figures accentuates the terror through the contrast with the spacious landscape. At the same time, it introduces the theme of duality that runs like a thread through so much of Magritte's work from the period, be it in images that contain repeated motifs, such as his portrait of Nougé, or his earlier works, La pose enchantée, La fin des contemplations, or in pairings such as the man and woman in Les jours gigantesques or the couple in Les amants. In Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, the two figures recall the book-end-like assailants in L'assassin menacé, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this way, by reducing his subjects to a dualism or dichotomy, Magritte was able to tap into some of the fundamental aspects of human nature, ageless themes which are given new momentum in his works, viewed from new perspectives. Even the concept of the wall, such an everyday element of life, becomes mysterious and dangerous in Magritte's universe, trapping these hunters and suffocating one of them. The solid aspects of our existence become mutable and magical. As Magritte wrote to Nougé the year before he painted Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit:

'I think I have made a really striking discovery in painting. Up to now I have used composite objects, or else the placing of an object was sometimes enough to make it mysterious... I have found a new potential in things - their ability to become gradually something else, an object merging into an object other than itself' (Magritte, quoted in J. Helfenstein & C. Elliott, '"A Lightning Flash Is Smoldering beneath the Bowler Hats": Paris 1927-1930', pp. 70-87, A. Umland, ed., Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926-1938, exh. cat., New York, 2013, p. 73).

Nowhere is this more clear than in Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit with the men being absorbed by the wall; Magritte has also managed to add a terrifying dimension to this forced juxtaposition of two separate concepts, man and material.

Magritte made a second version of Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, which was painted by 1936, was exhibited several times, and was owned by Mesens; it was destroyed while in storage in London during the Second World War (see D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. IV, London, 1994, app. 131, pp. 322-23). By an intriguing twist, Nougé would serve as the model when Magritte revisited the theme of the hunter whose body is partially caught in a wall in a subsequent variation, his 1943 picture, La gravitation universelle. That work was based on a photograph that Magritte took, showing Nougé in hunting garb by the wall. The fact that Magritte returned to this subject against the backdrop of the Occupation reveals his own understanding of the ability of this theme to convey feelings of intense anxiety and entrapment, both then and earlier, when he created Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit.

Looking at Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit in comparison with La gravitation universelle, it becomes clear that the former is a far more stylised work, with its stocky hunters. The physicality of these figures, which featured in a number of pictures from the period, adds to the pathos of their plight, as they are trapped regardless of the implied strength of their bodies; this effect is heightened by the large size of the picture - Magritte only painted around a fifth of his 1928 works on a canvas of this scale. These forms are almost expressionistic in their distortions and hint at the possibility, discussed by numerous authors including David Sylvester, that Magritte had been influenced partly by reproductions of the frieze showing the battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Certainly, the missing body parts recall ancient statuary, while the incredible sculptural quality of these squat hunters also recalls the Greek frieze, with its figures shown in high relief. At the same time, the depiction of the subjects also recalls Pablo Picasso's works from the early 1920s; living in Paris at the time, it is reasonable to suppose that Magritte would have been able to see those works as well as Picasso's more recent Surreal output.

Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was sent by Magritte from Paris to the Galerie de L'Epoque in Brussels later in 1928. Indeed, on 22 August, he wrote Mesens a note thanking him for letting him know that 'The Hunters is in perfect condition' (Magritte, quoted in Sylvester, op. cit., 1992, p. 279). This shows an early title that had been adopted for the work; later, it was referred to by Magritte as Les chasseurs condamnés, while Nougé suggested compromis instead. However, by the time it was exhibited publicly for the first time in 1931, the title had reached its current form.

That exhibition took place at the Salle Giso in Brussels and was quite an event. It marked the return of Magritte from Paris the previous year. On the occasion, a number of his more recent works were shown - strangely, few of the pictures from 1928 had been shown in galleries, although Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit had already been published in Variétés, the short-lived review edited by the work's then owner, Van Hecke, having been kept by him from the stock of the then-dissolved Galerie L'Epoque. In 1930, Magritte had tired of Paris and in particular of the strictures of the Surreal movement there, which followed Breton too rigorously for the Belgian artist's liking. He appears to have actively sought out an occasion to squabble with Breton and then, following this, left. He was clearly keen to leave his years of Parisian Surrealism behind him: he apparently burnt many of his photographs, letters and documents from the period with his friend Louis Scutenaire. Indeed, the incinerated objects even included an overcoat, a mark of his desire to eradicate certain memories (see S. Gablik, Magritte, London, 1992, p. 65).

Magritte's return to Brussels was fêted with an exhibition that certainly underlined his Surreal credentials. According to a review, the show in which Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was first revealed, having been lent by Van Hecke alongside fifteen other works mainly from Nougé, was opened in a spectacular manner:

'The first guests were surprised to find the hall plunged in darkness, and two lackeys in scarlet livery and with powdered hair standing on either side of an enormous lighted candle. A double metronome ticked away the while in the empty silence.
'About one o'clock in the morning, some fifty guests, among whom could be discerned up to three Surrealists, including two dissidents, crowded around the buffet, where whisky and gin were flowing freely. A gramophone began playing barrel-organ tunes, and M. Créten-George opened the ball, and was followed by all the bright young things.
'It was only at a very late hour that the assembled guests, intrigued by the ecstatic look which Mlle Solange Moret from the Casino was gazing intently at the walls, suddenly discovered hanging there some pictures belonging to M. Nougé, painted by M. Magritte. A concert of praise was immediately organised under the brilliant direction of M. Gustave van Hecke' (Le rouge et le noir, 18 February 1931, reproduced in D. Sylvester (ed.), S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London, 1993, p. 9).

In fact, it appears that the valets had their faces painted green; the music was discordant for part of the soirée as different tunes were being played simultaneously on four gramophones, and early in the morning, the lights were raised so that the pictures on the walls, including Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit, became visible. The evening clearly passed well, not least for Magritte, about whom it was written elsewhere:

'The painter M... who was the hero of the evening, danced a great deal. To demonstrate his ardent love of the people, he granted a waltz to one of the liveried valets, and then performed the java with the cloakroom attendant. She was, in fact, extremely charming... Which goes to show that Surrealists are not stuck-up' (Midi, 12 February 1931, quoted ibid., p. 9).

Two years later, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was included in a one-man show held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; this was one of the few pictures from the period that had previously been exhibited. By then, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was lent by Magritte's friend, Claude Spaak. The pair had met in 1931, and Spaak would become an important supporter of Magritte's work as well as a prominent collector. Spaak also lent Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit to an exhibition dedicated to the predominantly Surreal review, Minotaure, in 1934, also held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. On this occasion, the picture was shown alongside a formidable selection of works by a wide range of artists including Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Henri Matisse and Picasso (see ibid., p. 26).

In the 1950s, Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit was acquired by William Copley. Although Copley had initially shown little interest in art, in 1948 he and his brother-in-law John Ploydardt, an artist and animator for Walt Disney, together set up an art gallery (see S. Cochran, 'Passing the Hat: René Magritte and William Copley', pp. 75-79, S. Barron & M. Draguet, Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 2006). Although the Copley Gallery which they founded in Beverly Hills was short-lived, it was nonetheless influential, exposing Magritte and a number of other Surreal artists to the West Coast. At the same time, for Copley, who was a man of independent means, it provided a springboard into the world of the Surreal. He would financially back each exhibition by buying works, and was introduced to a number of the artists who had fled France for the United States during the Second World War.

