PARIS.- Amedeo Modigliani’s masterly Portrait of Paul Alexandre will headline the first sale of Impressionist & Modern Art at Sotheby’s Paris this year on June 4 . The work, which has an estimate of €5-8 million ($6,9-11m), pays tribute to Modigliani’s earliest and most important patron. It is in perfect condition and comes fresh to the market, having remained in the sitter’s family until today. It is one of an exceptional ensemble of five works by the Italian artist to be offered during the sale.

Alongside this iconic picture, Sotheby’s will also unveil works by such great names of Modern Art as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Fernand Léger. Surrealism will be extensively represented with paintings by its most famous exponents: Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Leopold Survage and others.

Exceptional Group of Works by Amedeo Modigliani
The sale features an exceptional ensemble of works by Amedeo Modigliani, once owned by Paul Alexandre, his earliest patron, and kept in his family ever since. Apart from the magnificent portrait already mentioned, there will also be a superb ensemble of drawings, including a 1909 Portrait of Paul Alexandre in Three-Quarter Profile with his Hand in His Pocket that reflects Modigliani’s incomparable technical virtuosity (est. €200,000- 300,000 /$245,000-412,000).

Another important Modigliani drawing from the same ensemble is a Head of a Cariatide (1913) in blue pencil – reflecting Modigliani’s fascination with sculpture, which occupied a vital place in his art. The drawing, illustrating one of his most sought- after architectural subjects, reveals the formal power of Modigliani’s work at the time, and his quest for ideal beauty through the simplification and stylization of forms (est. €120,000-180,000 / $165,000-247,000).

Spotlight on Picasso & Braque
The sale also pays tribute to some of the leading names of 20th century art, starting with Georges Braque, represented by a rare and splendid Still Life with Cherries (1936), where Braque gives full rein to his decorative imagination. This is one of his most refined composition of the 1930s, a decade when he pursued the formal exploration he had begun during his Cubist period and, at the same time, embarked on new aesthetic research that would lead to his famous Atelier series a few years later. Our composition constitutes a key link in the evolution of his œuvre (est. €600,000-800,000 / $824,000-1m).

Pablo Picasso is another of the star artists in the sale, with two paintings featuring his own studios. The Artist and his Model (1964) shows his studio at Notre-Dame de Vie in Mougins, where Picasso began working in 1963 (est. €2.2-2.8m /$3-3.8m). The studio became one of his favourite subjects, and saw him pay vibrant homage to the role of the artist in compositions laden with eroticism and stupendous energy. L’Atelier (1956) features Picasso’s mythical studio in his villa in Cannes, La Californie . Its technique and colour-scheme pay tribute to Matisse, who had died shortly before (est. €500,000-700,000 / $687,000-961,500).

Iconic Surrealist Works
The sale also majors on Surrealism, beginning with a monumental work by Joan Miró – his charismatic Bird Figure from 1976. This extremely powerful work, embodying the quintessence of Miró’s poetic vocabulary, was painted on ‘recuperated’ paper in finest Surrealist tradition (est. €1-1.5m /$1,3-2m).

René Magritte ’s enigmatic 1947 gouache Sheherazade pays homage to the Belgian Surrealist through one of his pet subjects. The work is in splendidly fresh condition and comes with a prestigious provenance: it was first owned by the poet Joë Bousquet, who gave it to his muse Jacqueline Gourbeyre in 1948. In his celebrated Letters to a Young Woman, Bousquet vaunted the work’s ‘fascinating strangeness and sensuous power’ (est. €140,000-180,000 / $192.000-247,000).

Another outstanding lot is Yves Tanguy ’s The Atheist or The Nun , painted in 1942 after Tanguy had taken refuge in the United States. It is a masterly example of the innovations pioneered by Tanguy as he clad his work in a new verticality, radiating light and peopled with mysterious biomorphic forms (est. €600,000-800,000 / $824,000-1m).

Last but not least comes a work by André Masson, featuring one of his favourite subjects: Pygmalion (1938) from his Mythologies series. The painting highlights the confrontation between creation and destruction, and is laden with startling violence, foretelling imminent global conflagration and echoing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War then in progress. We are at the heart of the ‘paroxystic expressionism’ evoked by Masson – expressed here in an overpowering composition with tortuous lines and eye-battering use of colour (est. €350,000-450,000 /$480,700-618,000).