Lot 25, "Lunia Czechowska (à la robe noire)," by Amedeo Modigliani, oil on canvas, 36 3/8 by 23 5/8 inches, 1919

Lot 25 is "Lunia Czechowska (a la robe noire)," by Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920).  An oil on canvas, it measures 36 3/8 by 23 5/8 inches and was painted in 1919.

 It was once owned by Chester Dale and comes to auction from Drue Heinz, who married H. L. Heinz, whose family was in the food business, in 1953. 

The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:

"In the hours before dawn on 20 May 2010, Vjeran Tomic, a veteran Parisian cat burglar, stole five paintings from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAM), masterworks by Braque, Léger, Matisse, Picasso, and Modigliani, valued at more than $125 million. First, he removed from its frame the Léger, the picture which the instigator of the heist, a small gallery owner, had coveted and expressly requested for himself. Tomic next took down Matisse’s fauve Pastorale, 1905. 
Then, as Jake Halpern has recounted in The New Yorker, “he noticed Modigliani’s ‘Woman with a Fan,’ a portrait of the artist’s muse and obsession, Lunia Czechowska. Tomic fixated on the image, which depicted Czechowska in a yellow dress, her eyes a cloudy white [Ceroni, no. 321]. ‘The woman in the picture was worthy of a living being, ready to dance a tango,’ he wrote to me. ‘It could have almost been reality.’ He stole the Modigliani, too.” Tomic went on to add the Braque and Picasso to his cache; he hesitated over a second Modigliani, Femme aux yeux bleus, but passed up the opportunity (“A Night at the Museum: France’s most daring art thief,” The New Yorker, 14 January 2019, p. 34).

"Tomic and two accomplices were apprehended, convicted, and are currently serving their prison terms. The five paintings, however, were never recovered, and are believed to have been well-hidden away or possibly destroyed. The perpetrator claimed to possess a special instinct for detecting and appreciating quality in art, and perhaps even his critical opinion may count when understanding the universal appeal of a great Modigliani painting, moreover the beguiling mystique inherent in certain portraits—especially one depicting Lunia Czechowska, who may well possess the most distinctive and memorably haunting visage among all the many women whom the artist painted. 
Lunia was 25 when she sat for the present portrait, which Joseph Lanthemann praised for its qualities “de noblesse, de beauté et de communion” (op. cit., 1970, p. 133). Her fine, delicate features bespeak a discerning intelligence, a rare sensitivity, and a compassionate nature. While we know that she and the artist loved each other, and they appeared to have been soulmates such as two people may experience only once in a lifetime, we can only speculate at the extent to which they may actually have been lovers, in the most complete, physical sense of such a relationship as well.

"The best-known female face in Modigliani’s oeuvre, from early 1917 to his death on 24 January 1920, is that of Jeanne Hébuterne, the artist’s companion and mother of his daughter, also named Jeanne. Hébuterne immortalized the legend of an impassioned and tragically fated amour bohème, when two days after the artist’s passing, pregnant with their second child, she leapt to her death from a fifth-floor window. Modigliani frequently painted two other women in his innermost circle, on whom he often relied during this period: Anna (“Hanka”) Zborowska, the common-law wife of the artist’s devoted dealer Léopold Zborowski, and Lunia Czechowska, married to a close friend of Léopold. All were Polish émigrés in Paris. Modigliani painted Léopold five times, and created ten portraits each of Hanka and Lunia, featuring in sum the two women on canvas nearly as often as he did his companion Jeanne during the same three-year period.

“Happiness is an angel with a serious face,” Modigliani wrote to Paul Alexandre, his earliest patron, on a postcard from Livorno, dated June 1913 (quoted in D. Krystof, Modigliani: The Poetry of Seeing, Cologne, 2006, p. 88). Lunia’s ethereal features perfectly suited the artist’s fascination with this type; her serious demeanor and youthfully lithe, feminine figure moreover lent themselves well to the primary influences the artist liked to incorporate and show off in his portraits. The plunging “V” of Lunia’s cylindrical neck and her blade-like décolleté, stark against the blackness of her robe in the present painting, allude to the hallmark swan-like neck and tilted head in the Mannerist practice of the 16th century Italian masters Parmigianino and Pontormo.

"The modernist fascination with African tribal art is manifest in Lunia’s ovoid facial features; the broad, high forehead, the subtle lift of her Slav cheekbones, the tiny, lozenge-shaped mouth contained with the narrowing curves of her jawline, down to the pointed tip of her chin, mirrors the serene, “classical” symmetry of Baulé masks from the Ivory Coast, believed to be the secular portraits of living persons. The eye slits in these masks appear as the blank eyes in Modigliani’s carved stone heads during 1907-1913, and again as the “cloudy white eyes”—which had intrigued the thief Tomic at MAM Paris—in many of the subsequent oil paintings. “This gives the paintings an aloofness,” Alan Wilkinson has written, “a kind of distancing from the model, that echoes the mysterious character of his sculptures” (Primitivism in 20th Century Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984, p. 423).

"Known in his day and admired among his circle of friends primarily as a portraitist, Modigliani prided himself on his skill as an acute observer of the variety and nuances in human character, especially among men, and in his paintings of women, his ability to evoke the serene, beatific beauty of l’éternel féminin. “To do any work, I must have a living person,” he explained to the painter Léopold Survage, “I must be able to see him opposite me” (quoted in J. Modigliani, Modigliani: Man and Myth, New York, 1958, p. 82). Modigliani was keen on capturing the essence of his sitter, not as a naturalistic likeness, but as an abstract, depersonalized representation stemming from his own pictorial synthesis of seeing and style.

"Lunia was born Ludwika Makowska in Prague in 1894. Her father was a Polish patriot who actively opposed the Russian and Austrian partition of the Polish homeland. In 1907, after serving two years of a fifteen-year prison sentence for his role in a workers’ strike in Warsaw, then under Czarist rule, Makowski moved his family to Krakow in the Austrian zone. Upon graduating from the gymnasium in 1913, Lunia followed her father’s wishes and moved to Paris. There she met Kazimierz Czechowski, another recent Polish émigré, also a patriot, with whom she fell in love; they married on 21 June 1915. Zborowski and Czechowski had known each other since childhood; when Léopold arrived in Paris in 1913 to study modern art at the Sorbonne, he moved in with his old friend. Anna (“Hanka”) Sierzpowska had been living in Paris with her sister since 1910. She met Léopold at the Café de la Rotonde on 2 August 1914, at the beginning of First World War. Although they never formally married, Hanka always referred to Léopold as her husband.

"The painter Moïse Kisling, also Polish-born, introduced Zborowski to Modigliani in 1916. The aspiring dealer first saw the Italian artist’s paintings later that year, in a group show at the Lyre et Palette, the Montparnasse atelier of the Swiss painter Émile Lejeune. Zborowski attended the event with Hanka, Lunia, and Kazimierz. In the recollections—“Les Souvenirs”—that Lunia wrote in 1953, which Ambrogio Ceroni published in his 1958 monograph Amedeo Modigliani, Peintre, she dated the event to June; the show actually opened in mid-November. Various discrepancies with known circumstances may be found in Lunia’s Souvenirs. When William Fifield interviewed her during the early 1970s for his biography of Modigliani, she complained that Ceroni “failed to reproduce” what she had told him. “We went to the exhibition,” she recounted for Fifield, “it was the Lyre et Palette, and Modigliani was present… He said he hadn’t time for Léopold, but seeing that we women were with him he returned and said we should perhaps meet in an hour. And we went to the Rotonde” (Modigliani: The Biography, New York, 1976, pp. 222 and 274).