Eventually, after the closure of the gallery, Copley accompanied Man Ray to Europe and lived in France for a decade. Copley himself had become an artist in his own right by this time. During that time, he was introduced to Magritte, with whom he had already corresponded and whose works he had already collected. Apparently, the initial meeting was a disappointment: Copley was surprised, after the flamboyance of the Parisian Surrealists, to find a man wearing respectable bourgeois garb. But soon he was fascinated by Magritte's uniform, which often served as a foil to his outrageous acts and visionary art. Indeed, Copley himself would pay Magritte the ultimate compliment by adopting the iconic bowler hat as part of his own outfit in later years. This was a mark of the esteem in which he held Magritte, which also became the basis of their friendship. It is a tribute to their relationship that Les chasseurs au bord de la nuit would remain in Copley's collection for over two decades.

Miró– Seven Decades of His Art is an outstanding collection of 85 works showcasing seven decades of Joan Miró’s (1893–1983) rich and dynamic career, which will be offered on 4 and 5 February. This is one of the most extensive and impressive offerings of works by the artist ever to come to auction. An important figure in 20th century art, Miró was highly influential for a huge number of artists, from Picasso to Pollock. Most often associated with Surrealism, Miró’s work has an appeal that transcends traditional categories, with today’s market seeing collectors of both Impressionist & Modern Art and Post-War & Contemporary Art compete for his paintings, works on paper and sculptures. The property was formerly in a private corporate collection and is now being sold by decision of the Portuguese Republic. 

Highlighting Miró’s incredible ability to innovate, the works feature a wide range of materials and techniques as well as his key themes and subjects, from poetry and dreams to music and stars, women and birds. He was an artist who allowed himself to be influenced by a range of things, from music, poetry and then hallucinations induced by hunger during his early years in Paris, to patterns made by chance, to the materials themselves. The top two lots are both monumental works: Femmes et oiseaux (Women and Birds), 1968 (estimate: £4-7 million) and Peinture, 1953, (estimate: £2.5-3.5 million). With estimates ranging from £10,000 to £7 million, this collection provides collectors at every level with a remarkable opportunity to not only add key works to established collections but for new collectors and enthusiasts to buy their very first work from Miró’s rich oeuvre. The works will be offered across three sales: The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, 4 February; Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale and Impressionist and Modern Art Works on Paper Sale, 5 February; the complete collection is expected to realise in excess of £30 million. 

Joan Miró (1893-1983), Femmes et oiseaux (Women and Birds). Estimate £4-7 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014

signed 'Miró' (centre right); signed again, dated '3/I/68’ and titled (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 96½ X 49 in. (245.2 X 124.6 cm.). Painted on 3 January 1968

Provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (no. ST 7700).
Acquavella Galleries, New York (no. 2424).
Private collection, Japan, by whom acquired from the above.
Private collection, Lisbon, by whom acquired from the above in 2003.
PROPERTY SOLD BY DECISION OF THE PORTUGUESE REPUBLIC

Literature: J. J. Sweeney, Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1970, no. 165 (illustrated).
J. Dupin & A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné, Paintings, vol. IV, 1959-1968, Paris, 2002, no. 1275, p. 215 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Joan Miró, 1968, no. 107 (illustrated, titled 'Femme et oiseau').
Barcelona, Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu, Joan Miró, November 1968 - January 1969, no. 113 (illustrated p. 119).
Yokohama, Yokohama Museum of Art, Joan Miró, Centennial Exhibition: The Pierre Matisse Collection, January - March 1992, no. 93 (illustrated p. 133).
Palermo, Palazzo Sant'Elia, España, Spanish Art 1957-2007, May - September 2008, p. 151 (illustrated).
Palma de Mallorca, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Joan Miro´, evocacio´ de la imatge femenina, December 2008 – March 2009, p. 129 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Valencia, Fundació Bancaja, March – June 2009.

Notes: Illustrating one of the most enduring and characteristic themes in Joan Miró’s oeuvre, Femmes et oiseaux offers a poetic and important example of the freedom of execution and audacity with which the artist approached painting in the 1960s. On the occasion of Miró’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1968 – the year Femmes et oiseaux was painted – a major retrospective was organized, shown first at Saint-Paul-de-Vence at the Fondation Maeght, then in Barcelona at the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu and finally in Munich at the Haus der Kunst. The show featured a wide selection of works from Miró’s career, but it also showcased his latest production, emphasizing the creative stride that still animated his art. Femmes et oiseaux was exhibited on that occasion, both in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and Barcelona, where the show marked a memorable date: it was the first time in fifty years that Spain had dedicated an important exhibition to Miró.

Executed with broad brushstrokes and fluid lines, Femmes et oiseaux exemplifies the calligraphic dimension which Miró explored in his works in the late 1960s. In 1966, Miró had travelled to Japan, where Tokyo and Kyoto museums had organised a retrospective of his work. On that occasion, the artist had the chance to visit the country’s museums and experience the local culture. The trip also rekindled Miró’s interest in and admiration for calligraphy. In the years which followed, his lines became more ample, his signs more potent. In its verticality – which recalls the presence of a Japanese scroll – and in the intricate smoothness of its lines, Femmes et oiseaux evokes the artist’s fascination for the oriental art of calligraphy. Miró himself acknowledged the connection in 1968: ‘These long paintings, for example, evoke Japanese writing. That is because I feel deeply in harmony with the Japanese soul’ (J. Miró quoted in ‘Article (Excerpts), by Pierre Bourcier, in Les Nouvelles Littéraires (Paris), August 8, 1968’, p. 275, in Margit Rowell, (ed.), Joan Miró Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 275).

The birds and women who inhabit Femmes et oiseaux were motifs that recurred, often in conjunction with each other, throughout his work, first appearing decades earlier and subsequently becoming important touchstones for the artist. Indeed, they came increasingly to the fore in the wake of his celebrated Constellations. In Femmes et oiseaux, birds and women have dissolved into round, embryonic forms, colliding and echoing each other at the centre of the picture. They evoke a fluid world of shifting entities, totemic presences and hybrid creatures of which Miró’s unconscious, poetic gesture held the cues. The esoteric world from which Femmes et oiseaux emanates was hinted at by the artist when he declared: ‘I believe in obscure forces. I believe in astrology. I am Taurus, with Scorpio in the ascendant. Perhaps that is why there are spheres and circles in many of my paintings – to evoke the governing planets’ (J. Miró, quoted in Ibid., p. 275). Inspired by calligraphy, yet governed by Miró’s most recondite spiritual instincts, Femmes et oiseaux offers an intriguing, distinguished example of Miró’s ability to widen and deepen his creative universe, plunging into the infallible vast ocean of his imagination.

In its gestural execution, Femmes et oiseaux not only illustrates Miró’s fascination for calligraphy and ease of execution, but also stands as an example of the artist’s fresh, inquiring response to one of the prevalent art movements of those years, namely Abstract Expressionism. Already in 1952, Miró had attended the Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Galerie Facchetti in Paris. Pollock’s dripping technique encouraged Miró to explore gestural brushwork and expand his expressive means. ‘It showed me a direction I wanted to take’, Miró recalled, ‘which up until then had remained at the stage of an unfulfilled desire’ (J. Miró quoted in ‘Interview with Margit Rowell Unpublished. Paris, April 20, 1970’, pp. 279-280, in Margit Rowell, (ed.), Joan Miró Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 279). Following that intuition, in Femmes et oiseaux Miró juxtaposed fuzzy, untamed areas of colour to vast areas of black and white, introducing an instinctive balance in the picture, determined by the artist’s free gestural action on the canvas.

