NEW YORK.- Sotheby’s May 8 and 9, 2002, sales of Impressionist and Modern Art will feature paintings and sculpture from the Collections of Samuel and Luella Maslon and Grace and Philip Sandblom, including masterworks by Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris and Piet Mondian. Prior to their exhibition and sale in New York, highlights will be on view at Sotheby’s in Los Angeles, Paris and Zurich.
A highlight of Sotheby’s spring sales is the offering of Modern and Contemporary art from the Collection of Samuel and Luella Maslon. David Norman and Charles Moffett, Co-Chairmen of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide, said: “As a collecting couple through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Samuel and Luella Maslon were deeply engaged in the art of their time, actively acquiring works by Giacometti, Warhol and Gottlieb when they were new. Especially remarkable is the group of 20th century sculpture, with superb examples by Matisse, Giacometti, Lipchitz and Laurens.”
Among the European masterworks in the collection are two key sculptural achievements by Giacometti and Matisse. Henri Matisse’s Figure décorative, estimated at $9/12 million, is recognized by collectors, curators, and art historians throughout the world as one of the greatest achievements of modern art. David Norman notes that this work is “a key example of the way in which Matisse turned to sculpture during his career to resolve figural challenges in his paintings.” This work reflects not only the avant-garde interests of the time, but also draws upon African and Etruscan art. Conceived in Paris in August 1908 and cast in 1950, this daring orchestration of mass, shapes and rhythms identify it as one of a handful of works created early in the century that influenced the course of modern sculpture.
Charles Moffett has called Alberto Giacometti’s powerful Grand tête de Diego one of the artist’s most beautiful and compelling works. It is one of the first in a series of innovative sculptural portraits of his brother Diego, who was the primary model for the artist’s numerous variations on the theme of head and bust sculptures during the 1950’s. Giacometti’s sculptural portraits brought fresh, new approaches to issues of space, representation, abstraction and meaning in the rapidly evolving history of avant-garde art. The present work, completed with deep fraternal feeling, is one of the artist’s most captivating sculptural masterpieces. Estimated at $5/7 million, it represents the first time that a Grand tête de Diego by the artist has ever appeared at auction. A wonderful complement to the bust of Diego is the artist’s Portrait of Diego, an oil on canvas from 1954, estimated to sell for $1/1.5 million. Charles Moffett has called it “an especially rich and complex painting. It exhibits a finished quality and a sense of resolution which is exceedingly rare for the artist.”
Also featured in the Collection is one of Joan Miró’s extraordinary landscape paintings completed in 1917 during a particularly significant period of his early career, Mont-Roig, La Rivière, which is estimated to sell for $700/900,000. This rare and powerful example of the young artist’s creative brilliance, which would later lead to the more abstracted compositions that would make him famous, is one of the artist’s paintings of this period capturing sweeping landscapes inspired by his sojourns to the Catalan countryside. In the spring of 1917, before completing Mont-Roig, La Rivière, Miró saw an exhibition of modern French artists, including the work of Cézanne and Matisse. The present work is an exceptional example of the artist’s agility at assimilating the artistic techniques of these great artists in order to create a bold, new style of painting.