"“He came and sat next to me,” Lunia wrote in Les Souvenirs. “I was struck by his distinctiveness, his luminosity, and the beauty of his eyes. He was at once very simple and very noble.” Modigliani began to sketch Lunia. “I was quite young and very shy”—she continued—“and I became frightened, when Modigliani asked, after several minutes, in the presence of my husband, to go out with me that very night. Because to Modigliani, I was alone. He felt so strongly towards me he would have liked me to abandon everything to follow him. Confused, I responded that I was not free. Poor dear friend, what seemed so natural to him seemed to me so strange! Zborowski came to my rescue, saying that plans for the evening had already been made, and he invited Modigliani to join us. He refused. Turning towards me, he asked, while offering the drawing he had made of me, to come pose the next day for a portrait” (“Les Souvenirs de Lunia Czechowska,” in A. Ceroni, Amedeo Modigliani, Peintre, Milan, 1958, pp. 20 and 21; all excerpts here translated by Lara Abouhamad).

"Based on Lunia’s June dating of the 1916 Lyre et Palette group exhibition, Ceroni ascribed that year to the first portrait that Modigliani painted of her, listing it as no. 73 in his 1958 catalogue. When it became clear that the show actually opened in mid-November, pushing back subsequent related events, Ceroni re-dated Modigliani’s first portrait of Lunia to 1917, and listed it as such in his final Modigliani catalogue (I dipinti di Modigliani, Milan, 1970, no. 169).

“He did my first portrait in a black dress (this painting is now in the Musée de Grenoble),” Lunia wrote in her memoir. “I knew from Zbo already that he liked to drink while he painted. Never will I be able to forget the first sitting session. After several hours passed, I was no longer scared of him. I can still see him in his dress shirt, all tousled, trying to fix my features on the canvas. From time to time, he would reach his hand towards the bottle of Vieux Marc. I would see the alcohol take its effect: he got excited, I didn’t exist anymore—he saw only his painting. He was so absorbed that he would speak to me in Italian. He painted with such violence that as he was leaning in closer to see the canvas, it fell over on his head. I was terrified; confused at having scared me, he looked at me tenderly, and started singing to me songs in Italian to make me forget the incident… We became really great friends from then on. He was a charming being, refined and delicate. I knew he loved me, but I felt for him just a profound friendship. We went out together a lot, vagabonding around Paris” (ibid., p. 21).

"Paul Guillaume had been acting as Modigliani’s dealer, but with hardly any sales to show for his efforts, and having grown impatient with the artist’s difficult behavior, the gallerist was amenable to passing him on to Zborowski—a dreamy novice who worked out of his home only, but was fired with an absolute passion for the painter’s work. Zborowski gave Modigliani a daily stipend of fifteen francs, and covered the costs of art supplies, the painter’s requisite wine and spirits as well. Having reserved a room in his and Hanka’s new apartment at 3, rue Joseph-Bara for use as a studio, he set Modigliani to work on a series of salable nudes. The artist completed twenty such canvases in all (Ceroni, nos. 184-203). Fifield stated that Lunia “almost certainly” posed for Le grand nu (no. 200; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), “though she would never admit it” (op. cit., 1976, p. 160).

"Modigliani painted four, fully clothed portraits of Lunia in 1917 (Ceroni, nos. 169-172). Despite all signs that she would remain faithful to her marriage with Kazimierz Czechowski, the artist persisted in seeking a romantic liaison with her. “I was always the mysterious woman to him”—Lunia told Fifield—“the Sphinx, Cleopatra, there were things he did not know” (ibid., p. 222). Modigliani must have felt especially encouraged in 1917, when in the wake of the February Revolution in Russia, which resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, Czechowski decided to return to his homeland and agitate for independence. He joined Lenin’s Red Army following the October Bolshevik Revolution. He had entrusted Lunia to the care of Léopold and Hanka, who took her into their apartment. Modigliani saw her often, when he regularly arrived to paint during the afternoon. Czechowski did not live to see Poland freed from foreign hegemony. In 1918, while in a hospital recovering from wounds, his Russian comrades learned he was a Polish revolutionary—someone who would eventually turn against and fight them—and had him summarily shot. Lunia did not learn of her husband’s fate until 1921.
 
“Although she was a married woman,” Pierre Sichel wrote, “Lunia was impressionable, and her writings betray that she instantly fell in love with Modi, although she was always to insist that theirs was an exalted spiritual attachment, of the soul alone” (Modigliani, London, 1967, p. 327). The stress of a love thwarted by circumstance would have surely become unbearable for both Modigliani and Lunia, had not Jeanne Hébuterne, newly turned nineteen in April 1917, caught the artist’s eye, likely at the Académie Colarossi, where she was a student. Within a month they became lovers, and in July they moved from the artist’s tiny hovel of a hotel room which Zborowski had been paying for, and with the bounty from a few sales, into a relatively spacious two-room apartment (but without amenities) at 8, rue de la Grande Chaumière, next door to Jeanne’s art school.

“Hanka and I cleaned the studio and painted it light gray,” Lunia wrote in Les Souvenirs, although she misdated this development to the summer of 1919. “We installed a stove…. Since we did not have enough money for curtains, we color-washed the glass with blanc d’espagne. A sofa, a table and a few chairs, those were the furnishings. This kingdom was quite modest but it belonged to him…he could now cook and host his friends. I will never forget the day he took possession of his new domain; his joy was such that we were all deeply moved. He finally had his own little corner for himself, my poor dear friend” (op. cit., 1958, p. 33).

"In March 1918 the Germans began to bombard Paris with huge guns mounted on railway carriages sixty miles away. The following month, Zborowski, Hanka, Modigliani, Jeanne (who was two months pregnant), and her mother—together with Soutine, Foujita, and his wife Fernande Barrey—joined the exodus from the capital, and stayed first in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Lunia remained in the Zborowskis’ Paris apartment. Having no success with sales in Cagnes, Soutine and the Foujitas returned to Paris, while Léopold, Hanka, Modigliani, Jeanne, and her mother moved on to Nice, where the dealer hoped to find clients for his artist’s unusual but appealing style of portraiture. Jeanne and Modigliani’s daughter, named for her mother, was born 29 November 1918—the artist called her, in Italian, “Giovanna”.

"Modigliani returned, alone, to his Paris studio on 31 May 1919, while Jeanne, her mother, and the baby remained five weeks longer in Nice. After a hiatus of more than a year, Modigliani and Lunia resumed their close friendship. They would eat together in the tiny restaurant run by Rosalie Tobia, once a model for successful Salon painters, on the rue Campagne-Première. “After dinner, we would go for a walk in Le petit Luxembourg; it was very hot that summer. Sometimes we would go to the movies, other nights we would leisurely stroll the streets of Paris… He had so much to say that it was difficult to separate when we arrived home. He would speak of Italy, which he would never see again, of the child he wouldn’t see grow up, and he would never mention a word about his art” (ibid., pp. 28-29). Modigliani signed and inscribed a drawing “homage à Madame Chakoska,” depicting Lunia dining at a café table, possibly in Chez Rosalie (Patani, Disegni, no. 498).

“This peaceful period did not last long,” Lunia lamented (op. cit., p. 29), but afforded Modigliani sufficient time to commence work on the final group of six portraits he painted of her that summer (Ceroni, nos. 317-322). The dark, grayish tonality in the present portrait, à la robe noire, suggests that it was done in Modigliani’s Grande Chaumière studio, which Lunia had helped to paint two summers earlier. This painting possesses a nocturnal aspect—golden lamplight illumines Lunia’s flesh, but barely suffuses the wall behind her, dark in shadow. Lunia sits on the edge of a bed, its wooden back-frame rising behind her right side. This somber setting contrasts sharply with the two portraits in which Modigliani posed Lunia before an Empire mantelpiece, the wall papered in the vivid garnet red that Zborowski chose to decorate his apartment (Ceroni, nos. 321-322; the former stolen from MAM Paris).

