NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s announces that it will offer Property from a Distinguished East Coast Collection in a series of sales in New York through 2011. Assembled over several decades, the Collection offers both diversity and depth, holding important examples from Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary periods, with a special focus on Latin American art and American painting.
Impressionist & Modern Art – 3 & 4 May 2011
Impressionist and Modern works from the Collection are led by Kees van Dongen’s Portrait de Mrs. Jean McKelvie Sclater-Booth, a prime example of the artist’s fashionable portraits of society Doyennes that synthesized all that was chic and desirable during the 1920s (est. $1/1.5 million**). To have a portrait painted by van Dongen was a coveted status symbol for the most fashionable women of the era, and the present work shows the svelte Mrs. Jean McKelvie Sclater Booth at her glamorous best – bejeweled, wearing the latest gown and sporting a sophisticated page boy haircut.
Other highlights from the Collection include works by Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Juan Miró. Chagall’s Souvenir de Paris is an ode to the city that the artist credited as the birthplace of the imaginative, whimsical style that defined his career (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Russian by origin, Chagall considered France his home during the last decades of his life, returning to the city after his exile in the United States during World War II. Léger’s Composition aux Deux Oiseaux from 1954 incorporates the solidly linear figures that had populated the artist’s best work since the 1920s (est. $800,000/1.2 million. Shape and form were primary concerns for the artist, but by the last years of his career he began to incorporate narrative into his highly-geometric compositions, such as the organically-shaped birds of the present work.
Contemporary Art – 10 & 11 May 2011
The Contemporary works in the Collection celebrate the various forms in which figuration thrived within the abstract idioms of the last half of the 20th century. Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop realism and bold graphics are joyously realized in both painting and sculpture with Two Paintings: Folded Sheets from 1983 (est. $1/1.5 million) and the 1986 bronze Surrealist Head (est. $1.5/2 million).
In Two Paintings: Folded Sheets, Lichtenstein appropriates his own imagery from earlier works much as he had previously painted canvases that took their subject from the work of Picasso or Matisse to initiate a dialogue of “art about art”. On the left, this composition presents a section from the artist’s Brushstroke series, while a portion of an Interior canvas is on the right, separated by simulated picture frames and an abstracted blue-striped wall. The painting shows the artist melding his hard-edged, flattened renderings with his Expressionistic style. Both Lichtenstein's sculptures and paintings play on his fascination with various conventions of commercial and high art. Although Surrealist Head is a volumetric work in three dimensions, Lichtenstein employed graphic design techniques such as the Benday dot and diagonal hatchings from his paintings to optically flatten our perception of this object in the round.
Tom Wesselmann’s Bedroom Painting No. 44 comes from the Bedroom Paintings series in which the artist moved his perspective and ours closer to the subject at hand, spotlighting close-up details of the female subject (est. $1.5/2 million). The work is dominated by the woman’s sensual profile but is enhanced by various still life objects including a provocative daffodil and a luxurious black satin pillow. Bedroom Painting No. 44 perfectly embodies the artist’s keen attention to color and proportion to convey a heightened sense of realism and sensuality.
American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture – 19 May 2011
The American paintings and watercolors from the Collection are highlighted by Thomas Hart Benton’s Flood Disaster (Homecoming – Kaw Valley), a rare and archetypal work which depicts the aftermath of the 1951 flooding of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers (est. $800,000/1.2 million). Striving to enlist popular and Congressional support for a relief program, Benton had a lithograph of the painting made and distributed to every member of the U.S. Congress. Despite initial resistance and delays, the House eventually voted for $55 million in relief funds to be distributed to the devastated area.
Other highlights from the Collection include Marsden Hartley’s New Mexico Recollections No. 8, a sense-memory ode to his experience in the primal mountains and desert of Taos (est. $800,000/1.2 million), as well as Milton Avery’s March Playing the Cello, a large-scale, brightly-colored figurative painting from 1943 which epitomizes the artist’s ability to balance simplified forms with lambent fields of color (est. $800,000/1.2 million). From an exceptional portrait by Walt Kuhn to John Marin’s mature Sea and Gulls, the wide variety of American works on offer represent the continual dialogue between the extremes of realism and abstraction throughout the first half of the 20th century in America.
Latin American Art – 25 May 2011
The Latin American Art in the Collection is led by a remarkable group of works by the Colombian master Fernando Botero, which will be offered in a single-artist evening sale. The auction, entitled Fernando Botero: A Celebration, is the first single-artist sale held by Sotheby’s Latin American Art department since the auction of Joaquín Torres-Garcia’s works from the estate of Royal S. Marks in 1992. The Botero works from the Collection were assembled over many years and include the quintessential themes and iconic images that have made Botero one of the world’s most recognized artists. Among the highlights will be the monumental 1992 bronze Man on a Horse, one of the artists most important sculptures and an early example of this quintessentially-Botero image (est. $800,000/1.2 million), El Presidente, one of the most famous pastel on paper works by the artist (est. $300/4 00,000), and Nude from 1983 (est. $500/700,000).
Two paintings by Pedro Friedeberg from the Collection also appear in the Latin American Art sale the following day, along with sculptures by Dario Morales and Francisco Zuniga.
Full Calendar of Property from a Distinguished East Coast Collection
Sotheby’s New York, 2011
• Impressionist & Modern Art – 3 & 4 May
• Contemporary Art – 10 & 11 May
• American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture – 19 May
• Fernando Botero: A Celebration – 25 May
• Latin American Art – 26 May
• Important 20th Century Design – 15 June
• Contemporary Art – 22 September
• American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture – 28 September
• Prints – 30 October
• Israeli & International Art – 11 December
Estimates do not include buyer’s premium