Developing an early theme into a new pictorial dimension, Femmes et oiseaux epitomises the great freedom which Miró discovered in his maturity. In the last twenty years of his life, Miró continued to draw from elements of his early career, yet he developed the characterising symbols of his art in new, audacious ways. Miró’s friend and leading authority Jacques Dupin observed: ‘The last two decades of Miró’s works render impossible any attempt to define stages or isolate moments (…) The flow of Miró’s works no longer followed a course fraught with capricious undulations, and marked by an alternating series of pauses and crises. Rather, they had found their way into a vast and complex delta, where any attempt at chronology no longer holds sway’ (J. Dupin, Miró, New York, 1993, p. 326). Femmes et oiseaux offers a remarkable example of the whimsical, enthralling world of images that Miró had first introduced decades earlier and yet which continued to inspire him, prompting new innovations rendered with absorbing passion.

Joan Miró (1893-1983), Painting. Estimate £2.5-3.5 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014

signed 'Miró' (lower right); oil on canvas; 22 3/8 x 196 1/2 in. (56.7 x 499 cm.). Painted in 1953.

Provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
Acquavella Galleries, Reno, Nevada (no. 446).
Private collection, Japan, by whom acquired from the above.
Private collection, Lisbon, by whom acquired from the above in 2005.
PROPERTY SOLD BY DECISION OF THE PORTUGUESE REPUBLIC

Literature: J. Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, no. 838, p. 563 (illustrated p. 420).
J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 1993, no. 316, p. 295 (illustrated pp. 294-295).
J. Dupin & A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, Paintings, vol. III, 1942-1955, no. 939, p. 214 (illustrated pp. 214-215).

Exhibited: Yokohama, Yokohama Museum of Art, Joan Miró, Centennial Exhibition: The Pierre Matisse Collection, January - March 1992, no. 70 (illustrated pp. 106-107).

Notes: Executed in 1953, Peinture belongs to a series of large-scale works Joan Miró executed in the 1950s. He named those vertical and horizontal panels ‘bandes’, emphasising their scroll-like unfolding; according to Jacques Dupin – the great authority on Miró’s work – ‘among them there are some of Miró’s most beautiful and important works’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 297). In Peinture, over a trembling azure background, Miró arranged a series of ‘miroglyphs’: evoking birds, insects and stars, they populate the surface with childhood-like spontaneity. Five–meters long, the work unrolls in front of the viewer like a frieze, yet no narrative seems to properly occur: rather, the viewer finds himself to walk along the picture freely, accompanied by Miró’s creatures, coexisting in space simultaneously like they first did in the artist’s mind. 

The horizontal format and formidable extended scale of Peinture evoke the public dimension of mural art. Miró was familiar with the format, since in 1947 he had executed a nine-meter-long canvas for the Gourmets Restaurant in Cincinnati. That mural painting was also developed on a blue, textured background, on which meticulous and linear creatures expanded, animating the whole surface. In order to execute the work, Miró travelled to New York for the first time; there he received another commission: Marcel Duchamp asked Miró to paint a frieze for the International Surrealist Exhibition planned that year in Paris. Painted on a long stretch of canvas, the frieze comprised a series of symbols drawn from the artist’s universe and simplified in order to evoke the primordial signs of cave painting. Neither an easel painting nor a public commission,Peinture suggests that in 1953 Miró returned to mural painting as a way of stretching the limits of his work. The elongated form of the canvas required the artist to find a strong rhythm in the composition; at the same time the lack of narrative asked for an intuitive, spontaneous execution. 

Together with another large canvas painted in 1953 and now held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Peinture opened a new chapter in the stylistic journey of Miró’s art. Dupin defined it as an ‘expansion tendency’. Leaving behind the precision of his ‘elaborate style’, Miró set out to loosen up control and explore a more instinctive approach. As Dupin wrote, ‘Calling upon all his powers for direct, uncompromising expressiveness, he achieved a kind of improvisation, at once grandiose and rigorous’ (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris, 2012, p. 292). In Peinture, Miró displayed the symbols in order to create a sense of rhythm in the composition: a long central black brushstroke divides the canvas into three parts, while two stars at each ends of the composition give a sense of symmetry. Yet the picture maintains a sense of floating free, developing its signs from left to right in a seemingly spontaneous sequence. The viewer’s eye wonders freely, comforted by the underlying strength of the composition. 

To achieve such an effect, in the bandes series Miró gave more emphasis to the background, letting the surface suggest the movements of the picture. As Dupin observed, ‘the background served to create a storm-tossed atmosphere, generating sufficient electricity to put the painter in a hypnotic state in which he was able to transmit directly onto the canvas a deposit of inner energies notable for their crude, raw, expressiveness’ (Ibid., p. 292). Miró himself described this approach, explaining the way he started painting in 1959: ‘I start my paintings under the influence of a shock that I feel and that takes me out of reality. The cause of the shock can be a little thread coming loose from the canvas, a drop of water falling, this print that my finger leaves on the shiny surface of this table. Anyway, I need a starting point, even if it’s only a grain of dust or a flash of light. This shape generates a series of things, one thing giving birth to another’ (‘Miró: I work like a gardener…’, pp. 423-428, in Joan Miró 1893-1983, exh. cat., Barcelona, 1993, p. 425). In its horizontal unfolding of signs, Peinture expanded this approach into a new dimension, challenging the artist’s creative power on a large scale. 

Stretching over five meters, Peinture is a work that can equally be overwhelming absorbing for an individual or indeed inviting for a larger crowd. The same year Miró painted Peinture, he also executed another horizontal painting, of exactly the same dimensions (J. Dupin, A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró: Catalogue raisonné. Paintings, vol. III, no. 940, p. 215; Collection Paule and Adrien Maeght). Miró might have intended the two works to form a pair in which to the blue of the present picture would be parallel by the earthy colours of its companion. Together, the two ‘bandes’ would have demanded a large space to be exhibited; this suggests that the artist might have hoped that the pair might find a public display. Miró had expressed his desire to work on a large scale as early as 1938; that year he had confessed: ‘My dream, once I am able to settle down somewhere, is to have a very large studio, not so much for reasons of brightness, northern light, and so on, which I don’t care about, but in order to have enough room to hold many canvases, because the more I work the more I want to work. I would like to try (…) to go beyond easel painting, which in my opinion has a narrow goal, and to bring myself closer, through painting, to the human masses I have never stopped thinking about’ (‘I dream of a large studio. In XXe Siècle, Paris, May 1938’, pp. 161-162, in Margit Rowell, (ed.), Joan Miró Selected Writings and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 162). 

The 1947 Cincinnati commission had showed the artist that his poetic language could reach a large audience and that his whimsical signs were strong enough to fill vast spaces. The artist, however, would have to wait until 1956 for his dream of a ‘large studio’ to come true: that year, the architect Josep Lluís Sert completed Miró’s studio in Palma de Mallorca. Finally, the artist had the space to tackle large, ambitious canvases. Works such as Peinture, however, suggests that already in 1953 and despite the constrains of his studio, Miró felt the need to expand his paintings onto a larger format. In a radio interview in 1951, Miró had in fact affirmed: ‘I hope for a physical contact with people, with ordinary people, with all people’ (‘Interview. French National Radio (Georges Charbonnier), 1951’, pp. 219-224, in M. Rowell, (ed.), Joan Miró, Selected Writing and Interviews, London, 1987, p. 217). Generously calling for a communal experience, Peinture conveys Miró’s wish to open the doors of the magical world of his universe to a large, inspired audience.