"The present portrait is surely the most intimate of the ten pictures that Modigliani painted of Lunia. The artist depicted here an instant of absolute stillness, her passive visage in serene anticipation of some profoundly meaningful moment, an epiphany. One senses the heavy heat of the summer evening in the darkened room. Lunia has just slipped into her black robe, or may soon remove it. Her pale, translucent eyes observe the man with whom she shares this room, on whose bed she sits. Her wistful, self-absorbed expression tells everything, yet reveals nothing at all. Modigliani has seized the very essence of this elusive, enigmatic, angelically pure young woman. This is the “communion” that Lanthemann found so compelling, a moment of transfiguration, a mystery beyond words, yet so profoundly affecting in paint.

"Upon the return of Jeanne and little Giovanna, until a nanny could be found, Lunia stepped in to care for the seven-month-old infant in the Zborowskis’ apartment. If Modigliani was not drunk or acting loudly with friends, the landlady Mme Salomon would allow him in at night. “He would come and sit next to his child,” Lunia wrote, “looking at her with such intensity that he would end up falling asleep; and I would watch over the two of them. My poor dear friend, these were the only moments when he had his daughter to himself” (ibid., p. 29).

"One evening that summer, as Modigliani finished a painting session in the Zborowskis’ apartment and Lunia was waiting for the dealer to return home, “I lit a candle,” she recalled, “and proposed that he stay to have dinner with us. While I prepared our meal, he asked me to lift my head for a few seconds, and, in the candlelight, he sketched an admirable drawing, on which he inscribed: ‘La Vita è un Dono: dei pochi ai molti: di Coloro che Sanno e che hanno: a Coloro che non Sanno e che non hanno’” [Life is a gift, from the few to the many; from those who know and have, to those who do not know and do not have]” (ibid., pp. 30-32). This drawing reprises the pose in the present portrait, set instead in the Zborowski apartment, with Lunia clad in daytime attire (Patani, Disegni, no. 499).

"Lunia later began to go out with another man—Modigliani assumed she had fallen in love with him. “Modigliani loved [Jeanne],” Lunia wrote, “but he could not stand that I ‘belonged’ to another man, because he thought I no longer wanted to be with him… He made such negative comments to me that I ended up feeling guilty towards him. I would remain his spiritual friend, as was my destiny. I was young and probably romantic; I had to abstract my feelings, because another person needed me as well. I had no life experience and acted only on pure intuition. I forced myself not to love the man I had met” (ibid., p. 32).

"The war having ended months before, and Poland again an independent nation, there was still no word from nor about Kazimierz Czechowski. Tensions were running high between the Hébuterne family and Modigliani, of whom they disapproved. The artist had promised them in writing to marry Jeanne, who was again pregnant, but he failed to follow through. He seemed disaffected with his companion, unhappy that Jeanne appeared little interested in their child, whom she might visit only several times a week in a nursery. The artist had begun drinking more heavily to distract himself from—and thereby aggravating—the symptoms of his tubercular condition; the bacillus in his lungs, we now understand, had infected his brain and would soon lead to cerebral meningitis, which killed him. As Modigliani’s confidant, all these matters and concerns took their toll on Lunia as well.

“Autumn of 1919 was very sad,” Lunia recalled. “I had to leave Paris, as my health required me to leave for the South. My friends [the Zborowskis] were very insistent that Modigliani come with me and he also wanted to. But Jeanne Hébuterne was expecting a second child and the idea of leaving Paris saddened her. She had retained very bad memories from when Giovanna was born [in Nice]; and the idea of Modigliani leaving without her equally saddened her. I thus left alone, promising my friend that we would see each other again soon… I left in November… From time to time, I would send him flowers. I learned from Zbo that he was sick; then he made me believe that he had returned to Italy. No one was mentioning him. I had all sorts of premonitions and I was pained by his silence” (ibid., p. 33).

"Lunia returned to Paris in September 1920 and visited the Zborowskis. “I asked for news of Modigliani right away; they told me that he was in Livorno and that his poor health no longer allowed him to paint. All the friends I ran into repeated the same thing. I noticed that they avoided talking about him; I found this strange and accused them of forgetting him. I spent my first night in the room [in the Zborowski apartment] where Modigliani had created a number of his masterpieces. I had a strange dream: I was at Bourbon l’Archambault in autumn… There was no one around; I was alone with Modigliani, walking along the park’s fence. He held something in his hand that looked like a magazine; he opened it and told me: ‘You see, Lunia, here they are announcing my death; don’t you find it a bit brazen! Look, I am not dead, as you can see yourself.’ I then saw Jeanne Hébuterne approaching us from the end of the street. I said to him: ‘There’s Jeanne, let’s call her.’ He refrained me: ‘No, no, in a minute.’ But moved by seeing Jeanne looking for him, I called her—and then woke up” (ibid., pp. 33-34).

“I, who never took notice of my dreams, was very impressed”—Lunia continued—“so much so that I still remember it perfectly today, after all these years. It was very early, but I hurried to Hanka’s room to tell her about my dream. I asked her when she had her last news from Modigliani. She reassured me, and I didn’t insist. That afternoon, I visited a Swedish friend who knew of my connection with Modigliani, but who did not know about my friends’ silence. It was she who revealed to me the death of my friend, and Jeanne’s suicide. I was so rattled that I didn’t hold it against my friends who didn’t tell me immediately and who didn’t have the courage to say anything later. I then learned that Modigliani’s death had rendered Jeanne so hopeless that she jumped from the fifth floor. Neither her daughter, nor the child she was expecting, could give her the will to live” (ibid., p. 34).

"Lunia eventually remarried, and as Mme Czechowska-Choroszczo ran a small art gallery in Paris after the Second World War. She died in 1990, at age 96.

The lot has an estimate of $12.000,000 to $18,000,000.  It sold for $25,245,000.

Lot 31 is a limestone sculpture of a head by Modigliani that is 20 1/8 inches and was created in 1911-12.  It was consigned by a private European collection.

The catalogue provides the following commentary on the lot by Robert Brown:

"Alongside Picasso, Brancusi and Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani is rightly recognized as one of the pioneering masters of modern sculpture. Modigliani differs from these artists however, in that his reputation is founded almost solely upon a unique series of works, all made in a brief and concentrated burst of creativity between 1911 and 1914. This series comprises of a sequence of around twenty-five carved stone heads (and two caryatid figures) that Modigliani created in Montparnasse in the years running up to the First World War. Tête,of 1911-1912, is a particularly haunting example and one of the finest of the very few works from this great series to remain in private hands.
A mesmeric, portrait-like visage exhibiting several of the defining characteristics of this famous series, Tête is a sculpture with a strong, meditative presence and an almost otherworldly sense of timelessness and calm. As the British artist Augustus John was to remark, after first encountering such works in Modigliani’s studio, in 1913, these stone heads ‘affected me deeply. For some days afterwards I found myself under the hallucination of meeting people in the street who might have posed for them; and that without myself resorting to the Indian Herb. Can “Modi” have discovered a new and secret aspect of “reality”?’

