LONDON.- Helena Newman, Global Co-Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, said: “The three stars of the sale are these outstanding works by Picasso, Rodin and Modigliani that brought the art of portraiture into the modern era. Among the greatest works by these artists, they each explore in their own ground-breaking way the universal theme of the eternal feminine form. The lives and art of these giants of Modern art were inextricably linked with their relationship with women and the female form - as model, as muse, as lover, as inspiration - which runs through every aspect of their work.”

Pablo Picasso Inspiration
Cubism is considered to be Pablo Picasso’s most important contribution to Modern art, and Femme assise comes from the series of canvases that revolutionised Picasso’s working methods and established his path to Cubism. One of Picasso’s greatest Cubist portraits, Femme assise (estimated to fetch in excess of £30m) was painted in the summer of 1909 when Picasso travelled to his native Spain where he created a series of canvases based on the features of his lover Fernande Olivier, over a period described as ‘the most crucial and productive’ in the artist’s career.

Amedeo Modigliani Adoration
Painted as a loving tribute to the artist’s eternal muse, Jeanne Hébuterne (au foulard) (estimated to fetch in excess of £28m) reveals a tender moment between a pioneer in the world of modern art and his lover. One of the greatest portraits that Modigliani painted of her and the finest to come to the market in a decade, the painting provides a glimpse into one of the most poignant love stories in 20th-century art history. Jeanne met Modigliani in 1917, when she was a young art student, and for the next three years she was his constant companion and source of inspiration. Shortly after Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis Jeanne Hébuterne, inconsolable and reputedly heavily pregnant with the artist’s child, committed suicide by leaping from a window.

Auguste Rodin Temptation
From a series of sculptures considered to be among Rodin’s greatest achievement, his portrayal of the ultimate female icon, Eve, is strikingly modern in its expressive form, yet also looks back to the antique as well as taking inspiration from Michelangelo. Rodin’s Eve (est. £8-12m) is shown here in life-size glory in the moment of recognising humankind’s fallibility. Renowned as the original temptress, Eve is depicted here at the moment of the awakening of her self-awareness. This work was formerly in the collection of actor Sylvester Stallone, who owned other works by Rodin including the daring sculpture of Iris, messagère des dieux sold for £11.6m in Sotheby’s February 2016 Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, a record price for the artist. The sculpture of Eve is one of the earliest figures modelled for Rodin’s great project for La Porte de l’Enfer which he began work on in 1880, an official commission for a monumental door to grace the entrance to the planned building for the new museum of decorative arts in Paris.

FURTHER HIGHLIGHTS
Edvard Munch The Scream (Woll 38; Schiefler 32) lithograph on wove paper Executed in 1895. Estimate: £800,000-1,200,000
Munch’s The Scream has transcended art history to reach a global consciousness and his lithograph of 1895 led to the image becoming one of the most iconic of Modern art. This superb, richly inked impression is a rare graphic interpretation of one of the most iconic subjects in the history of art – using the simple yet stark black and white contrasts to reimagine Munch’s powerful and highly expressive themes. This work was originally owned by the Norwegian industrialist and collector Olaf Schou who acquired it directly from the artist around 1900 and has remained in his family collection until now.

Paul Gauguin Nature morte aux pommes oil on canvas Painted in 1890. Estimate: £2,200,000-2,800,000
Nature morte aux pommes epitomises Gauguin’s life-long search for the primitive and anticipates the bright, warm palette that would characterise his celebrated Tahitian landscapes and still-lifes. Gauguin was attracted to the genre of still-life as an emblem of a pristine past, free from the complications of modern civilised life. The work exemplifies an important shift to his unique PostImpressionist style, significantly influenced by Cézanne’s technique yet with his own vibrant, exotic quality.

Alfred Sisley Bords du loing oil on canvas Painted in 1892. Estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000
Painted on a bright day near Moret-sur-Loing, Bords du Loing is a beautiful depiction of a riverscape with the boatyard and trees reflected on the water's surface. Like many of Sisley’s works its calm atmosphere evokes the serenity of nature. The only suggestion of human activity is provided by the figure in the boat, whose calm movement down the river further emphasises a sense of tranquillity and harmony of man and nature. The local scenery offered a constant source of inspiration to the artist, who tried to capture the relationship between land, water and sky as well as the changing effects of light on his surroundings.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Un Jardin à Sorrente oil on canvas Painted in 1881. Estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000
At the end of October 1881 Renoir left France for Italy, struck by its unique luminous light. This works captures the atmosphere of the Mediterranean landscape of Sorrento – evoking the soft light and tonal harmonies to create a pastoral idyll that evokes Italy’s classical past.

