LONDON.- As collectors and art lovers converge in London for Frieze, Sotheby’s galleries on New Bond Street will unveil some £220 million / $280 million worth of art for a public exhibition spanning some of the greatest modern and contemporary artists. This comes in the midst of spectacular exhibitions in London’s world-class institutions, from the once-in-a-century Vincent van Gogh show at the National Gallery (marking 200 years of the museum) to Claude Monet’s London views at The Courtauld, and Francis Bacon’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery to the Royal Academy’s retrospective on Michael Craig Martin.

At the heart of Sotheby’s offering is the annual Contemporary Evening Auction on 9 October*, which begins with Post-War abstraction and Pop art all the way through to the most exciting young artists of today’s generation. Headlining the week is David Hockney’s L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime, a sun-drenched ode to a magical summer spent in the South of France together with his first love Peter Schlesinger. Having remained in the same private collection for over a decade, since it was last offered at auction at Sotheby’s in 2011, it is returning to public view for the first time since. The sale will also present artworks by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Paula Rego, Christopher Wool and Banksy, to name a few.

The Evening Sale will be followed by the Contemporary Day Auction on 10 October, with works by the artists who capture the spirit of Frieze Week.

The auctions will run in parallel to LDN > PAR, a private selling exhibition which offers rare and important artworks spanning some of the greatest moments of artistic creation, from Kandinsky’s pure aesthetic abstraction in Paris, to the heights of Andy Warhol’s obsession with money in art, and a sensual embrace by Pablo Picasso. Following its London leg, the exhibition will travel to Sotheby’s Paris, on view to coincide with Art Basel’s takeover of the French capital.

From 3-8 October, the galleries will also be the first stop for the star lots of Sotheby’s New York auctions in November, including the collection of trailblazing beauty entrepreneur and philanthropist Sydell Miller, with seminal artworks including an enthralling example of Claude Monet’s iconic Nymphéas, Picasso’s first depiction of a female artist and an elegant Henri Matisse portrait from wartime France.

London will then hand the baton over to Paris in mid-October, as more than €40 million of art will be offered in the Surrealism & Its Legacy and Modernités sales on 18 October - the first to take place in Sotheby’s new Parisian headquarters on 83 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the heart of the art, fashion and luxury district. Highlights include important paintings by the likes of René Magritte, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Alfred Sisley, Jean Dubuffet and rare sculptures by Lucio Fontana.

LONDON AUCTION HIGHLIGHTS

David Hockney, L‘Arbois, Sainte-Maxime, oil on canvas, 1968 Estimate: £7-10 million

After years spent soaking up the Californian landscape, which inspired so many of his best-loved canvases, this joyful work – radiating with vibrant colour and a heightened sense of naturalism – is a unique snapshot of Hockney finding his new muse in the South of France.

In 1966, Hockney met – and quickly fell in love with – Peter Schlesinger, a young Californian art student, who soon became the model in some of Hockney’s most important canvases. At the height of their romance, they travelled to Le Nid du Duc, home of film director Tony Richardson in the South of France. From Richardson’s hideaway in the hills of Saint-Tropez, Hockney began to explore the surrounding area, armed with his 35mm Pentax camera. Returning to his London studio, Hockney pinned these images across his studio wall, taking cues from the assemblage to create four paintings, which mark the very first time he would make serious use of his own photographs as inspiration.

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 1963-64 Estimate: £3-4 million

In the early 1960s the Pop art pioneer became renowned for his candid portrayals of luminaries including Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor. This self portrait represents the moment that Warhol stepped out from behind the camera and into the glare of its flashbulb – and the moment that Warhol “the icon” was born. Self-Portrait was created using images taken in a New York photo-booth, when Warhol was 35. The use of such unconventional source material was, at this time, fiercely innovative, and added to the aura of technical invention that already surrounded this artist, who had pioneered the use of silkscreen printing in art only a couple of years previously. This series would begin a lifelong preoccupation with the self-portrait that would deliver some of the most important works of his career, from this photo-booth 1960s iteration through to the Fright Wig Self Portraits of Warhol’s final years.

Never before seen at auction and housed in the same important private collection since the 1990s, this painting hails from Andy Warhol’s very first series of self portraits, and is the only canvas from a series of nine painted in this particular shade of green. Owing to the limited number created for this series, examples from this body of work are rare to auction, with no comparable works having been offered since 2017 when Sotheby’s sold a work from the same series for over £6 million.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Militant Pressures, oil on linen, 2016 Estimate: £700,000-1 million

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye works within the highly traditional genre of portraiture, yet purely focusing on black subjects - redressing the imbalance in art history of Black people painted by Black artists. Her most celebrated works are fictitious figures set against dark, monochromatic backgrounds, drawn from her own imagination, and among the most sought-after characters is the dancer. Here, Yiadom-Boakye looks to a master, Edgar Degas, who delicately depicted ballet dancers from live models in their studios, and reinterprets the subject for a modern age.

This painting was exhibited in the artist’s major retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2017 and will now be making its auction debut. Yiadom-Boakye’s top five results have all been achieved in the last four years. Most recently in Sotheby’s Frieze week sale last year, her painting Six Birds in the Bush set an auction record for the artist and became the highest price at auction for a Black British woman artist.

Alexander Calder, Quinze Feuilles Noires, sheet metal, wire and paint, 1961 Estimate: £2-3 million

A quintessential example of Alexander Calder’s most iconic and enduring body of work, his mobile sculptures, Quinze Feuilles Noires stands out for its dynamic composition and elegant black colouration. At over three metres in length, the captivating cascade is further notable for its impressive scale. It was last exhibited in the 1980s and will now be appearing at auction for the first time.