"Because Modigliani was later to be so acclaimed for his painting, it is sometimes overlooked that the artist saw himself primarily as a sculptor. Almost all accounts of Modigliani, by those who knew him, attest to this fact. His friend, the English painter Nina Hamnett, for example, wrote that, Modigliani ‘always regarded sculpture as his real métier, and it was probably only lack of money, the difficulty of obtaining material, and the amount of time required to complete a work in stone that made him return to painting during the last five years of his life.’ Even after his re-engagement with oil painting, as another friend, Manual Ortiz de Zarate noted, Modigliani’s ‘real longing was to work in stone, a longing that remained with him throughout his life.’ Sculpture was, therefore, as the dealer and art critic Adolphe Basler emphasized. Modigliani’s ‘only ideal and he put high hopes in it.’ Modigliani had longed to be a sculptor ever since his first discovery of Michelangelo in his youth. But, it was only after becoming close with Constantin Brancusi in Paris in 1909 that he began a practice of making his own carved sculptures, learning, under Brancusi’s direction, to carve, first into wood, and subsequently into stone. By 1911, Modigliani had abandoned painting almost entirely and from then on until around 1914, sculpture became almost his sole practice. Between 1911 and 1914, he produced very few paintings but a vast number of drawings and gouaches, all related to sculpture and sculptural projects, and almost all his known sculpture. Tête is one of the series of predominantly either limestone or sandstone heads that Modigliani carved repeatedly during this period. He intended these personages to be seen collectively as what he described as a ‘decorative ensemble’, and in 1912, seven of these works were presented in this manner as part of the Cubist room at the infamous Salon d’Automne held that year.

"As Modigliani scholar, Kenneth Wayne has pointed out, echoing Augustus John’s thoughts, Modigliani’s heads, ‘are not based on visual reality, but on a new reality that the sculptor has created’. Therefore, while ‘it may seem odd to us today that Modigliani should be grouped with the Cubists in this exhibition—and in later shows and reviews during his lifetime - this fact is noteworthy. It underscores the point that Cubism was understood more broadly at the time than it is today. Cubism was a term used to describe any art that was unnaturalistic and took liberties in depicting its subject. The strong resonance with African sculpture seen in Cubist paintings—such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907—and in Modigliani's sculpture and painting may be another reason that he was considered to be a Cubist at the time.’ Before the Salon d’Automne exhibition, Modigliani is thought to have first exhibited his stone heads, again as a collective group, at an impromptu exhibition that he organized with Brancusi’s help in the studio of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso in March 1911. Cardoso was one of many fellow sculptors then working, like Modigliani, at the Cité Falguière studios in Montparnasse. It was here, too, at the Cité Falguière, that Jacques Lipchitz was to first come across Modigliani’s stone heads. Lipchitz recalled seeing Modigliani ‘working outdoors’, in order to avoid his own small studio, which was too cramped and, (with all the limestone dust flying around), also too hazardous for the artist’s already fragile health. Around Modigliani, ‘a few heads in stone—maybe five—were standing on the cement floor of the court in front of the studio. He was adjusting them one to the other. I see him as if it were today, stooping over those heads, while he explained to me that he had conceived all of them as an ensemble. It seems to me that these heads were exhibited later the same year in the Salon d'Automne, arranged in stepwise fashion like tubes of an organ to produce the special music he wanted.’

"Around the same time, the English sculptor Jacob Epstein, then in Paris to work on the tomb of Oscar Wilde, also recalled a visit to Modigliani’s studio in the Cité Falguière. On this occasion, Modigliani had filled his small studio, Epstein noted, with ‘nine or ten long heads and one figure’ and ‘at night,’ he ‘would place candles on the top of each one and the effect was that of a primitive temple. A legend of the quarter said that Modigliani, when under the influence of hashish, embraced these sculptures.’

"At the basis of Modigliani’s sculptural vision was the articulation of an innate concept the artist had of a sublime, timeless and all-encompassing beauty. It was a quality that Modigliani had first divined in much of the Ancient Greek and Roman art he had first encountered as a student in Rome, Naples and Florence. And, it was this, ‘truth in beauty’, he had written as a young man, that was to lay the foundation for all his subsequent artistic endeavors. ‘I am trying to formulate with all possible lucidity the truths about art and life that I found scattered throughout Rome’s beauty. I shall try to reveal them and reconstruct their metaphysical structure—one might almost say architecture—and make thereof my truth in beauty, life and art.’

"After the artist’s premature death in 1920, Modigliani’s friend and patron, Paul Alexandre, while looking back on the artist’s career as a whole, argued that Modigliani was someone who had ‘sought all his life for a definite form’ but never, in the end, he believed, ‘achieved it’.(15) It is in this sense of Modigliani’s dedicated pursuit after the, almost certainly unattainable, ideal of realizing a pure and transcendent form of beauty, that Epstein’s recollections of the artist’s shrine-like studio, with its beatific ‘temple’ of female figures, reveals one of the key elements of Modigliani’s sculpture.

"Not only did Modigliani work strictly in series and conceive of his creations as, ultimately, a collective ensemble; he also seems to have recognized and revered them as if they were sacred totems. For him, his idealized figures were all component parts, (or building blocks, perhaps) of a vast and greater enterprise. Through his work in sculpture, Modigliani had, by all accounts, come to dream of creating, what he called a ‘Temple of Beauty’. The stone heads and the caryatids, (most of which he obsessively drafted and redrafted in drawings and gouaches rather than actually carved during this period), were intended to become, what Modigliani described as ‘columns of tenderness’ in this ‘Temple of Beauty’. Modigliani’s vision of this great, future ‘temple’, evidently conjured up by the artist as he lived and worked amongst his sculpture in his small Montparnasse studio, is thought, in concept at least, to have resembled Ivan Mestrovic’s Temple Dedicated to the Heroes of Kosovo. This was an elaborate monument comprising numerous stylized caryatids dedicated to the fourteenth century victory of the East Orthodox Serbian kingdom over Ottoman Turks that the Croatian artist Mestrovic had worked on in Montparnasse between 1907 and 1909. Individual caryatids for Mestrovic’s grandiose project had been exhibited at the 1909 Salon d’Automne and were later to cause a sensation when the collective ensemble was shown at the Espozione Internazionale of Rome in 1911.

"Modigliani’s dreams of creating his own ‘Temple of Beauty’ not only exemplify the scale of his ambition but also the fact that it was primarily through sculpture that the artist believed he could attain his ideal of a pure and transcendent form of beauty. It was also, as his friend and fellow Italian in Paris, Gino Severini, noted, the developments that Modigliani was to make in his sculpture towards this crystallization of a pure form, that were ultimately to inform and determine the path of his later painted portraits, with their thin, elongated necks and faces, elegant lines and hollowed-out, almond-shaped eyes.

"Thought to have been made some time between 1911 and 1912, Tête is a work that displays many of the unique and often idiosyncratic motifs common to the most fully resolved and finely rendered of Modigliani’s stone heads. The frontal, hieratic position of the figure’s head; the elongated face; curlicue, engraved hair; long, trapezoidal nose; smiling, v-shaped mouth; elongated ear-lobes and pointed chin are all distinguishing features, common to many of these pioneering works but not found altogether in any of them except here. In Tête, as in all of Modigliani’s sculptural heads, each of these individual features has been seamlessly amalgamated and refined into a startlingly unique configuration. The resultant effect of this is to conjure a personal and idiosyncratic sense of portraiture. Reflective of a myriad of different sources and influences all coming to bear upon the artist at this time, the origins of each of these surprisingly well-blended but disparate forms is also often quite specific.

