Displaying items by tag: Impressionist and Modern Art Sale

Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) granddaughter, Marina Picasso, has chosen Sotheby’s to sell two paintings by her grandfather from her personal collection. The sale will benefit children and adolescents in difficulty, a cause Marina Picasso is a major champion of. She has provided substantial funding and assistance to foundations in Vietnam, France, and Switzerland.

Marina Picasso’s collection was the subject of a traveling exhibition in the 1980s but this is the first time that any of her works have been offered for sale. The two paintings, which will be part of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Sale in Paris on June 6, 2013, are Palette et Tete de Taureau (1938) and Femme Assise en Robe Grise (1943). The works echo the aesthetic implications of Picasso’s famed Guernica (1937), which captures the dark, somber tone of Picasso’s works from this period, the result of the horrors endured due to the Spanish Civil War.

Palette et Tete de Taureau is expected to bring $1.3 million-$1.9 million and Femme Assise en Robe Grise is expected to garner $3.2 million-$4.5 million.

Sotheby’s will offer the Collection of Alex and Elisabeth Lewyt in a series of auctions in New York and Paris beginning on May 7, 2013. The works, which include paintings and drawings by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), will lead Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sale in New York. Proceeds from the sale will benefit a charitable foundation to be created in the couple’s name. The 200 works, which also include illustrated letters by artists such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), are expected to garner anywhere from $67 million to $98 million.

The first sale of the series will present a selection of 20 works from the Lewyt’s collection. Highlights include a seminal Cézanne still-life titled Les Pommes, which the Lewyts bought from the Wildenstein Galleries in 1953; Modigliani’s sensual portrait of the socialite Marguerite de Hasse de Villers titled L’Amazone; and various works by Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

Alex Lewyt, a New York-based vacuum cleaner inventor who died in 1988, and his wife, Elisabeth, an animal-welfare activist who died this past December, began amassing their remarkable collection in the 1950s.  

On February 6 in London, a painting by the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) will lead Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Sale. Painted in 1919, Jeanne Hebuterne (au chapeau) is a portrait of Modigliani’s common-law wife seated in a wooden chair wearing a black hat and dress, illustrating the elongated form he is known for.

While Modigliani is one of Europe’s highest-selling modern artists, the market for Impressionist and modern art has slowed lately due to a lack of exceptional works in circulation. However, the upcoming sale at Christie’s is expected to bring as much as $237 million with the Modigliani portrait selling for as much as $35.5 million.

Jeanne Hebuterne appeared in a posthumous Modigliani retrospective in Venice in 1922. The portrait was bought from Sotheby’s, London for $26.4 million by a New York collector who is now putting it up for sale.

Rowdy art handlers — who have been locked out of Sotheby’s over a labor dispute since the summer — blew whistles and shouted insults at the crowds who poured into Sotheby’s Upper East Side auction house on Wednesday night for its auction of Impressionist and modern art. But for all the anger outside the building, inside there was excitement and a great deal of relief as an international crowd of collectors and dealers watched the auction market come back to life.

It has been a week of quick reversals and stark contrasts. On Tuesday night, the Christie’s sale of Impressionist and modern art performed poorly, making Sotheby’s sale seem like a triumph by comparison as paintings by Klimt and Caillebotte, Monet and Giacometti brought prices that far exceeded expectations.

Coming in second had its advantages. Looking at the competition’s results, Sotheby’s experts were able to gauge the market and persuade consignors to lower their reserves (the secret minimums generally agreed upon by the auction house and the seller). Sotheby’s sale was also filled with fresher material that was more conservatively estimated. And collectors responded. The sale totaled $199.8 million, right in the middle of its $167.5 million to $229.8 million estimate. Of the 70 works on offer, only 13 failed to sell. (Christie’s sale on Tuesday night brought in $140.7 million, far below its $211.9 million low estimate, and ended with 31 out of 82 works unsold.)

The evening’s star work was “Litzlberg on the Attersee,” a colorful Klimt landscape painted around 1914-15 that made $40.4 million. It had been hanging in the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria, before being returned to George Jorisch, a retired camera store manager from Montreal whose great-uncle and great-aunt had owned it before it was seized during World War II.

The painting was expected to sell for around $25 million, but five people ended up competing for it. Eventually it came down to one telephone bidder against David Lachenmann, a Zurich dealer, who won the painting.