Modern Masters: Works from an Important Private Swiss Collection comprises an exceptional and historic group of works which will be offered across all four King Street sales on 4 and 5 February. The Surrealist works in the collection are led by the most significant work by Carlo Carrà to come to auction, Solitudine (Solitude), started in 1917 (estimate: £2.5-3.5 million) and L’Oiseau-nocturne, 1939, by Joan Miró (estimate: £1-1.5 million). Collections often reflect their collectors’ tastes and histories, but seldom do they also reflect their friendships and relationships as much as the 22 works of art assembled by a private Swiss couple. Behind almost all of these works are tales of friendship, as the collectors came to know many of the artists who are represented, meeting a number of the leading figures of the avant garde from the 1920s onwards. Living a reality confined merely to dreams for many, they were able to meet Constantin Brancusi, to see Pablo Picasso’s Guernica while it was in its studio, to support the impoverished and embattled Piet Mondrian and to entertain Hans Arp on a regular basis. Two published authors, who were authorities in their field, the couple were prominent in the cultural milieu of Switzerland and Europe as a whole, particularly in the middle decades of the 20th century. Coming to the market for the first time, the collection as a whole is expected to realise in the excess of £30 million. 

Carlo Carrà (1881-1966), Solitudine (Solitude). Estimate £2.5-3.5 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014

signed and dated 'C. Carrà 917’ (lower left); oil on canvas; 36 x 21 7/8 in. (91.5 x 55.5 cm.). Painted between 1917 and 1926

Provenance: Private collection, Zurich, by whom acquired directly from the artist circa 1926, and thence by descent to the present owner.
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

Literature: The artist's Archives: photo of the work in its first state (signed and dated upper left 'C. Carrà 1917').
"L'Illustrazione medica italiana", 1921 (first state illustrated, titled 'Impressioni dell'ospedale neurologico "Villa del Seminario" a Ferrara').
M. Broglio, ed., Valori Plastici, Anno III, no. 1, Rome, 1921 (first state illustrated, signed and dated upper left 'C. Carrà 919').
A. Soffici, Carlo Carrà, Arte Moderna Italiana, vol. XI, Milan, 1928 (illustrated).
G. Cerrina, "Carlo Carrà" in La Provincia di Bolzano, 26 November 1932.
V. Costantini, Pittura italiana contemporanea, Milan, 1934, pp. 394 & 426 (illustrated p. 221).
R. Huyge, Histoire de l’art contemporain, Paris, 1935.
C. L. Ragghianti, "Carrà" in Critica d’arte, 1936.
R. Longhi, Carlo Carrà, Arte Moderna Italiana, vol. XI, Milan, 1937 (illustrated pl. VII).
M. Masciotta, "La pittura metafisica", in Letteratura, 1941.
G. Pacchioni, Carlo Carrà, Milan, 1945 (illustrated pl. 11).
J. Thrall Soby, Twentieth Century Italian Art, New York, 1949.
L. Vitali, Preferenze, Milan, 1950.
C. Zervos, Cahiers d’art I, Paris, 1950.
R. Carrieri, Pittura e scultura d’avanguardia in Italia, Milan, 1950.
U. Apollonio, Pittura Metafisica, Venezia, 1950 (first state illustrated).
C. Cardazzo, Carrà, Venice, 1952.
W. Schmalenbach, Grosse Meister Moderner Malerei, Lucerne, 1957.
R. Modesti, Pittura italiana contemporanea, Milan, 1958.
M. Valsecchi, La pittura metafisica, Milan, 1958.
M. Valsecchi, Carrà, Milan, 1962.
E. Cecchi, Carrá, in Exh. Cat, Carrà, Milan, 1962.
S. Branzi, "Carlo Carrà", in L’osservatore, 1962.
G. Ballo, La linea dell’arte italiana, Rome, 1964.
M. Carrà, Carrà, Tutta l’opera pittorica, vol. I, 1900-1930, Milan, 1967, no. 3/17, p. 585 (illustrated p. 315).
M. Carrà& P. Bigongiari, L’opera complete di Carrà, dal futurismo alla metafisica e al realismo mitico, 1910-1930, Milan, 1970, no. 72, p. 91 (illustrated pl. XXI).
C. Giedion-Welcker, Schriften 1926-1971, Cologne, 1973, no. 38 (illustrated).
C. Carrà, La mia vita, Rome, 1981, pp. 137 & 138.
Exh. cat., Carlo Carrà, Rome, 1994, pp. 130, 131 & 163 (both first and final state illustrated).
F. Rovati, Carrà tra futurismo e metafisica, Milan, 2011, n. 26, p. 122 (first state illustrated).

Exhibited: Milan, Galleria Chini, Mostra personale del pittore futurista Carlo Carrà, December 1917 - January 1918 (probably in the first state).
Galleria L'Epoca, May - June 1918.
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Italienische Maler, March – May 1927, no. 15.
Sasso Marconi, La Casa dell’Arte, Carlo Carrà, Mostra del Centenario, 100 dipinti e 35 disegni dal 1900 al 1966, February – April 1981, no. 19 (illustrated).
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Carrà, Mostra antologica, April - June 1987.
Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, XIII Esposizione Quadriennale d’Arte, “Valori Plastici”, October 1998 – January 1999, no. 50, p. 312 (both first and final state illustrated p. 35; final state illustrated again p. 222).

Notes: Solitudine (Solitude), despite its title, is an important testimony to one of the most intense, most influential encounters in the history of Italian modern art. First conceived in the middle of the First World War, in a withdrawn hospital outside Ferrara, the painting commemorates one of the most significant years in the career of Carlo Carrà, when in 1917 he met and worked closely together with Giorgio de Chirico. Carrà worked on the painting between 1917 and 1926, the year in which the work was acquired by the family of the present in its second, current state. While Solitudine testifies to the intellectual bond that Carrà and de Chirico shared that year, the work also states Carrà’s singularity, expressing some of his deepest beliefs about art and situating his metaphysical art into an orbit distinct from that of de Chirico’s.

Set in the enclosed space of a bare room, the scenery in Solitudine appears as reminiscent of a science lesson. Left alone with these objects of contemplation, the viewer is confronted with the serious tools of learning: a blackboard displaying an unfinished geometry theorem and an assembled anatomy model. Yet, displayed in the foreground, a bright red skittle breaks this solemn atmosphere of pedagogy, introducing instead a symbol of play, instability, and childhood. Two worlds seem thus to collide in this placid scene of abandoned activity, in which human presence has been replaced by the powerful poise of some commanding objects.

Dated 1917 by the artist, Solitudine was first started around the time of Carrà’s encounter with de Chirico. Their meeting was fostered as much by a mutual friend – the painter Ardengo Soffici - as by fate. In January 1917, Carrà was assigned to the 27th Infantry Regiment, serving in Pieve di Cento, near Ferrara. In February, he received a letter from Soffici lamenting the fact that he had not been deployed in Ferrara: ‘It is a real shame that you were not sent to Ferrara. There you would have met the de Chirico brothers’. He nevertheless urged him: ‘If you go to Ferrara, you absolutely have to look for them’ (Soffici, Letter to Carrà, 16 February 1917, quoted in M. Pasquali, ‘Carrà e Ferrara, 1917’, pp. 89-96, in Carlo Carrà 1881-1966, exh. cat., Rome, 1994, p. 91). De Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio had in fact arrived in Ferrara in 1915, serving in the same regiment to which Carrà had been assigned. A couple of weeks later, de Chirico and Carrà made their first written contact. De Chirico wrote to him: ‘I regret not having found you; I would have liked you to see some of my most recent paintings’ (De Chirico, letter to Carrà, 27 February 1917, quoted Ibid., p. 91). In March, however, the two painters had finally met. In a triumphal letter to his friend Carrà, Soffici cheered: ‘My dearest friend, I was told by de Chirico that you have finally met and that he has great respect for you and that he loves you’ (Soffici, letter to Carrà, 28 March 1917, quoted Ibid., p. 92). In the following weeks, Carrà and de Chirico met again, exchanging opinions and planning to publish an album of their works together.