"The protruding, triangular form of the smiling, upturned mouth of Tête, for example, can be seen to derive directly from archaic Greek Koré and Kouros figures that Modigliani would have seen as student in Florence and Rome. After his move to Paris, amongst the more significant but arguably less archaic influences that there came to direct Modigliani’s hand in the creation of his sculpture was also, of course, the profound impact of African art. Greatly admired, at this time, by artists like Picasso and Derain, for instance, the formal language of African sculpture encouraged a whole generation of young artists in the early 1900s to seek out and define new and alternative forms of realism. Modigliani, as Paul Alexandre remembered, was a frequent visitor at this time to the Ethnological museum at the Trocadéro, where, in addition to its African collection, he particularly admired the Khmer sculpture from Angkor Wat. Modigliani was also well-acquainted with the large collection of African masks owned by his friend and neighbor in Montparnasse, Frank Burty Haviland. He is known to have been especially influenced by the refined forms of Baule masks from the Ivory Coast, although, it should also be mentioned that the extremely elongated faces of some of his sculptural heads recall also the similar forms of Fang masks from Gabon.
Robert Goldwater has famously analyzed the impact of Baule masks on Modigliani in his 1967 book ‘Primitivism and Modern Art’. Modigliani followed the example of Baule masks, Goldwater wrote, ‘in the elongated oval of the head with narrow chin, the almond eyes, the sharply defined drawn-out rectilinear volume of the nose that, like the tiny lozenge shaped mouth, hardly interrupts the smoothly rounded curve of the cheeks and chin.’ Similarly, Goldwater observed, Modigliani’s repeated use of the ‘neck cylinder’ in these works is also African, even though, he noted, ‘its regional source is less easy to locate’ and that ‘these characteristics are more prominent and more isolated in some heads than in others’. In addition, as he was keen to point out, such African influence does not occur in these sculptures alone. Archaic Greek art can be seen to ‘play a role in the treatment of the hair, and perhaps even more in the handling of the stone surface which, though smooth, remains unpolished – very different from the high patinations of African wood.’ Such is certainly the case here in Tête, which, like other heads such as (Ceroni XII, XV and XXII, for example) display both the pinched, v-shaped smile of the Greek Koré and an archaic Greek or perhaps even Etruscan styling in the depiction of its curled hair. That Modigliani ‘singled out the Baule example to fuse with other archaic styles shows that he was being guided by a strong sense of personal creation’, Goldwater added. ‘Baule sculpture is the most refined and linear, the most aesthetic and the least daemonic of African work: it could be easily integrated with the other styles Modigliani assimilated, and with the graceful, sentimental direction of his own art, best seen in the paintings that follow the sculpture.’

"In addition, Alan G Wilkinson has suggested that Modigliani may have been particularly attracted to the Baule style because it represented ‘secular portraits of living persons’ and, as Lipchitz has pointed out, Modigliani was an artist who, in spite of his search for a pure ideal, could ‘never forget his interest in people.’ The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, with whom Modigliani was especially close during these years, not only remembered the ‘deserted alley’ in Montparnasse that resounded to ‘the knock of his mallet’ as he worked on one of his sculptures there, but also the artist’s intense fascination at this time for Egyptian art. Modigliani reportedly told her during a visit to the Louvre’s collection of Egyptian antiquities that ‘tout le reste’ was of little interest in comparison. Today, debates continue to rage between art historians and other admirers of Modigliani’s sculpture about the precise sources of the many varied influences—African, Cycladic, Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian, Near-Eastern and Oriental—that all came to bear upon Modigliani’s sculpture during this dramatic period in Paris shortly before the war.

"What is certain, is that Modigliani’s distinctive sculptural vision was derived from no one, single source. It was a unique and elegant fusion of many influences, all of which Modigliani combined into a new style all of its own. This idealized style, especially noticeable in a work such as Tête, is one in which his figures are not only bestowed with the same, timeless sense of serenity and monumentality to be found in archaic Mediterranean sculpture and figures of the Buddha from Angkor or Gandhara. It is also one that despite its African-influenced simplicity, somehow maintains a unique and edgy sense of personal idiosyncracy. Although Modigliani may have untended these works to form an ensemble, each of these imposing, hieratic-looking stone-heads clearly also asserts itself as a unique and distinct individual.

"Paul Alexandre, explained this almost miraculous quality of Modigliani’s work well when he wrote that ‘Modigliani’s art is a re-creation’, but one which, ‘always stems from a direct view of nature. There is nothing, or virtually nothing, in his work that does not take as its point of departure an intense visual sensation. The resemblance is remarkable and immediate…His constant aim was to simplify while grasping essentials. Unlike most artists, he was interested in the inner being, and his portraits were real characters…All his life he was pursuing the same goal (as his drawings show). An idea that one might have thought dated from the end of his life can be seen in embryo in drawings executed ten years earlier. Modigliani personifies the pursuit of a single idea which has to attain a high degree of intensity in order to enter into the life of art. He never gave up the struggle to demonstrate this idea fully. In his drawings there is invention, simplification and purification of form. This was why African art appealed to him. Modigliani had reconstructed the lines of the human face his own way by fitting them into primitive patterns. He enjoyed any attempt to simplify line and was interested in it for his personal development.’

"Another highly evocative aspect of sculptures such as Tête is the way in which such works reveal Modigliani’s unique response to and manipulation of stone as a sculptural medium. Although Modigliani had begun his sculptural practice by carving works in wood (the majority of which are now lost), stone was always his desired medium. It was stone that essentially bestowed his work with its sense of monumentality, permanence and timelessness. And it was stone too that lent his figures their sacred, temple-like qualities of reverence and mystery. As a result, Modigliani was always insistent about working in stone, even though, given his often dire and impoverished circumstances, the material was difficult to obtain. Charles Douglas has recalled in this respect that Modigliani, ‘like other sculptors of the Butte’ was, however, highly resourceful. He had ‘not neglected when funds permitted, to make friends over a bottle with the masons working on the new buildings rapidly devouring the maquis,’ and ‘with their aid…[to] secure a supply of stone.’

"The particular type of stone that Modigliani was able to acquire in this way was usually a limestone, sometimes known as ‘Pierre de Paris’ because it derived from quarries in the Parisian suburbs.  This was the stone then being used to construct many of the new buildings going up all over Montparnasse. A comparatively soft but durable stone, ‘Pierre de Paris’ allowed Modigliani to create a variety of effects. Its fine grain could either be chiseled to coarse effect or sanded into a smooth surface. As Kenneth Wayne has indicated: ‘In his art, Modigliani was clearly trying to distance himself from the slick, smooth painting and sculpture of the nineteenth-century academics, which many people felt had become stiff and sterile because of many rules and restrictions. Modigliani liked to maintain traces of the artistic process in his art—brushstrokes and chisel marks—to create sensuality, tactility and allure.’

"Working in close contact with Brancusi, Modigliani was one of a new generation of artists at this time involved in the tradition of direct carving from the stone block without the intermediary of a model or maquette. It was a practice that emulated the rawness and immediacy of approach used in African and other so-called ‘primitive’ arts and was, in part, a reaction against the outmoded tradition in sculpture then typified for Modigliani’s generation by Rodin’s, lumpy, contorted, hand-modeled and emotion-packed bronze figures. As Jacques Lipchitz remembered, ‘Modigliani, like some others at the time, was very taken with the notion that sculpture was sick, that it had become very sick with Rodin and his influence. There was too much modeling in clay, too much ‘mud.’ The only way to save sculpture was to begin carving again, direct carving in stone. We had many very heated discussions about this, for I did not for one moment believe that sculpture was sick, nor did I believe that direct carving was by itself a solution to anything. But Modigliani could not be budged; he held firmly to his deep conviction. He had been seeing a good deal of Brancusi, who lived nearby, and he had come under his influence. When we talked of different kinds of stone – hard and soft – Modigliani said that the stone itself made very little difference, the important thing was to give the carved stone the feeling of hardness, and that came from within the sculptor himself: regardless of what stone they use some sculptors make their work look soft, but others use even the softest stones and give their sculptures hardness. Indeed, his own sculpture shows how he used this idea.’

