By Carter B. Horsley This evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie's May 7, 2002, has many important works of great interest for connoisseurs including major sculptures by Brancusi, Giacometti and Degas and fine paintings by Lautrec, Picasso, Magritte, Klee, Miró, and Vuillard. The cover illustration of the catalogue, shown above, is Lot 27, "Danaïde," by Constantin Brancusi (1867-1957), an exquisite, 11-inch-high bronze and gold leaf sculpture that was conceived circa 1913 and cast shortly thereafter. This magnificent work was included in the 1914 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and it was purchased there by Eugene and Agnes Meyer. There are six other bronze casts of this work and they are located in the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kunstverein in Winterthur, Switzerland, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Muzuel National de Arta al Romaniei in Bucharest and the ones in Paris and Bucharest are also gilded. The lot has an estimate of $8,000,000 to $10,000,000. A considerably smaller but also exquisite gilded head by Brancusi from the Smooke Collection sold at Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg November 5, 2001 for $1,762,000 (see The City Review article). It sold to an anonymous buyer for $18,159,500 including the buyer's premium as do all prices mentioned in this article, a world auction record for sculpture! The previous auction record price for Brancusi was $8,800,000 in 1990 and the prior auction record for sculpture was $14,306,000 set at Christie's Nov. 8, 2000.
The remarkable price demonstrated that money is still very much available in the art market for rare and important works of great quality and confirmed the recent dramatic rise in prices for modern sculpture.
Another major sculpture is Lot 34, "La Forêt," by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), a 23-inch-high painted bronze sculpture with seven standing female figures of different heights and a bust of a man. The work was executed in 1950 and has an estimate of $7,000,000 to $9,000,000 and is one of the artist's best. There were six bronzes cast and besides this one there is one other in private hands and the others are at the Foundation Maeght, St.-Paul-de-Vence, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Louisiana Art Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. This sculpture brought the second highest price of the evening, $13,209,500, close to the world auction record for Giacometti of $14,306,000.
Lot 38, "L'empire des lumières," by René Magritte, is an oil on canvas, 39 3/8 by 31 1/2 inches that was executed in 1952 and commissioned by Dominique and Jean de Menil of New York. The de Menils donated the second completed version of this work to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and two years later commissioned the artist to paint the present work, which is the fourth completed version of this subject. It had an estimate of $5,000,000 to $7,000,000 and sold for $12,659,500, a world auction record for Magritte and a very impressive price for a painting of which there are three other copies. While it is a famous image, it is not one of the artist's finest paintings.
These three lots made this a very successful auction despite the fact that only 72 percent of the 46 offered lots sold for a total of $97,647,000. The pre-sale low estimate for the auction was $73.8 million and the high estimate was $103 million. After the sale, auctioneer Christopher Burge remarked at a news conference that the sale was "a pretty explosive and exciting start" of the spring season of major auctions. Seventeen works sold for more than $1 million and 58 percent of the buyers were American, 33 percent European, and 9 percent Asian. "It's a very healthy market, particularly for quality," Mr. Burge said.
Lot 4 is "Le Tub," an excellent bronze with varied patina, 8 1/2 inches high, by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) that was conceived circa 1888 and cast in an edition of 22. This piece was once owned by Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair magazine. According to the catalogue, "Le tub is widely regarded as the most innovative and important work of Degas' entire sculpted oeuvre. Arguably the most radical element of Le tub is its incorporation of real materials or objets trouvés - an overt challenge to the accepted criteria of sculpture in the late nineteenth century, unprecedented except in Degas' own Petite danseuse de quatorz ans of 1881. The original version of Le tub consists of a reddish-brown wax figure reclining in an actual lead basin; plaster had been poured into the bottom of the basin to simulated water, and real draperies soaked in plaster crumbed around the tub. The sculpture, then, is at once illusory and real - a precursor to a long line of twentieth-century assemblages, from Cubist collages and Duchamp readymades to surrealist objects and Rauschenberg combine-paintings. The second pioneering feature of Le tub is the unusual vantage point that it forces the spectator to adopt. Since the bather is partially submerged in the shallow basin, a full view of the figure can be obtained only by looking down at her." The lot has a conservative estimate of $1,200,000 to $1,800,000. It sold for $1,989,500. The original wax version of this work is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and the bronze model, or mast cast, is in the Norton Simon Art Museum in Pasadena. Other casts are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.
