Sotheby's Fall Sales of Impressionist and Modern Art Sotheby's Fall Sales of Impressionist and Modern Art To Be Held in New York on 4 & 5 November 2009
the present work. A trip to Morocco in 1910 transformed Van Dongen’s vision, foregrounding a brand of raw sensuality that intensified the original shock of Fauvism. “Van Dongen has a personal and violent sense of Orientalism”, as the poet Apollinaire observed the following year, “a painting often reeking of opium and amber”.
Barques au port de Collioure by André Derain is a seminal Fauvist landscape executed during the summer of 1905 when Derain joined Henri Matisse in Collioure, a coastal town on the Spanish border, and the artists spent two months working side by side (est. $6/8 million). The dazzling effect of light is captured in brushstrokes of pure, primary tones. Derain has rendered the port with broad strokes of juxtaposed complementary color contrasts. The treatment of a single object, such as a boat, in a number of contrasting colors, is a feature that characterizes Derain's style of this period; taking the Impressionist rendering of the effect of light to its extreme. Six works from the collections of renowned philanthropist and
patron of the arts Dr. Arthur M. Sackler, will be offered in the Evening Sale, including Wassily Kandinsky's stunning Krass und Mild (Dramatic and Mild), one of the greatest Bauhaus-period works to have appeared at auction in decades (est. $6/8 million). Painted in May 1932, during Kandinsky's final months at the Bauhaus, the canvas is a visual symphony of geometry and color. Krass und Mild was purchased by Dr. Sackler in Sotheby's historic sale of Fifty Paintings by Wassily Kandinsky from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1964. (Separate release available)
Classic Impressionism
Seven paintings from the Durand-Ruel Family encompass works by a number of the Impressionist masters that legendary art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel represented -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. All but one work were acquired by Durand-Ruel directly from the artists and all have remained in the family ever since. This direct line from the great champion of Impressionism is a truly impeccable provenance. Three works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir will be offered including Femme au Chapeau Blanc which belongs to a series of oils that Renoir completed in the early 1890s of young women wearing elaborate chapeaux (est. $2.5/3.5 million). (Separate release available) Another classic Impressionist work from a private Belgian collection is Claude Monet’s Clématites (est. $2.5/3.5 million). Painted in Monet's garden at Giverny in the summer of 1887, the present work belongs to a series of paintings in which flowers dominate the picture space to the exclusion of any sort of landscape or contextualizing background. In its scale and focus, the present painting prefigures the artist's later fascination with waterlilies. The single-minded concentration on leaf and petal spread out across the picture plane provides a precedent for the waterlily compositions, leading ultimately to the dissolution of form by light and color which led Monet to the limits of abstraction.
One of Edgar Degas’ finest racing pictures, Avant la course, painted circa 1882-88 will also be offered (est. $4/6 million). The artist’s exploration of