Ultimately, however, Carrà and de Chirico’s artistic friendship would be precipitated by the trauma of war. In April, de Chirico was hospitalised at the Military Neurological Hospital in Ferrara, as ‘neurasthenic’. Two weeks later, Carrà arrived at the same hospital suffering psychic depression. Their illnesses proved to be a blessing in disguise: withdrawn from the horrors of war and able to share their anxieties, the two painters had the chance to sublimate their disquieting feelings, working closely together on a series of paintings, destined to become highly influential for generations to come. In May, Carrà wrote in a letter: ‘I’m living through these days of military bestiality with a dear friend and together we sustain each other in order not to end up in despair. Here we can have that bit of calm that allows us to work on our paintings’ (Carrà, Letter to Gherardo Marone, 5 Maggio 1917, quoted Ibid., p. 92). Solitudine was born in that context of unexpected calm, in which the troubled days of war still resonated in waves of angst and consternation.
It is very interesting, in fact, that the first title of Solitudine was Impressioni dell'ospedale neurologico "Villa del Seminario" a Ferrara (Impressions of the Neurological Hospital “Villa del Seminario” in Ferrara), a more narrative and descriptive account of the seminal moment in Carrà’s life, defined by the almost surreal elimination of the war dramas in the estranged atmosphere of the neurological hospital. The evolution from this first title to Solitudine, loneliness, which is also in itself a very metaphysical state of mind, is also symptomatic of this process of simplification from one state to the final, from a narrative preoccupation to a more pure solution, in line with Valori Plastici.

In its composition, Solitudine bears the sign of Carrà and de Chirico’s strong artistic bonding. Presenting a mannequin staring at an enigmatic board, the painting is reminiscent of two compositions de Chirico executed a few years earlier: Le Vaticinateur (1915) and Le Poète et le philosophe (1914-1915). Both works evoke the intimate, mystical world of creation through the figure of a contemplative mannequin and the hypnotic abyss of a blackboard. Through those paintings de Chirico wished to evoke the figure of the artist as a seer, as the interpreter of the enigma of existence, revealing a new hidden dimension. In 1917, Carrà wrote to Soffici: ‘together with de Chirico, we discuss and paint new realities’, suggesting that by then he too shared de Chirico’s approach to art (Carrà, Letter to Soffici, 5 June 1917, quoted ibid, p. 92). Re-elaborating a theme explored by de Chirico to express the role of the metaphysical painter, Solitudine might have served Carrà as the gateway to Pittura Metafisica, preparing the ground for works such as La camera incantata (1917), Madre e figlio (1917) and La musa metafisica (1917).

In its distilled composition and linear structure, Solitudine ultimately expresses Carrà’s individual perspective on Pittura Metafisica, manifesting his very personal approach to figurative painting. The work as it appears, in fact, constitutes a second state, the changing of the composition revealing how Carrà distanced himself from de Chirico. A reproduction of the painting in its earlier state was published in 1921 in Valori Plastici, the influential art review published by Edita and Mario Broglio, to which Carrà, de Chirico and Savinio contributed extensively. The composition shown there was more elaborate: surrounding the mannequin was a series of abandoned, out-of-proportion objects much reminiscent of de Chirico’s still life compositions from 1916-1917. In particular, Carrà placed a tray of biscuits in the foreground, a detail which de Chirico himself had lifted from the shop windows of Ferrara the previous year. The perspective of the room appears more vertiginous, an impression which is reinforced by the oblique orientations of the coloured baton on the floor and of the blackboard. Overall, that first state aimed to achieve the same spatial ambiguity that de Chirico was exploring in his paintings at the time.

Carrà eventually reintroduced stability and balance into the picture through a series of changes, certainly completed before 1926, date in which the painting was acquired by the family of the present owner in its present state. Reworking Solitudine, Carrà lowered the furthest wall in order to reduce the foreshortening of the room and straightened the plane of the blackboard, bringing it almost parallel to the background. He also elongated the pedestal of the mannequin, giving its figure more élan and stability, and erased all other elements except for the skittle, which – of reduced dimensions – now serves as the central, vertical point of focus for the whole composition. Through these changes, Carrà gave the composition rigour and symmetry, two principles that remained extraneous to de Chirico’s works of the period.

The differences in Carrà and de Chirico’s compositions are reflected in the written accounts the two artists left on their art. For de Chirico, Pittura Metafisica had to escape all ‘human limits: logic and common sense’, in order to enter ‘the regions of childhood vision and dream’. De Chirico specified: ‘it is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of recognizable material to date, all familiar subject matter’ (G. de Chirico, ‘Mystery and Creation’, pp. 60-61, in C. Harrison, P. Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990, Oxford, 1992, p. 60). By contrast, Carrà wrote: ‘Ordinary things reveal those forms of simplicity that indicates a upper state of the soul, which constitutes all the secret magnificence of art’ (C. Carrà, ‘Delle cose ordinare’, in Classici dell’arte: L’Opera Completa di Carrà, Milan, 1970, p. 86). While de Chirico strived to capture a different reality beyond the quotidian and inspired by the irrational strong sensations of dreams, Carrà maintained a more intellectual approach, rooted in the unexpected amazement provoked by simple things. Even though in 1917, Carrà let the objects and figures of de Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica invade his work, the two different states of Solitudine illustrate how he eventually filtered them through a personal lens, shaped by his own sense of artistic tradition.

Carrà’s involvement with Pittura Metafisica in 1917 was paralleled by a growing interest for the masters of the Renaissance, which in fact permeates Solitudine. In 1916, leaving behind him his Futurist experience, Carrà published two studies in La Voce, one dedicated to Giotto (Parlata su Giotto), the other to Paolo Uccello (Paolo Uccello Costruttore). Later on, he explicitly acknowledged the link between his interest in Renaissance art and his involvement with Pittura Metafisica: ‘with Pittura Metafisica (…) we tried to re-establish that superior equilibrium that we had found so magnificently expressed in the work of Piero [della Francesca]’ (C. Carrà, quoted in A. Monferini, ‘Il platonismo di Carrà e le opera metafisiche tra il 1916-1919’, pp. 81-88, in Carlo Carrà 1881-1966, exh. cat., Rome, 1994, p. 87). Viewed from this perspective, Carrà’s mannequins acquire a different meaning from those of de Chirico’s. While in de Chirico’s painting the mannequin conveys the dread of a machine impending onto the human form, in Carrà it embodies an effort to understand and intellectualise the human form. Maurizio Calvesi traced the influence of the plates featured in Dürer’s treatise on human proportions in paintings such as Solitudine: divided into modules, the mannequin expressed Carrà’s desire – as it had been Dürer’s – of understanding the world through its art, grasping the hidden rules of nature. Solitudine opened the way to works such as L’Idolo Ermafrodito, in which the scientific appearance of the mannequin has given form to a more humanised, idealised form, reminiscent of the eternal figures of Renaissance art. Triggered by his encounter with de Chirico, Carrà’s metaphysical phase allowed the artist to develop his own sense of tradition, in which the force of Renaissance art found a new way into Modernity.

If Solitudine in its second state signalled Carrà’s independence from de Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica, its first state would however prove to be one of the most influential images for the European avant-garde. The reproductions of Carrà’s metaphysical works in Valori Plastici grabbed the attention of artists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalì and George Grosz, providing them with a language they could use in order to express their fascination for the uncanny and for the malaise in modern society. In the 1920s, Carrà pushed forward that sense of historical continuation expressed in the second state of Solitudine, adhering to the ‘retour à l’ordre’ in order to explore tradition in a more overt way. Telling the story of Carrà and de Chirico’s encounter, while tracing Carrà’s personal trajectory, however, Solitudine remains one of the most emblematic woks of Pittura Metafisica, marking the dawn of Modernism. Just after Carrà had met de Chirico, Soffici exulted: ‘After the war we will achieve great and marvellous things’ (Soffici, letter to Carrà, 28 March 1917, quoted in M. Pasquali, ‘Carrà e Ferrara, 1917’, pp. 89-96, in Carlo Carrà 1881-1966, exh. cat., Rome, 1994, p. 92). Started before the end of the war, Solitudine proves instead that, already in 1917, that moment had arrived.