Bridget Riley, Gaillard 2, oil on canvas, 1989 Estimate: £1.5-2 million

Art historical references are a cornerstone of Bridget Riley’s practice, informing her evolution as one of the leading figures in contemporary abstraction. Her late work stands as a critical redefinition of contemporary abstract painting, bridging the historical with the avant-garde.

Gaillard 2 is the ultimate realisation of Riley’s 1980s output, a strident body of work that today stands as an important conceptual breakthrough in the tradition of painting. While her bold and vibrant compositions of the 1970s and early-1980s drew heavily on the colour theories of Neo-Impressionists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, by 1989, Riley had turned her focus to the formal concerns of Synthetic Cubism, as championed by Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Here, in her diagonal stripe series, each pigment glimmers from the mesmerising, mosaic-like surface as Riley deftly refines painting to its simplest and most evocative elements: form and colour.

Paula Rego, Jenufa, pastel on paper mounted on aluminium, 1995 Estimate: £1.2-1.8 million

Jenufa is a work from Paula Rego’s celebrated Dog Woman series, in which liberated female figures are imbued with powerful, bestial strength. The series began in 1994, based on a pose Rego herself adopted in mirror, then recreated by her favourite model and assistant, Lila Nunes - and so are considered partial self-portraits. Opera was an abiding source of inspiration for Rego throughout her career, and the title of this work references the wronged protagonist of Leoš Janáček’s opera of the same name. The tactility and immediacy of the pastel underscores the vitality of the figure, the rugged texture bestowing an almost sculptural physicality together with rich, sensual colours – a testament to Rego’s unparalleled mastery of the medium.

Adrian Ghenie, St. Christopher, oil on canvas Estimate: £1.5-2 million

Making its auction debut, St. Christopher brings together all the most sought-after qualities of Adrian Ghenie’s best work: historical allegory, dynamic figuration and a complex, vibrant palette. According to legend, St. Christopher carried a child who was unknown to him - but later was revealed to be Jesus Christ - across a river, becoming patron saint of travellers. Artists have depicted him for centuries, from Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch to Titian and Albrecht Dürer. In this painting Ghenie weaves biblical tales and traditional art historical precedent, with the influence of Modern masters Francis Bacon and Vincent van Gogh, and the canon of self-portraiture. Here a swirling abstract patchwork of colour surrounds a figure strikingly clad in a pair of contemporary athletic shorts (reminiscent of Adidas branding). Ghenie thus reframes a biblical story of immigration and refuge, propelling it into the contemporary realm via key artistic influences.

LDN > PAR: WORKS FOR PRIVATE SALE

Wassily Kandinsky, Le Rond Rouge, oil on canvas, 1939

An exceptional large format painting from Kandinsky’s Paris period, Le Rond Rouge conveys the viewer into the realm of pure aesthetic expression. The exquisite arrangement of the composition's geometric forms and bold, bright colours represents the final phase of the development of Kandinsky’s compelling style of abstraction, and a counter response to the Surrealist movement that dominated the cultural topography of Paris at the time. Together with his contemporaries, Paul Klee and Jean Arp, Kandinsky explored the idea of nature and natural growth, incorporating biological motifs relating to zoology and embryology. Le Rond Rouge was on long term loan to the Courtauld Gallery in London for over 15 years, and is considered one of the finest paintings from the 1930s.

Andy Warhol, Dollar Signs, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 1981

In his notorious Pop art style, twenty unique dollar signs in varying colours and graphic styles are vibrantly imposed over a bubble-gum pink background in Warhol’s iconic canvas. His obsession with currency was so prevalent, Warhol began producing works similar to the functions of a money printing machine, developing his use of the silkscreen in a similar way to the printing press. He would continually return to depicting representations of the dollar sign, repeating the form in new and dynamic ways throughout his meteoric career.

Picasso, L’Etreinte, oil on canvas, 1969

A monumental composition from Picasso’s late oeuvre, L’Etreinte – meaning ‘the embrace’ – depicts an intimate moment in a passionate relationship between lovers. The late canvas captures the ardent vitality and fervent energy with which Picasso approached the act of painting during the final years of his life, executed in bold, expressive, brush strokes and dynamism.

Willem de Kooning, Untitled XIII, oil on canvas, 1983

This exemplary work dates to the pinnacle of de Kooning’s ‘late style’, produced within the critical three-year period between 1983-1985 that is considered a momentous turning point within the artist’s oeuvre. De Kooning condensed and refined his earlier lush painterly style of re-working and indiscriminate mark making, creating ever narrowing ribbons of colour which sweep amongst white tonal swathes.

Works from this period of his career are highly sought after with similar works residing in the collections of major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Philip Guston, Moonlight, oil on canvas, 1975

Moonlight brings together Guston’s earlier energetic style as an Abstract Expressionist and the surreal, eerie figuration of his later paintings - resulting in a work that is both dark and atmospheric, whilst exploding with energy. During this period, the artist focused on ‘nocturnes’ of figures in forms, imbued with a simplicity and grandeur. The glowing lunar orb in the upper edge of the canvas resembles a dim incandescent bulb, which sheds a glowing light over the upturned shoes protruding from the ground. These boots appear frequently in Guston’s later work, synonymous with the artist’s cacophony of surrealist figures.