Lot 25, "Danseuse," is a very large painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec that was painted in 1895-6 and has an estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000. It sold for $3,419,500. This is the last known painting of a dancer that Lautrec is known to have done and it was the first he had done in five years as he had switched his subjects from ballet's petit rats to the celebrities of the dance-halls. The catalogue provides the following commentary on this lot: "Danseuse is clearly a woman, her arms and legs are fuller and more muscular, and the low cut of her costume reveals an ample bust. The illumination coming from the footlights below shades her upturned face in a manner that resembles the arch and haughty expressions of Lautrec's cabaret entertainers. In the fashion of the time her waist is tightly cinched, perhaps a bit too unrealistically so, which accentuates her mature feminity. She bears little resemblance to the usual dancer we see in Degas, Forain or earlier Lautrec. She may be a première danseuse, slightly past her prime, hinting again in Lautre'c's now customary fashion that, for all the hard work put into it, achievement and success is fleeting at best. If not an actual dancer, Lautrec's model may have been a circus performer, perhaps from the Cirque Fernando, where a bareback rider's costume was not unlike that of a ballet dancer and the circus girls had a more powerful physique than most dancers. In any case, Lautrec's view of women was evolving in its own terms, in an a increasingly stylized mixture of exaggerated reality and private fantasy, in which the artist displays a marked preference for an Amazonian concept of feminity. The locked hands of the dancer here are a gesture that suggests strength and revolve. Although it is unlikely that she was more than five feet tall, she nevertheless assumes the statue of a powerful giantess and glowering idol. The elongated vertical format of Danseuse may have been determined by some decorative scheme. The upward thrust in the sage screen at left appears to burst form folds at the dancer's skirt; it amplifies her figure, and contributes to the sense of power and strength in the subject. The influence of japonisme is evident in the flat surfaces and off-center composition." The composition is extremely unusual, especially for Lautrec and its background is fantastic and both very abstract and very dynamic and also unusual for the artist. Lautrec, of course, was a master and bold sketcher but the background here is occupies almost half the picture and is in its own way rigorously detailed. Interestingly, the auction has another very large vertical painting, shown below, that would make a good companion piece to the Lautrec, Lot 13, "Enfant dans un jardin," by Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). This 83 1/2-by-31 1/2-inch peinture à la colle was executed circa 1910 and has an estimate of $650,000 to $850,000. It was commissioned, along with panels by Denis, for the country home of Josse and Gaston Bernheim. It was passed at $400,000. It is considerably brighter and gayer than another Vuillard, Lot 10, "La Soirée familiale," that was painted in 1894-5. Lot 10 is a 19 1/2-by-25 1/2-inch oil on canvas and has an ambitious estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $2,649,500. Unlike the outdoors scene of Lot 13, this is an interior. "Tightly woven and richly charged, Vuillard's interiors emphasize the ambiguous and often troubled relationships among his family members; skillful spatial distortions generate a sense of pyschological tension, while intricate tapestries of color and pattern transpose scenes of bourgeois domesticity into intense and airless dramas," the catalogue entry observed, adding that the artist has depicted in this work his older sister Marie and her husband Ker-Xavier Roussel, a fellow Nabi painter and Vuillard's close friend. "The garish artificial light," the catalogue continued, "throws Roussel and his companion and into eerie shadow, obscuring more than it illuminates. Marie is depicted on a disproportionately small scale, as though the space of the dining room had receded more quickly than one would expect. She is thus detached from her husband in her own discrete space, producing an effect of disconnection and dislocation that represents the very antithesis of a meals nourishing implications. Indeed, the future of Marie is perhaps the most compelling element of this poignant and melancholy scheme. Her slender frame is wraith-like and incorporeal; her shoulders are hunched and her left arm dislocated like that of a marionette. Vuillard's Nabi work also helped to pave the way for the development of Abstract Expressionism in the post-war period. In the present picture, for instance, the all-over patterning of the wallpaper background has the character of a canvas by Jackson Pollock, while the stylized orange doorway at the far right seems to presage the color-field paintings of Mark Rothko." There are two good Picassos in the auction, Lots 23 and 26.
"Les Courses," Lot 23, is an oil on board that measures 20 5/8 by 26 3/4 inches and was executed in 1901. "The paintings done in Paris in the late spring and summer of 1901 show Picasso acquiring fluency in the divisionist technique that characterized the work of many of the progressive post-impressionist painters working in France at the turn of the century. Picasso was indeed painting in a new way. The paintings he had done in Madrid the previous winter were more carefully drawn, and the color is often restrained and somber in a manner derived from Symbolist painting that many Spanish artists shared. Picasso began to experiment with divisionism in some of the paintings he did in Barcelona in the spring, and when he arrived in Paris he applied his colors in broad and broken brushstrokes. Forms were no longer outlined and contours were defined entirely by means of contrasting color. The fashionable ladies in the present painting are perhaps a continuation of the extravagantly costumed courtesans that Picasso had painted in Madrid. The outlandish dresses and hats worn by these women are like the plumage of grand exotic birds. Someline the respectable consul Virenque could look upon them as being perfectly respectable ladies of his own class, but Picasso probably painted these creatures as prosperous courtesans parading in their finery. There is an element of fanstasy here, as there had been in the Madrid pictures; the virtuosic flourishes in his brushwork, the hallmark of his new style, heightens the effect to an almost feverish degree." Picasso would soon change his style to darker and more monochrome subjects "with the heavy black outlines of the Blue period." This lot has an estimate of $4,500,000 to $6,500,000. It sold for $4,629,500.