Joan Miró (1893-1983), L'Oiseau-nocturne (Nocturnal Bird). Estimate £1-1.5 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014

signed 'Miró' (lower right); signed 'Joan Miró', dated '30-8-939.' and titled (on the reverse); oil on canvas; 16 1/4 x 10 5/8 in. (41.3 x 27 cm.). Painted on 30 August 1939.

Provenance: Private collection, Zurich, and thence by descent to the present owners.
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SWISS COLLECTION

Literature: J. Prévert & G. Ribemont-Dessaignes, Joan Miró, Paris, 1956, p. 144 (illustrated).
J. Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work, London, 1962, no. 527, p. 540 (illustrated p. 339).
G. Weelen, Miró, Paris, 1984, no. 157, p. 117.
J. Dupin & A. Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue raisonné, Paintings, vol. II, 1931-1941, Paris, 2000, no. 618, p. 224 (illustrated).

Exhibited: Basel, Kunsthalle, Joan Miró, March - April 1956, no. 48.
London, Tate Gallery, Joan Miro´, Painting, sculpture and ceramics, August - October 1964, no. 164; this exhibition later travelled to Zurich, Kunsthaus, October - December 1964.
Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró, Impactes, Joan Miró 1929-1941, no. 77, p. 127 (illustrated p. 109).

Notes: Miró painted L’Oiseau-nocturne in the village of Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, on the Channel coast, during a sojourn that lasted from mid-August 1939 through late May 1940. He made his first painting there on 22 August (Jeune fille courant, Dupin, no. 614), and completed L’Oiseau-nocturne on the 30th. These canvases marked the beginning of an astonishing sequence of works Miró went on to create in Varengeville, culminating in the first of the celebrated wartime Constellations on 21 January 1940 (Le Lever du soleil; Dupin, no. 628), followed by nine more (Dupin, nos. 629-637) before the artist and his family fled south in late May to avoid air aids and approaching German forces during the invasion of France. 'All the works of this period, inspired directly or indirectly by the place where they were conceived, are of capital importance,' Jacques Dupin declared (J. Dupin, Miró, Paris. 2012, p. 237). He added the assessment of the influential American critic Clement Greenberg, who claimed that during this period Miró’s work 'reached then what I consider to be its greatest height so far' (C. Greenberg, Miró, New York, 1948, p. 27).
Note the date of L’Oiseau-nocturne in this distinguished line of pictures--30 August 1939. Less than forty-eight hours later, in the early morning light of 1 September, the German Luftwaffe bombed military targets in Poland, as mechanized armored units overran that nation’s feeble border defenses. On 3 September Great Britain and France, under treaty with the Polish government, declared war on Germany. It was then not quite twenty-one years after the end of the First World War that a second cataclysmic conflict quickly engulfed Europe.

The ferocity of the German onslaught came as a shock, although Miró and many others knew that such a terrible event was imminent and inevitable. Indeed, 1939 had begun badly for Miró and his Spanish friends -- on 26 January Franco’s fascist legions occupied Barcelona, the last stronghold of the Loyalist republic, bringing the bloody civil war in Spain to its tragic conclusion. The growing momentum toward an all-out European conflict rose to a head on 23 August, when the German and Soviet foreign ministers signed a non-aggression pact, signaling that some momentous military undertaking would soon come to pass. The French government decreed a general mobilization three days later.

Miró’s concerns during this ominous period were primarily two-fold: he sought to engage his creative work in the tumultuous events of the day, while preserving for himself and his work, his wife and daughter some viable measure of safety and well-being. 'The outer world, the world of contemporary events, always has an influence on the painter,' Miró declared in the Cahiers d’Art issue of April-May 1939. 'The horrible tragedy that we are experiencing might produce a few isolated geniuses and give them an increased vigor. If the powers of backwardness known as fascism continue to spread, however, if they push us into the dead end of cruelty and incomprehension, that will be the end of all human dignity… There is no longer an ivory tower. Retreat and isolation are no longer permissible. What counts now in a work of art is…how it implicates lived facts and human truth in its upward movement' (in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 166).

Precautions were also in order, and would soon take precedence over such idealistic pronouncements. Miró, possibly as early as July, had placed his work in storage, and sometime by mid-August relocated himself and his family to Varengeville, where Braque had made his country home. Miró had visited Varengeville the previous summer as a guest of the architect Paul Nelson, for whose home he had executed a trio of mural paintings (Dupin, no. 605). This time he rented a cottage on the Route de l’Eglise called the Clos de Sansonettes. 'I was working very well in this beautiful country, and here we are, now plunged into this nightmare,' he wrote to his New York dealer Pierre Matisse on 25 August, lamenting the inexorable slide towards war (in C. Lanchner, Joan Miró, exh cat., The Museum of Modern Art New York, 1993, p. 334).

Dupin recorded the pictures done prior to the Constellations as comprising two distinct sets, which he classified as Varengeville I and II. L’Oiseau-nocturne belongs to the first group of five small canvases done on what Dupin described as a 'raspberry red' background during August-September. Varengeville II, done in October-November, consists of nine paintings executed directly on raw burlap in larger dimensions than the first set. In these later works Miró practiced an increasingly dense graphism of linear signs, leading directly into the all-over configuration of imagery that characterizes the Constellations. The use of the raw burlap as a ground lends the Varengeville II paintings a darker aspect than the luminously carmine first set, an indication that more troubled thoughts had beset the painter as with each passing week the wartime situation appeared increasingly dire. On 17 September Soviet armies invaded Poland from the east. Crushed on both sides between the two totalitarian powers, with Warsaw suffering under devastating air attacks -- while the Western allies were powerless to help -- the Polish government surrendered on 27 September.

One may characterize the reddish paintings of the Varengeville I set as the calm before the storm, but bearing ominous signs of menace in the offing. A great black bird, with an alarmingly distended phallic appendage, here fills the night sky over the form of a great earth mother. 'The backgrounds are very suggestive: impregnation of red in the first series,' Dupin wrote, '…the colour is very intense: these touches are like sparks in the night' (op. cit., 2012, p. 243). 'Red sky at morning,' the old saying goes, 'shepherd take warning.' If he were gazing eastward, Miró has caught sight of a black sun rising on the horizon, an inauspicious sign. Or if looking westward, the setting black sun, as if burnt out, lightless and cold, may betoken a world destined to become barren and lifeless. Nevertheless, the overall import of the imagery is visionary in a truly cosmic dimension, and so strikingly animated that Miró projects more a sense of profound mystery and wonderment than any inclination toward foreboding and despair.

Indeed, during the first months of the war in France, apart from a few air raids and limited ground incursions, the western front remained relatively quiet, a lull or reprieve that the British and French dubbed 'the phony war.' The French military felt secure in the strength of their Maginot line, a vast network of supposedly impregnable fortresses that faced the Rhine. Varengeville likewise provided for Miró at least a temporary sense of refuge, a 'splendid isolation' from events of the day, in which he could paint. He and his family walked along the Channel beaches at night, reveling in the vast array of stars, constellations and galactic swirls, which he rendered in L’Oiseau-nocturne. 'At Varengeville-sur-Mer, in 1939, I began a new stage in my work which had its source in music and nature,' the artist explained to James Johnson Sweeney in 1948. 'I felt a deep desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings' (M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 209). The image of l’échelle de l’évasion, 'the ladder of escape,' does in fact provide the title for both a Varengeville II painting (Dupin, no. 626), and the second of the Constellations (31 January 1940; Dupin, no. 629).

