NEW YORK.- On the evening of November 5 and on November 6, Sotheby’s New York will offer Impressionist and Modern Art. The evening sale will feature 12 works from the Robert C. Guccione Collection, including important paintings by Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger, which are estimated to sell for $17/25 million. The sale will also include, from various owners, a rare, posed female nude by Paul Cézanne, an early Fauvist still life by Matisse and a celebrated Surrealist sculpture by Max Ernst. Prior to their exhibition and sale in New York in November, highlights will be on view at Sotheby’s Paris on October 3-5 and 7-8, 2002.
The Robert C. Guccione Collection
Featured in the November 5th evening sale is a group of works from the Robert C. Guccione Collection. David Norman, Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide, said: “As a collector and an artist himself, Bob Guccione has always had an interest in the portrayal of the figure, and in those artists who found their creative voice in the expression of the figure and the human condition. The drama of the quiet gesture, the resonance of solitude, the passion of the religious impulse, or the intrigue of a face only registering the slightest expression, are attributes of the many artworks in this collection.”
Chief among the works from the Robert C. Guccione Collection is Amedeo Modigliani’s Giovanotta dai Capelli Rossi from 1919, which is estimated to sell for $6/8 million. This sensitive depiction of an unidentified young man with red hair typifies the fresh and direct style Modigliani’s paintings had assumed in his later years. Although this work is related to the portraits Modigliani executed of peasants in the Midi, its handling is closer to the style of his post-1916 Paris paintings. The pure oval of the young man’s face, the delicate tracing of his features and the hypnotic and intense blue eyes lend the portrait a mood of urban elegance and dignity.
Also from the Guccione Collection is Pablo Picasso’s Le fils de l’artiste en arlequin, an endearing interpretation of the harlequin, a subject that held the artist’s fascination for much of his career. The early 1920s heralded Picasso’s classical period, a style that was manifested in a more realistic and sentimental approach to his figures. Here, Picasso has rendered his young son with soft, gestural brushstrokes. The geometric pattern of the harlequin costume and the dark backdrop behind him frame his delicate face, drawing attention to his large brown eyes and wisps of hair. Though dressed in a fanciful costume, Paolo retains the dignity of innocence and directness of childhood. Executed in 1924, this painting is estimated to sell for $2/3 million.
Fernand Léger’s Composition les trois soeurs, also being sold from the Guccione Collection, is one of the artist’s definitive compositions of the 1950s. In contrast to the rarefied and elitist aesthetic of postwar abstraction, Léger’s paintings of the 50s were intended to appeal to the public with a more comprehensible figurative style and relevant subject matter. The present work exemplifies Léger’s firm commitment to neoclassical figuration and his fascination with the expressive potential of color – the two defining stylistic factors of his work during the last decade of his life. Here, he has rendered the figures with a sharp clarity that is characteristic of his later work, using a vivid plane of primary color for the background, and articulating the figures’ contours with bold, black lines. The colors, in keeping with his works of this period, are fully saturated, voluminous and substantial. This painting is estimated to sell for $2/3 million.
Property from Various Owners
Discussing the November offering, Charles Moffett, Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide, said, “Cézanne’s Femme nue debout is one of the artist’s most remarkable late pictures, offering a unique opportunity for a discerning private collector or museum. Modigliani’s Giovanotta dai Capelli Rossi is best male portrait by the artist to have appeared on the market in years, and Giacometti’s Figure Walking between Two Houses is sublime.”
Another major highlight of the evening sale is Paul Cézanne’s Femme nue debout, circa 1898-99, unique among the artist’s compositions depicting the nude, and a picture which has never appeared at auction. While depictions of nudes had commonly been incorporated into many of Cézanne’s great compositions, never before had he executed a solitary female nude in a studio. The present work, which was once in the collection of the French industrialist Auguste Pellerin, one of the most important collectors of Impressionist art in the early 20th century,
shows the figure in an ‘academy’ pose, framed by the angular geometry of the wall and floor. Measuring 36 ½ x 28 in., this work is estimated to sell for $10/15 million.
Also included is an early Fauvist still life, Nature morte, serviette à carreaux, by Henri Matisse, which Mr. Norman has referred to as being among the artist’s earliest contributions to the freedom of form and composition. Thought to have been painted at Lesquielles-St. Germaine, where Matisse settled with his wife and children in 1903, this painting is estimated at $4/6 million. Other works from the months spent at Lesquielles show the artist’s immediate surroundings, while in this canvas the artist continues his investigation of the still life genre, which had been a major preoccupation since the middle of the previous decade. The present work reflects the influence Cézanne, not only in general approach, but also in technique and choice of motifs. Nevertheless, Matisse has put his own stamp on the composition with the choice of a brightly colored red and white checkered tablecloth.
The November 5th evening sale also includes a very strong offering of sculpture highlighted by a group of Modernist works from the Estate of Stanley Marcus, style-maker and marketing genius who built the family store into a fashion empire and made Neiman Marcus a household name. Chief among the works from the Marcus Estate is Alberto Giacometti’s Figure Walking Between Two Houses, one of the artist’s rare depictions of a woman in motion. Giacometti usually immobilized his female figures, either firmly rooting them to their pedestals with disproportionately large feet, or severely abstracting their anatomy. In the present work, however, he has animated the figure and encased her in a glass box, capturing her within the void between the two “houses.” The spatial complexity of this sculpture is characteristic of Giacometti’s work from the 1950’s. It is estimated to sell for $2/3 million.
Also from the Marcus Estate is one of the best-known Cubist sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz, Arlequin à l’accordéon, which was conceived in 1919 in Paris and later executed in bronze when the artist moved to New York after the second World War. Part of a series of standing figures playing musical instruments, the present work, which is estimated to sell for $400/600,000, demonstrates the artist’s interest in 18th century paintings, particularly the work of Watteau. By the time the present work was executed in 1919, a remarkable stylistic change had become visible in Lipchitz’s sculpture. He abandoned the strict verticalism of his earlier work and began to approach Cubism as an act of construction rather than reduction.