"Stone was, therefore, the medium that provided Modigliani with the means to pursue a specific end. ‘What I am searching for,’ Modigliani is said to have told Paul Alexandre, ‘is neither the real nor the unreal, but the subconscious, the mystery of what is instinctive in the human race.’ Nowhere is this new, pure and idealized form of realism that Modigliani sought—and which he continued to strive after for the rest of his life—better realized than in his sculpture. Modigliani’s sculpture, and in particular, smooth-surfaced stone heads such as Tête, epitomize this perpetual search to refine and distill the human form into a beatific concentration of its essential qualities. Griselda Pollock has written of Modigliani’s work in this respect that, his ‘project echoes that of Matisse, where the distillation of movement, volume, and form into the sureness of a single line negotiates the tightrope between the decorative and the minimal...[Modigliani’s] patient repetitions and persistent search for a line [that] his hands and mind could internalize and confidently repeat, reveals that he was not working from the model, from life, from women’s bodies. He was working conceptually, from the museum of long and culturally diverse histories of art.’

"Paul Alexandre also observed that Modigliani would often throw a stone away if a sculpture was not working out as he wanted. This observation is revealing because it distinguishes Modigliani’s approach from that of many other ‘direct carvers’ of his generation. It suggests that Modigliani was no ‘truth to materials’ artist and did not, like other ‘carvers’ of the time, work with the material in an intuitive manner, attempting to find and release a figure believed to be already hidden inside the stone (à la Michelangelo). Rather, Modigliani was always chasing a preconceived ideal and seeking to impose this ineffable vision upon the stone. It was for this reason that soft, more durable and easier to work stones such as limestone and sandstone lent themselves so well to his art. And also perhaps why it was in the works made in this material, that Modigliani came closest to realizing his unreachable ideal.

‘Everything Dedo [Modigliani] did’, Max Jacob wrote, ‘tended towards purity in art. His insupportable pride, his black ingratitude, his haughtiness, did not exclude familiarity. Yet, all that was nothing but a need for crystalline purity, a trueness to himself in life as in art. He was cutting, but as fragile as glass, so to say. And that was very characteristic of the period, which talked of nothing but purity in art and strove for nothing else. Dedo was to the last degree a purist.’

The lot has an estimate of $30,000,000 to $40,000,000.  It sold for $34,325,000.  The record for a Modigliani sculpture is $70.7 million, set in 2014.

"The toys and youthful ephemera which surrounded the artist and Gilot while their young children were growing up were not solely descriptive motifs that Picasso included in his portraits, but were for the artist, symbolic objects that embodied a youthfulness that he wished to harness for himself. “Even now, when Claude and Paloma have gone to spend their holidays with their father,” Gilot wrote in her biography of her time with Picasso, “Pablo has never let Claude return without taking at least one, sometimes more than one, article of clothing from his luggage. The first thing his father took was a new Tyrolean hat. After that there was a whole series of other hats… Another time it was a light-blue poplin raincoat… I finally became convinced that Pablo hoped by this method that some of Claude’s youth would enter into his own body. It was a metaphorical way of appropriating someone else’s substance, and in that way, I believe, he hoped to prolong his own life” (Gilot, op. cit., p. 232). Forever trying to defy the inexorable march of time, Picasso’s paintings of his children allowed him to inhabit a world of complete freedom and inhibition, something he wished to embody for himself and channel into the way he made his art. “When I was a child I could draw like Raphael,” he famously stated, “but it took me a lifetime to draw like a child” (quoted in H. Read in The Times, 26 October 1956).

The lot has an estimate of  $7,000,000 to $10,000,000.  It sold for $8,674,000.

Lot 21, "Nu a la fenetre," by Henri Matisse, oil on canvas, 25 3/4 by 21 1/2 inches, 1929

Lot 21 is a nice scene of a naked lady by a window by Henri Matisse (1869-1954).  The oil on canvas measures 25 3/4 by 21 1/2 inches and was painted in 1929.  It was once owned by Vladimir Horowiz and was acquired by Drue Heinz from M. Knoedler & Co., in 1961.

The catalogue provides the following commentary:

"In 1926-1927, during his tenth working season at Nice, Matisse acquired two adjacent apartments that together comprised the entire top floor of 1, place Charles Félix, the neo-classical building in the heart of the old city where he had lived and worked, one story below, for the previous five years. After a lengthy period of renovations to combine the two flats, creating sufficient living space for his wife Amélie to join him on the Côte d’Azur, the sprawling residence was ready to occupy by mid-1928. Whereas Matisse’s studio in the third-floor apartment had been snug and heavily decorated, the new one was a veritable light chamber, with triple floor-length windows and a spacious balcony facing south over the Baie des Anges and white tiled walls that amplified the dazzling radiance.

"Matisse immediately felt the impact of this intense, saturating light, which had the visual effect of flattening form and compressing space. “You’ll see, there’s something new here,” he wrote to Amélie in July 1928. “I can feel it inside myself, like a release. I had pretty well come to the end of what I could do with construction based exclusively on the balancing of colored masses” (quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master, New York, 2005, p. 295). During the ensuing months, Matisse swiftly clarified and consolidated his new aims. “The retina tires of the same means. It demands surprises,” he told the publisher Tériade in January 1929. “For myself, since it is always necessary to advance and to seek new possibilities, I nowadays want a certain formal perfection, and I work by concentrating my means to give my painting this quality” (quoted in J. Flam, Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 85).

"Matisse painted the present Nu à la fenêtre—also known as Nu nacré (Pearly Nude) for the iridescent quality of its light—in his new studio during the first part of 1929 and sold the canvas to Bernheim-Jeune that September. The painting was reproduced shortly thereafter in two important monographs, one by Florent Fels and the other by Roger Fry, which paid tribute to the artist on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in December 1929; it was first exhibited publicly at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York the following fall. 

"The focal point of this luminous, high-keyed canvas is the nude model, the subject par excellence of Matisse’s exemplary Nice period. “The Odalisqueswere the bounty of a happy nostalgia, a lovely vivid dream, and the almost ecstatic, enchanted days and nights of the Moroccan climate,” the artist recounted. “I felt an irresistible need to express that ecstasy, that divine unconcern, in corresponding colored rhythms, rhythms of sunny and lavish figures and colors” (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 1986, p. 230). Here, Matisse depicted a sultry brunette named Loulou, one of several ballet dancers from the Compagnie de Paris who populated the artist’s private pictorial theater in 1928-1929. Clad only in a sheer, open peignoir and a gold necklace, Loulou stands in a classic, contrapposto pose. Her volumetric curves play provocatively against the flat, abstract geometry of the tiled studio wall, a proxy for the rectilinear grid of the canvas itself. 

"Although the model’s eyes are closed in languorous repose, a wicker armchair beside the window faces outward over the panoramic vista, connoting the act of viewing that underpins the artist’s relationship to the world. The window had been a key theme in Matisse’s work ever since his revolutionary Fauve summer at Collioure in 1905, when he rendered the brilliant light of a new day streaming into his hotel room through an open portal—a metaphor for the very advent of modernism, representing the passage to a momentously new manner of painting. “For Matisse the window was a constant, as important in its expression as the room itself,” Shirley Blum has noted. “Together they enabled the pictorial revolution taking place on his canvases” (Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, New York, 2010, p. 16).