Unmistakably a Blue Period Picasso, Lot 26, "Tête de femme, is a 14 3/4-by-11 5/8-inch oil on canvas that was executed in 1903 in Barcelona. "Picasso's work of this time expressed psychological turmoil - most often that of the beggars and prostitutes whom he used as subjects," noted the catalogue. "Stylistically, Picasso admired French symbolists such as Odilon Redon, Maurice Denis, and Puvis de Chavannes. Following this symbolist tradition, Picasso used color to convey emotional qualities in his paintings. In the present work, the monochrome palette distills the quiet spirituality of the sitter into a mystical aura. Her eyes closed and set against and atmospheric background, Picasso embued Tête de Femme with a timeless quality that speaks of the depth of humanity. With the absence of an external gaze, the present work suggests eternal stillness, transcending the earthly into the spiritual. The first owner of this work was Wilhelm de Krostowiztky, a brilliant poet of half-Italian half-Polish descent who adopted France as his homeland and renamed himself Guillaume Apollinaire." Lot 26 had an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000 and sold for $1,659,500. The painting had been unsold at an auction in France last year.
Lot 9, "Le peintre animalier La Rochenoire," by Edouard Manet, is a masterpiece. This pastel on canvas meaures 21 7/8 by 13 7/8 inches and was drawn in 1882. It has a very modest estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It sold for $779,500. The catalogue notes that "the sitter for the present work, Emil-Charles-Julien de la Rochenoire, was a close friend of Manet's and a painter in his own right who specialized in the depiction of animals."
Lot 20, "Après-midi de mai à By," by Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), is a very fine Impressionist landscape and a magnificent example of Sisley's style. An oil on canvas, it measures 19 7/8 by 28 3/4 inches and was executed in 1882. It has a conservative estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $669,500.
Works by Gustav Caillebotte (1848-1894) have appeared relatively rarely at auctions in recent years but the May 8, 2000 sale at Christie's of a large painting by him of a man looking out of a balcony on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris sold for $14,306,000 (see The City Review article) and has brought quite a few Caillebottes out of the closet this season.
Lot 17, "Le bassin d'Argenteuil," by Gustav Caillebotte is a very nice Impressionistic riverscape. An oil on canvas, it measures 25 3/4 by 32 inches and was painted circa 1882. Caillebotte sometimes has a rather heavy touch, but this is pleasantly light but very strong. It has an ambitious estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000. It sold for $4,299,500.
Lot 21, "Les dahlias, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers," is a very strong composition by Caillebotte and has an estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000. It sold for $2,099,500. An oil on canvas, it measures 45 1/2 by 34 7/8 inches and was painted in 1893.
Lot 15, "Quatre vases de chrysanthèmes," by Caillebotte is a very strong and rather startlingly dramatic floral still life. An oil on canvas, it measures 21 1/4 by 25 5/8 inches and was executed in 1893. It has a modest estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It was passed at $320,000.
Lot 5, "Un Soldat," is a 42-by-29 1/2-inch oil on canvas by Caillebotte that was painted circa 1881 and has an ambitious estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold to an anonymous buyer for $6,389,500, the second highest price at auction for the artist. It shows a soldier smoking a cigarette against a plain background and while it is somewhat reminiscent of Manet it cannot begin to compare with the glory of Lot 9, above, which has a high estimate of only $600,000.
These four Caillebottes should significantly raise the visibility and respect for this artist.
Lot 7 is a gorgeous floral still life by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904). An oil on canvas, it measures 23 7/8 by 20 3/4 inches and was painted in 1888. It has a conservative estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. It was passed at $550,000.
Lot 14, "Portrieux. Les mats. Opus 182," is a nice riverscape by Paul Signac that was once in the collection of Paul Mellon. An oil on canvas, it measures 18 1/8 by 21 1/2 inches and was painted in 1888. While pleasant, it is not one of Signac's masterpieces and has an ambitious estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $2,649,500.
Lot 42, "Tiergarten," is a delightful and fine oil on muslin laid down on board by Paul Klee (1879-1940). It measures 15 3/4 by 23 3/8 inches and was executed in 1928. It has a modest estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It failed to sell and was passed at $450,000.
Lot 45 is a pleasant and quite strong oil on canvas by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) that measures 22 by 18 1/4 inches. Entitled "Nu dans un fauteuil," it was executed in 1929 and had an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000. It sold for $2,429,500.