Because of the war, none of the Varengeville paintings could be included in Miró’s first ever retrospective, which James Johnson Sweeney curated for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was viewed November 1941-January 1942. The Constellations, shipped from Barcelona (where, after a spell in Palma, Mallorca, Miró spent most of the rest of the war) were first seen at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in January-February 1945. Both exhibitions had a major impact on the young American painters who would constitute the pioneering post-war New York School. Concluding his text for the 1941 MoMA retrospective catalogue, Sweeney praised Miró for having 'carried on most consistently those researches which have brought western painting from the austere disciplines of cubism to new forms and new evocations… Miró’s vitality, laughter, naïve lyricism and love of life are, today, auguries of the new painting in a new period which is to come' (Joan Miró, exh. cat., the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1941, p. 78).

Painted in 1943, La Vénus endormie is a deeply absorbing and poetic vision of one of Paul Delvaux’s most celebrated themes, dating from his greatest period (estimate: £1.2-1.6 million). Asleep outdoors in the midst of a vast and impossible classical temple complex, the Venus of the title is the object of veneration and worship. Strange supplicants, like priestesses, surround her, each seemingly oblivious to the others’ presence as they assume their ritualistic positions on the terrace. It is in this disjointedness that Delvaux’s art derives its unique power. Unlike the Surrealists, Delvaux invents relatively little, choosing instead to create a peculiarly otherworldly atmosphere in his paintings by the Romanesque idealisation of his women, their apparent lack of relation on to the other, and their dreamlike existence in a perfectly ordered pseudo-classical architectural landscape. These all combine to conjure up a vision of a world filled with its own, unique haunting poetry. 

Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), La Vénus endormie. Estimate £1-1.5 million. © Christie’s Images Limited 2014

signed and dated 'P. Delvaux 10.43' (lower right); oil on canvas; 29 1/8 x 62 1/8 in. (74 x 158 cm.). Painted in October 1943

Provenance: Robert Giron, Brussels, by 1945.
Roger Vanthournout, Belgium, by 1973.
Private Collection, Belgium, by whom acquired from the above; sale, Christie's, London, 21 June 2005, lot 48.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN COLLECTION

Literature: A. Eggermont, 'Les Arts Plastiques' in Le Thyrse, Brussels, 15 February 1945, p. 53.
R. Gaffé, Paul Delvaux ou les rêves éveillés, Brussels, 1945, p. 34 (illustrated pl. 18).
C. Spaak, Paul Delvaux, Antwerp, 1948, no. 11, p. 16 (illustrated).
Exh. cat., XXXVe Salon du Cercle Royal Artistique et Littéraire de Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, 1961 (illustrated).
Exh. cat., Rétrospective Paul Delvaux, Galerie Krugier, Geneva, September - October 1966, illustrated.
P.A. De Bock, Paul Delvaux, L'homme, le peintre, psychologie d'un art, Brussels, 1967, no. 58, p. 292 (illustrated p. 120).
J. Vovelle, Le Surréalisme en Belgique, Brussels, 1972, p. 188 (illustrated).
R. Hammacher, 'Interview avec Paul Delvaux' in Exh. cat., Paul Delvaux, Rotterdam, 1973, pp. 16-17.
'Ausstellungen: Paul Delvaux Tentoonstelling 14 April - 17 June', in Bulletin Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, April 1973, no. 4, p. 26.
P. Sager, 'Paul Delvaux' in Das Kunstwerk, Stuttgart-Berlin-Cologne-Mayence, May 1973, vol. XXVI, no. 3, p. 41.
M. Butor, J. Clair, & S. Houbart-Wilkin, Delvaux, Catalogue de l'oeuvre peint, Brussels, 1975, no. 131, pp. 201-202, illustrated p. 202.
B. Emerson, Delvaux, Paris, 1985, p. 118 (illustrated).
M. Rombaut, Paul Delvaux, Barcelona, 1990, no. 46, p. 126 (illustrated).
Exh. cat., Delvaux and antiquity, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Andros, 2009 (illustrated p. 12).

Exhibited: Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Rétrospective Delvaux, December 1944 - January 1945, no. 36.
Charleroi, Salle de la Bourse, XXXIe Salon du cercle royal artistique et littéraire de Charleroi: Rétrospective Paul Delvaux, March - April 1957, no. 47.
Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition rétrospective des oeuvres de Paul Delvaux, November - December 1966, no. 18 (illustrated; dated 1944).
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Paul Delvaux, April - June 1973, no. 29, p. 131 (illustrated pp. 67 & 131).
Knokke-Heist, Casino, Rétrospective Paul Delvaux, June - September 1973, no. 23 (illustrated pp. 61 and 125).
Ostend, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, From Ensor to Delvaux, Ensor, Spilliaert, Permeke, Magritte, Delvaux, October 1996 - February 1997, p. 352 (illustrated).
Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, March - July 1997, no. 52, p. 109 (illustrated).
Himeji, Himeji City Museum of Art, From Ensor to Delvaux, October - April 2001, no. 69 (illustrated pp. 156-157); this exhibition later travelled to Sakura, Sakura City Museum of Art; Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art; Osaka, Daimaru Museum and Okazaki, Okazaki City Museum.
Brussels, Musée d'Ixelles, Paul Delvaux, aux sources de l'œuvre, October 2010 - January 2011, no. 104, illustrated.

Notes: Painted in 1943, La Vénus endormie is a deeply absorbing and poetic vision of one of Delvaux's most celebrated themes, dating from his greatest period. Asleep outdoors in the midst of a vast and impossible classical temple complex, the Venus of the title is the object of veneration and worship. Strange supplicants, like priestesses, surround her, each seemingly oblivious to the others' presence as they assume their ritualistic positions on the terrace. It is in this disjointedness that Delvaux's art derives its unique power. Unlike the Surrealists, Delvaux invents relatively little, choosing instead to create a peculiarly otherworldly atmosphere in his paintings by the Romanesque idealisation of his women, their apparent lack of relation on to the other, and their dreamlike existence in a perfectly ordered pseudo-classical architectural landscape. These all combine to conjure up a vision of a world filled with its own, unique haunting poetry.

Delvaux's art benefited from two great epiphanies, both of which came within the space of a few years of each other. One was his exposure to Surrealism and the art of Giorgio de Chirico. However, by far the greatest influence was the Grand Musée anatomique ethnologique du Dr P. Spitzner. In the midst of a bustling fair, this was a dark and gloomy exhibition of models and curiosities. Skeletons and automatons were crowded within the gloomy confines alongside wax reproductions of diseased organs. Delvaux was struck by Spitzner Museum's gloom in the midst of the fun and frolics of the fair, and he repeatedly insisted that this strange contrast was the original and most influential inspiration for his pictures.

Amongst all the objects on display was the model of a sleeping Venus, much celebrated in the exhibition's cataloguing:

'Reclining Venus, modelled from life. Artistic masterpiece that was awarded two medals at the Vienna Exhibition. The first... for the remarkable progress it achieved in the art of modelling; the second for the ingenious mechanism inside the breast giving the subject the appearance of being alive. This masterpiece surpasses anything that has been done previously and uniquely justifies the use of these three words: ART, SCIENCE, PROGRESS' (Spitzner cataloguing, quoted in Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, exh.cat., Brussels, 1997, p. 17).