"In Nu à la fenêtre, Matisse exploited the window’s intrinsic duality—at once an opening and a barrier—to generate a tension between illusionistic depth and modernist flatness. Although the window grille recedes perspectivally at an oblique angle, Matisse has compressed the landscape vista against the fictive picture plane, linking the distant to the close at hand. Interior and exterior are rendered with the same sparkling white light and intensity of color, as a single, unified spatial realm. “The result is a productive ambiguity of ‘looking through’ and ‘looking at’,” Katharina Sykora has observed, “a continual back-and-forth between the pull into depth with its promise of a ‘genuine’ view and the visual threshold of inhibition that halts our gaze in the interior” (Henri Matisse: Figure Color Space, exh. cat., Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2005, p. 60).

"The paintings that Matisse created in early 1929 represent the culmination of his work at Nice during this transformative period. Following his return to the Côte d’Azur that fall after his usual summer stint in Paris, Matisse found himself at a crossroads, pondering the direction in which the accomplishments of the last decade might next lead him. During the ensuing four years, he scarcely worked at the easel, devoting himself instead to drawing and print-making, extensive travel, and his decorative murals for Dr. Albert Barnes. When he returned to painting in late 1933, the condensation of pictorial means that he had begun to explore in the “Loulou” interiors provided him with a springboard to renewed innovation, heralding the mounting abstraction of the next decade. 

“When you have worked a long time in the same milieu, it is useful at a given moment to stop and take a voyage,” he explained to Tériade, “which will let parts of the mind rest while other parts have free rein—especially those parts repressed by the will. This stopping permits a withdrawal and consequently an examination of the past. You begin again with more certainty” (quoted in J. Flam, op. cit., 1995, p. 88)."

It has an estimate of $7,000,000 to $10,000,000.  It sold for $6,517,500.

Lot 22 is a magnificent interior scene by Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940) that is entitled "La Table de Toilette."  An oil on canvas, it measures 25 7/8 by 45 1/4 inches and was painted in 1895.  It is from the collection of Frederick A. and Sharon L. Klingsnstein.  Mr. Klingenstein was co-chairman and CEO of Wertheim & Company and was also chairman of the board of trustees of Mount Sinai Hospital.

The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:

"Of the five panels, including the present lot, commissioned by Thadée and Misia Natanson, three can be found in public institutions, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

“A muted symphony, where relationships never seen before harmonize and vibrate deeper and deeper as they are contemplated—melodious outbursts, postures skillfully linked, composed according the memory that moved him. It is a brilliant profusion of colorful harmonious splendors upon which a tender soul drapes itself” (Thadée Natanson quoted in G. Groom, exh. cat., op. cit., 1993, p. 76).

"So wrote Thadée Natanson, co-founder of the influential journal La Revue Blanche, about the suite of five decorative paintings—the present canvas among them—that he and his wife Misia commissioned from Vuillard in 1895 to adorn their apartment on the rue Saint-Florentin, the epicenter of Paris’s most advanced artistic and literary circle at this time. Depicting elegant young women reading, talking, embroidering, and arranging flowers within a luxuriantly appointed domestic interior, the five elaborately patterned panels—collectively known as the Album—constitute a subjective, symbolist-inspired re-envisioning of the Natansons’ cultivated milieu, in which poetry, art, and music reigned supreme, and the mundane, material world was held at bay. “The Album panels, which presented themselves from the outset as a high-water mark in Vuillard’s art, may be viewed as an allegory of life in the Natanson home,” Guy Cogeval has written, “where refined tastes and the art of living were combined” (op. cit., 2003, p. 434).

"Vuillard first entered the Natansons’ orbit in 1891, when Thadée—a keen advocate of the band of young avant-garde painters who called themselves the Nabis—gave him his first solo show in the offices of La Revue Blanche. In 1893, Thadée married the prodigiously charismatic Misia, a gifted pianist and born iconoclast, who soon became the object of reticent Vuillard’s unrequited infatuation, as well as the muse and darling of the sophisticated, intellectual society that revolved around La Revue Blanche. “Her position, combined with her unique personal style, her seductive charm, and her almost physical need to be constantly surrounded by people, was to make her the magnetic center, the feminine touchstone for one of the most gifted circles of artists Paris has ever known,” Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale have observed (Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, New York, 1980, p. 38).

"For Vuillard, his relationship with the Natansons—Misia especially—was like a religious conversion, life-changing and all-consuming. By the middle of the decade, he saw them almost daily. They purchased his work in quantity and recommended him unreservedly to friends; they afforded him inside access to the very latest in arts and ideas, and they demonstrated a way of life—a taste and a culture—that fascinated the sheltered young artist. “Vuillard’s vision of reality,” Cogeval has written, “which melded bodies, faces, inanimate objects, flowers, draperies and light into a single texture, was developed and supported by his contact with Misia, whose appearance in the interiors he painted represented a daily miracle for him. His painting, even when Misia was not in the picture, was conditioned by the imprint in space of her passing” (op. cit., 2003, pp. 454-455).

"Vuillard painted the five panels of the Album for the sprawling central room of the Natansons’ apartment—at once parlor, music chamber, and salon—where Misia hosted a spirited weekly soirée for the painters, poets, composers, and critics of La Revue Blanche. In lieu of the prim refinement of their conventionally haut bourgeois childhood homes, Misia and Thadée embraced in their own shared space a cluttered and eclectic informality. The main room was profusely decorated with millefleur tapestries, exotic textiles, oriental rugs, and upholstered furniture; the walls were covered in a heavily patterned, Arts and Crafts-style paper, with a crisscross motif of leaves and flowers. In the Album paintings, Vuillard used densely layered patterns, closely ranged tonalities, and a delicately stippled technique to create an all-over, tapestry-like surface effect that harmonized with this laden setting. “Space does not retreat before us,” John Russell wrote, “we can caress it” (Edouard Vuillard, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 1971, p. 59).


"The present painting depicts two women in conversation, with a third partially visible in profile at the far left; they are all, Joseph Rishel has suggested, variants of Misia, clad in the charming, patterned day dresses that she favored and with their hair informally pinned up like hers (exh. cat., op. cit., 1989, p. 112). The heads of the two women at the left seem to emerge, dream-like, from the copious bouquet of chrysanthemums on the table in the foreground, only to vanish once again into the patterned wallpaper; the third participant, seen from behind, dissolves into the deepening shadows at the periphery of the painting, absorbed compositionally and psychologically into the interior. The very ethereality of the figures contrasts with and underscores the palpable existence of the objects around them, heightening the impression of sensuous abundance. 
“The mood is languorous, subdued, and highly sensual,” Kimberly Jones has written. “The spatial ambiguity—the tension between the two-dimensional picture plane and the illusory three-dimensional interior space—that marks so many of the artist’s domestic interiors from this period is particularly pronounced here, further intensifying the rarefied atmosphere of domestic calm and mystery that pervades the suite as a whole. Even the women themselves seem to blend into their surroundings, their features vague, their forms simply another ornamental element in the elaborately patterned picture” (exh. cat., op. cit., 2003, p. 191).

"The five panels of the Album, though harmoniously unified in subject, palette, and technique, have disparate sizes and orientations, which allowed for varying decorative arrangements within the unstructured environment of the Natanson apartment. The title of the ensemble comes from the motif of the largest panel, which shows women leafing through an album, suggesting that Vuillard drew on the idea of a portfolio of prints with a loosely connected theme and diverse formats. Of the five paintings in the group, only the present canvas and Le pot de grès share the same dimensions (Salomon and Cogeval, no. V-96.5; Christie’s New York, 18 November 1998, lot 38); the smallest panel, Le corsage rayé, is the same height as these but half the width (no. V-96.1; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The remaining two canvases have an unusual, exceptionally narrow format, but one—L’Album—is oriented length-wise while the other, Les Brodeuses, is a vertical composition (nos. V-96.2 and V-96.3; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, respectively).
 
