CHRISTIE’S CELEBRATES THE ECLECTIC EYE OF THE TALENTED AND BELOVED KING OF CROONERS:ANDY WILLIAMS A group of works from the collection of crooner Andy Williams will be offered in the Evening and Day Sales, May 15th and 16th, and is expected to achieve in excess of $30 million.
work is haunted by the artist’s dark skeletal figure who emerges from a golden blaze into a flat sea of gray. With his ghostly face, illuminated halo, and upraised arms, Basquiat’s figure draws on the motifs of biblical imagery. With its raw energy and urban-primitive aesthetic, Furious Man acts as a wry commentary on the image of the noble-savage, illustrated by modernist masters like Pablo Picasso. Drawn in layers of wax crayon on paper, the work has an immediacy that matches its dramatic imagery.
Impressionist & Modern Art: New York 8-9 May 2013
“My first interest was French impressionist painting but of course I didn’t have any money. So, I bought prints, $2 or $5 a print. I was about 25 years old. I was early in my career… When I made a little bit of money, then I started to buy lithographs for $75. That’s how I could afford Picasso. But that is all I could afford. When I started to make money I started to buy pictures. But that was in the 60s.” Andy Williams.
Works by Paul Klee, Henry Moore, Alexander Archipenko, Egon Schiele and Pablo Picasso from the Andy Williams collection will be included in New York’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale this May. The highlight of this section is Picasso’s Figure Féminine Sur la Plage. Painted in 1927, the work coincides with an exhibition of drawings that ended on July 11, 1927 at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg in Paris—right before Picasso took his wife and son to the Côte d’Azur for their annual summer holiday. The artist quickly set up accommodations for his family, before returning to Paris for a clandestine meeting with his seventeen-year-old mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Back in Cannes, Picasso rendered Marie-Thérèse on the beach in a series of Bather drawings. Illustrated in a sculpturally volumetric manner using ink or pencil, these drawings filled two notebooks dated July 17 and September 11, 1927. Figure Féminine Sur la Plage may well be Picasso’s first painted version of the bather subject rendered in the surrealist figuration of the Métamorphoses drawings, which are characterized by oddly sensual bodily distortions, dislocations and visual double-entendres.
American Art: New York 23 May 2013
Six works from the Andy Williams’ collection will be included in May’s American Art sale, including two important paintings by Milton Avery, The Musicians, 1949 and Pale Flower, 1951. The success of Milton Avery's art lies in his ability to modernize a familiar domestic scene through his carefully orchestrated arrangement of color and pattern. He translates his subject matter into a unique lexicon of shapes and forms that fit together to create a cohesive composition. Painted in 1949, The Musicians was executed during the most critical period of Milton Avery's career. Indeed, his work from the mid-1940s incorporates the simplified, blocked forms for which he became known. In addition to their broad popular appeal, Avery's bold, abstracted shapes exerted an important influence on Post-War American painters, especially Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. His work also reflects