René Magritte La Belle hérétique gouache on paper Executed in 1963 or 1964. Estimate: £800,000-1,200,000
La Belle hérétique is a captivating example of one of the central themes of Magritte’s art - that of unexpectedly juxtaposed objects seen in a generic, unidentified landscape. The everyday scene of a person sitting on a brick wall is rendered simultaneously comical and macabre, as the viewer is confronted with an image in which life has been turned into death. Magritte applied this theme to famous images from art history, using notions of life and death to bring together the absurd and the horrifying.

Georg Scholz Nächtlicher Lärm (Nightly Noise) oil on canvas Painted in 1919. Estimate £400,000 — 600,000
Scholz served in the First World War from the summer of 1915 until 1918, and was wounded just a few months before its end. Painted in 1919, this work reflects the horror and suffering he had witnessed during the war, as well as the violence and oppression during the years that followed in struggling Weimar Germany. Inspired by the quintessential Expressionist image, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Nächtlicher Lärm employs expressive, contrasted colours and sharp, violent shapes to convey the depth of human suffering and terror.

Joaquín Torres-García Peinture constructive oil on canvas Painted in 1931. Estimate: £600,000-800,000
Born in Uruguay, Joaquín Torres-García’s career spanned both the Americas and Europe. Moving to Barcelona in his late teens, he enrolled in art school, frequented the café Els Quatre Gats with artists such as Pablo Picasso and worked with Antonio Gaudí on the Sagrada Familia Cathedral. It wasn’t until 1926 that Torres-García arrived in Paris and formulated what he would come to call Universal Constructivism. Peinture constructive was painted in 1931 and belongs to this very fertile period when the vast amount of work, theory, study and movement crystallised into an overall structure. He did not abandon figurative form, but instead represented his repertoire of images and symbols – such as the sun, anchor, star, boat, building and fish - within a prominently geometrical grid-like structure.

Marc Chagall Deux têtes à la fenêtre gouache, pastel and wash on paper laid down on canvas Executed in 1955-56. Estimate: £250,000-350,000
'I have come to feel the relative righteousness of our ways, and the ridiculousness of anything that is not produced with one’s own blood, and one’s soul, and which is not saturated by love.'1

Deux têtes à la fenêtre reflects the new sense of security and romance that Chagall found with Valentine 'Vava' Brodsky, his second wife whom he married in 1952. An intimate embrace set against a sapphire blue night sky and a bouquet of flowers, the window backdrop sets the stage for a nocturnal scene in which the lovers’ faces glow even brighter than the crescent moon. The moon and flowers symbolise heaven and earth, balancing the composition from opposite corners, and converges on the embrace - a representation of eternal love conjured in Chagall’s unique artistic vision.

Wifredo Lam Fruits tropicaux oil on canvas Painted in 1969. Estimate: £650,000-850,000
A beguiling example of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam's distinctive and poetic form of expression, Fruits tropicaux is dominated by a figuration indebted both to Cubism and Surrealism. Lam arrived in Paris in the 1930s at a time when many modern artists were seeking inspiration from 'primitive' art – primarily African masks and statues. Picasso’s Cubist innovations were a source of inspiration to Lam’s work, as he explained ‘what made me feel such empathy with his painting, more than anything else, was the presence of African art and the African spirit that I discovered in it’2. Lam also met André Breton and became involved with his circle, absorbing both the visual aesthetic and the playful subversion of the Surrealists. When he returned to Cuba in 1941, Lam was able to engage with the prevailing interest in primitivism on a more personal level, rediscovering the environment and mythology of his native country. This experience was to have a profound effect on the artist; although he returned to Europe and ultimately settled in Paris in 1952, the Cuban spirit remained integral to his work.


1 Marc Chagall quoted in Jacob Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall, A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 179