Of all the exhibits in the Spitzner Museum, the Venus in particular fascinated Delvaux, and he returned many times to see it again and again. Even before his exposure to Surrealism, he tried to capture its strange qualities in several early pictures. The figure of the Sleeping Venus would recur again and again as the focus of some of his greatest paintings. La Vénus endormie is one of a small group of paintings on the subject that were executed in the early 1940s, the high-point of his art, when he began to consolidate his unique visual poetry. He distilled the juxtapositions of Magritte and the atmosphere of de Chirico, mixing them with his haunting memories of the Spitzner Museum, to create paintings that were striking in their confidence and their discreet novelty. The quality of the works from this rich, early period is reflected in the number of paintings, including several on the same theme as La Vénus endormie, that are in museum collections throughout the world, not least the Tate in London. The quality of these works, and the attention that they gained, was reflected in Delvaux's increasing recognition both in Belgium and internationally. This resulted in his first major retrospective taking place in 1944 in Brussels. The importance of La Vénus endormie is reflected in its inclusion in this retrospective, only the year after it was painted.

Delvaux's treatments of La Vénus endormie as a subject vary hugely, be it in the features of the Venus or in the arrangements and scenery around her. The painting on the same theme in the Tate, for instance, has a markedly oppressive atmosphere of containment, with a skeleton looming in the foreground. However, regardless of these differences, Delvaux was insistent that 'All my Sleeping Venuses originate there... [They are] an exact transcription of the Sleeping Venus of the Spitzner Museum, but with Greek temples or with models - anything you like. It is different, but the understanding is the same' (Delvaux, quoted in Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, exh.cat., Brussels, 1997, p. 18). That the Venus motif derives from his memories of an automaton adds to the eerily ambiguous of the vision before us, Delvaux deliberately introducing the unsettling possibility of the Venus being a simulacrum, sharpening the hallucinatory quality of the image.

Despite their lack of relation the one to the other and their statuesque coolness, Delvaux did not believe that the austerity of his female figures excluded the possibility of his works being erotic. The reclining young woman in La Vénus endormie is prone in her sleep both to the gaze of the viewer, and to whatever menaces might lurk in her world. Nothing is arbitrary in Delvaux's art, and the half-naked figure in this picture is expressly erotic: 'Naturally there is eroticism. Without eroticism I would find painting impossible. The painting of the nude in particular. A nude is erotic even when indifferent, when glacial. What else would it be? The eroticism of my work resides in its evocation of youth and desire' (Delvaux, quoted in Paul Delvaux 1897-1994, exh.cat., Brussels, 1997, p. 23). By deliberately introducing the confusing presence of this eroticism to the cool and rational architecture of La Vénus endormie and the ritualistic positioning of the bystanders, Delvaux reinforces the painting's atmosphere of incongruity and its intense strangeness.

This evocation of a hidden yet epic world hovering just beyond the veil of our vision and understanding is one of the greatest legacies of de Chirico's art in the paintings of Delvaux. While the classical architecture recalls the piazzas and towers of de Chirico's metaphysical masterpieces, it is the strange and potent quality of stimmung that Delvaux mainly gleaned from his predecessor. Delvaux has distilled a new version of the timelessness and stillness of de Chirico's painting to evoke a world that cannot exist within our realm of being. This timelessness, the absence of history and of movement in La Vénus endormie, is all the more pertinent considering the historical backdrop against which La Vénus endormie was painted, with Belgium still under Nazi control. During this time, Delvaux avoided Brussels as much as possible, staying instead in Knokke. Thus the world of the Venus appears to exist parallel to the stressful world of its inception, for despite the alien architecture and the alien rituals at work in that world, it is the flat, shadowless light of off-season Belgian resorts that permeates La Vénus endormie.

Bulgari Four Seasons High Jewelry Mini-Collection
Spring. High Jewelry necklace in pink gold with mint tourmalines, peridots, amethyst, round brilliant cut diamonds and pavé set diamonds. (still in production)
Photo courtesy of Bulgari.

Bulgari Four Seasons High Jewelry Mini-Collection
Summer / Caprice in Portofino, #8812. High Jewelry necklace in yellow gold with 9 fancy shaped curved cut emeralds (108.2 cts), 23 fancy shaped curved cut spessartite garnets(65.35 cts), 23 fancy shaped curved cut amethysts (45.55 cts), 9 round brilliant cut diamonds and pavé diamonds (24.26 cts)
Photo courtesy of Bulgari

Bulgari Four Seasons High Jewelry Mini-Collection
Autumn, #9139. High Jewelry necklace in pink gold with tourmalines (116.39 cts), amethysts (34.87 cts), spessartite garnets (47.95 cts), round brilliant and pavé diamonds (24.26 cts)
Photo courtesy of Bulgari

Bulgari Four Seasons High Jewelry Mini-Collection
Winter, #9083. High Jewelry necklace in platinum with 9 round brilliant cut diamonds (3.95 cts) and pavé-set diamonds (38.52 cts)
Photo courtesy of Bulgari

Gold and sapphire 'La Flamme' brooch, Van Cleef & Arpels, France. Photo Sotheby's

Centered by ten yellow sapphires weighing approximately 9.50 carats, accented by 30 calibré-cut sapphires weighing approximately 4.00 carats, signed Van Cleef et Arpels, numbered 51793, with French hallmarks, circa 1940. Estimate 7,500 — 10,000 USD

Sotheby's. Important Jewels. New York | 06 Feb 2014 - www.sothebys.com

Gold and sapphire bangle-bracelet, France. Photo Sotheby's

The fluted gold bangle-bracelet set at the terminals with two cushion-cut sapphires weighing 18.65 and 12.92 carats, internal circumference 6¼ inches, with French assay and maker's marks. Estimate 50,000 — 70,000 USD

PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF JEAN TENNYSON DREYFUS BOISSEVAIN

Accompanied by AGL report no. CS 57848 A and B stating that the sapphires are of Ceylon origin, with no indications of heating.

Jean Tennyson Dreyfus Boissevain performed as an opera singer under the name Jean Tennyson with several leading opera companies throughout Europe and America including La Scala in Milan, The Chicago Civic Opera and the San Francisco Opera Company in the 1930s. Later during World War II, she was a well-known radio personality, most notably on the CBS Radio Program 'Great Moments in Music.'

Born in Chicago in 1903, she married Camille Dreyfus, founder of Celanese Corporation of America. Upon his death, Jean served as the president of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation and went on to be a bold supporter of music education, veterans' causes and the Philharmonic Society of New York.

Sotheby's. Important Jewels. New York | 06 Feb 2014 - www.sothebys.com

Juan Niño De Guevara (Madrid, 1632–Malaga, 1698), The Apparition of the Virgin and Child to Saint Francis and the Vision of the Cross. Pen, ink and brown wash on paper; 212 x 153 mm. Photo courtesy José de la Mano Galería de Arte.

José de la Mano Galería de Arte. Exhibiting at: Arader Galleries, 2nd Floor, 1016 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021. Telephone: +1 212 628 7625 - Email: info@galeriajosedelamano.com - Website: www.galeriajosedelamano.com. Master Drawings New York. Saturday 25 January to Saturday 1 February 2014.

Mariano Salvador Maella (Valencia, 1739-Madrid, 1819), The Allegory of Eternity, 1802-1804. Pencil and grey wash on paper, 197 x 374 mm. Photo courtesy José de la Mano Galería de Arte.

José de la Mano Galería de Arte. Exhibiting at: Arader Galleries, 2nd Floor, 1016 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021. Telephone: +1 212 628 7625 - Email: info@galeriajosedelamano.com - Website: www.galeriajosedelamano.com. Master Drawings New York. Saturday 25 January to Saturday 1 February 2014.