"Photographs and paintings of the Natanson apartment indicate that the panels were originally hung unframed or sometimes propped informally against the wall, blending with the undulating arabesques of the wallpaper. They did not remain in fixed positions but rather were arranged and re-arranged according their owners’ whim, functioning more like portable textiles than integral murals. Thadée and Misia even brought the paintings along when they left Paris each summer, installing them in their country house at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne in Burgundy, where Vuillard was a frequent guest.

"A month after Vuillard completed the paintings in November 1895, they were included in the inaugural exhibition of the dealer Siegfried Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau in Paris, the first of the artist’s decorative ensembles to be shown publicly. When the Natansons’ marriage ended in 1904, the panels stayed with Thadée; in 1908, facing bankruptcy, he was forced to sell at auction, and the ensemble was dispersed. La table de toilette entered the personal collection of Vuillard’s dealer Jos Hessel, whose wife Lucy had replaced Misia by that time as the artist’s closest confidante and abiding muse. “As for Lucy,” reads a note in his journal, “guiding light that she is—domination—bewitchment...totally dazzled by her” (quoted in G. Groom, op. cit., 1993, p. 148). The Hessels kept the present painting at least until 1941, the year after Vuillard—a lifelong bachelor—died with Lucy at his side."

It has an estimate of $5,000,000 to $8,000,000.  It sold for $7,883,000.  In 1989, it sold at auction for $7.7 million.





Lot 23  is a fine pastel on paper laid down on card laid down on panel by Edgar Degas (1834-1917).  Entitled "Femme s'essuant," it measures 38 3/4 by 27 1/2 inches and was painted circa 1899.  It is property of Drue Heinz.

The catalogue entry provides the following commentary:

"The vivid, scintillant, chromatic tints of pastels reigned supreme in late oeuvre of Edgar Degas. All the pictures he had shown in the eighth and final Impressionist group exhibition in 1886—nude bathers, milliners, and portraits—were executed in pastel. By the middle of the following decade, when the character and means of the late style had become fully manifest and definitive in Degas’s art, his use of pastel had largely supplanted oil painting. Among the approximately 500 works the artist created in color after 1890, fewer than fifty were painted in oils; the rest were rendered in varying applications of pastel on paper, ranging from counter-proofs retouched with the powdery sticks, to works such as the present Femme s’essuyant, a fully worked and signed composition, drawn to circa 1899, which is as impressive in scale and visual impact as any of the late oil paintings.

"Having finished her bath, this young woman towels herself dry—in the series to which this pastel belongs, specifically her left side, beside her breast—while seated in a scallop-backed chair draped with linen sheets. The lines of the bathtub, of a new, porcelain-enameled, cast-iron design, indicate perspective in the room. Standing above and gazing down on his model, Degas projected between the shapes of the bathtub and chair an abruptly ascending sense of deep space. Amid the prevailing blue-green tonality, the subject appears as if she had been bathing outdoors on a river bank.

"The late pastels represent Degas’s resolution of the apparent dichotomy between the perception of color and the semblance of linear contour. “I am a colorist with line,” Degas declared. “To color is to pursue drawing into greater depth” (quoted in R. Kendall, ed., Degas by Himself, New York, 1987, p. 319). The guiding forces in the artist’s evolution had been the exemplary linear discipline manifest in the art of Ingres, in contention with the adventurous, passionate expression of color in Delacroix. A half-century later, Henri Matisse discovered his own solution to reconciling color and line in his paper cut-outs.

"Paul Válery recalled Degas stating that a picture is the result of a “series of operations” (quoted in Degas, Manet, Morisot, Princeton, 1960, p. 6). The present Femme s’essuyant pastel stemmed from a sequence of six known charcoal drawings that Degas executed circa 1895-1900, included in the sales of the artist’s atelier: 1ère Vente, no. 314; 2ème Vente, nos. 266, 309, and 311; 3ème Vente, nos. 186 and 292. These studies also resulted in four other related pastels, Lemoisne, nos. 1011, 1340, and 1342-1343.

In the process of tracing the drawings from one to another, and while configuring his subject in the five pastels, Degas altered the elevation of the sitter’s bent left arm, as well as the incline of her back, from the nearly upright contour seen in the present work to a forward-leaning posture in the others. With the addition of room space at both the top and bottom edges, the present Femme s’essuyant and the version, Lemoisne 1342, likewise titled, are the largest in this group. During this period, Degas also modeled a sculpture in wax of this subject, Femme assise dans un fauteuil s’essuyant l’aisselle gauche (Hebrard, no. 43; Rewald, no. LXXII; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

"Among the pastels Degas exhibited in the final Impressionist exhibition of 1886 were ten works which marked the debut of his domestic bathers theme—“Suite de nuds [sic] de femmes se baignant, se lavant, se séchant, s’essuyant …” These scenes of the female nude à sa toilette were deemed scandalous; viewers assumed the artist’s models to be prostitutes, and the rooms those of seedy, cheap hotels. Painting a bather as the mythical Diana or the biblical Susanna was perfectly acceptable in the official Salon—however, as Degas remarked to his dealer Ambroise Vollard, “a woman undressing, never!” (Quoted in A. Vollard, Degas: An Intimate Portrait, New York, 1937, p. 48).

“Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience,” Degas explained to the artist George Moore, “but these women of mine are honest, simple folk, unconcerned by any other interests than those involved in their physical condition. Here she is washing her feet. It is as if you looked through the keyhole” (quoted in R. Kendall, op. cit., 1987, p. 311).

"Peering into such intimate and hidden moments in a woman’s private life unsettled many viewers. Accused of prurient voyeurism, decried as a misogynist for the blunt exposure he accorded his female subjects, Degas was dismayed at the outcry, but persisted with the bathers theme. “Retreating from the public eye,” George T.M. Shackelford has written, “Degas treated the nude for himself, for his own gratification, and for his own celebration of the body” (Degas and the Nude, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2011, p. 156).
 
"In deference to his clientele’s conservative inclinations, and more comfortable himself with Degas’s earlier production, Paul Durand-Ruel, since 1874 the artist’s primary dealer, shied away from the bather pastels. Vollard eagerly took up the slack, often acquiring Degas’s recent work in exchange for pictures from his wide-ranging inventory of contemporaries—Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and others—that Degas was seeking to add to his own estimable collection of 19th-century art.

In 1914 Vollard published his Degas holdings, comprising mostly late pastels, in Quatre-vingt-dix-huit reproductions signées par Degas, the so-called "Album Vollard.” This folio of both color and duo-tone plates proved instrumental in creating a market for these pictures outside France, especially in Scandinavia, Germany, and Russia, while inspiring young foreign artists with a modernist bent to emulate Degas’s use of electric color and audacious, emphatic line. The present Femme s’essuyant, as noted in the cataloguing above, is illustrated as plate XLIII in the "Album Vollard."

The lot has a modest estimate of $2,000,000 to $3,000,000.  It sold for $3,135,000.




Lot 8, "Therese sur une banquette" is a good oil on canvas by Balthus (1908-2001) from the collection of Dorothy and Richard Sherwood.  It is an oil on board that measures 28 5/8 by 36 1/4 inches and was painted in 1939. 

It has an estimate of $12,000,000 to $18,000,000.  It sold for $19,002,500.