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Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art | New York Fall 2019

Explore Highlights from New York's November Auctions

New York | 12 – 15 November
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D iscover works from Sotheby's premier autumn Impressionist and Modern Art Sales and Contemporary Art Auctions in New York. Taking place from 12 – 15 November, the auctions feature a stunning array of paintings, works on paper and sculpture by leading artists of the late-19th century up through the present day.

Works from the sales are currently on display at Sotheby's New York public exhibition.

Explore Highlights from New York's November Auctions

  • Paul Signac, La Corne d'Or (Constantinople), 1907
    Estimate $14,000,000 – 18,000,000

    When Signac first traveled to the city of Istanbul in the spring of 1907, he was immediately struck by both the grandeur and history of the place, and the unique quality of light and color that filled the ancient city. The artist returned to France with a series of tantalizing canvases on the subject, the largest and most flamboyant of which is La Corne d'Or (Constantinople). When Signac painted the current work, he was in the midst of further developing his artistic style beyond the strict tenets of Divisionism – he liberated his color palette, daring to blend the pure pigments seen in earlier works, and broadened his approach while retaining the main characteristics of Divisionism through his pointed application of brushstrokes.
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  • Jack Whitten, Black Monolith, VII Du Bois Legacy: For W.E. Burghardt, 2014
    Estimate $800,000 – 1,000,000

    Black Monolith, VII Du Bois Legacy: For W.E. Burghardt is among Jack Whitten’s Black Monolith series, in which he pays homage to significant African-American figures who made significant contributions – culturally, politically, or artistically – to American history. In addition to W.E.B. Du Bois, who is memorialized in the present work, other heroes of the Black Monolith series include James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Jacob Lawrence and Maya Angelou.
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  • Pablo Picasso, Nature morte à la tête classique et au bouquet de fleurs, 1933
    Estimate $5,000,000 – 7,000,000

    Nature morte à la tête classique et au bouquet de fleurs is among the finest of a small group of highly-worked watercolors and gouaches on this subject executed during the summer of 1933 while Picasso was on holiday in Cannes with his wife Olga and his young son Paolo. Held for decades in the collection of the famed Surrealist poet and patron Edward James, the present work eloquently speaks to James’s keen eye for the most ethereal and dreamlike compositions of the avant garde.
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  • Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brown Eggs, 1981
    Estimate $2,500,000 – 3,500,000

    The explosive mark-making and scrawls across the surface of Brown Eggs emphatically testify to the equally fierce artistic drive that propelled Basquiat’s meteoric rise to unprecedented success during his breakout year. Executed in 1981, Brown Eggs exemplifies a selection of drawings that, in their haunting and unique renderings of skull-like heads, powerfully embody the extraordinary intensity, focus, and drive which fueled Basquiat at this pivotal moment in his burgeoning career. The work was executed at a turning point in the artist’s short but prolific career: in February of the same year, the artist was included in the multi-disciplinary show New York/New Wave at MoMA P.S.1 in Queens, marking beginning of the artist’s transition from the streets to galleries, to museums, and eventually, into the highest echelons of the international art world.
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  • Joaquín Torres-García, Constructivo en blanco y negro (Inti), 1938
    Estimate $2,00,000 – 3,000,000

    Painted in 1938, Constructivo en blanco y negro (Inti) is one of the best-known and most-exhibited of Torres-García’s works. Created in the period of Torres-García’s career after his return to Uruguay in 1934, the genesis of Inti was bracketed by the founding of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (AAC) in 1935 and the organization of the Taller Torres-García (TTG) in 1943. From 1937 onwards, Torres-García was involved in his “Indo-American project,” concerned with separating his version of contructivist abstraction—which he called Universal Constructivism—from its European origins (which included the influences of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.) As a part of this program, Torres-García began incorporating motifs derived from the art and architecture of pre-Columbian civilizations, particularly those of the Andes – here, the architectonic, rigorously geometric structure of Inti relates closely to the city-plan grid of the Inca fortress Sacsayhuamán, with its precision-cut massive stones and geometric portals, and the title of the work refers to the Andean sun god, who protected the Inca empire and was thought to be the ancestor of the Inca rulers.
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  • Kees van Dongen, La Femme au chapeau, circa 1911
    Estimate $2,000,000 – 3,000,000

    Completed at the beginning of a new era for the artist, Van Dongen’s La Femme au chapeau is a pioneering portrait which embodies fauvist ideals. The work has inspired wide esteem and a slew of eminent admirers, including the late Nelson Rockefeller, who acquired the painting in 1966. In 1980, Rockefeller bequeathed the work to The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it resided for more than two decades; so beloved was this work that upon gifting this canvas to MoMA, Rockefeller commissioned a reproduction of the painting from Paul Kiehart which was later passed down through the Rockefeller family.
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  • Francis Bacon, Pope, circa 1958
    Estimate $6,000,000 – 8,000,000

    Pope from circa 1958 broadcasts Francis Bacon’s most celebrated and recognizable iconography, which today remains one of the most pertinent, universal, and affecting visions in the history of art. Executed during the years of Bacon’s tumultuous romance with Peter Lacy, the work is one of just six surviving canvases the artist painted in Tangier; of the other five, one work resides in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the other four belong to esteemed private collectors worldwide. Having remained in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum for nearly forty years, Pope is a rare exemplar of Bacon’s signature style and marks a critical historical moment in his storied career.
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  • Rufino Tamayo, La Máscara roja, 1940
    Estimate $4,000,000 – 6,000,000

    Rufino Tamayo’s La Máscara roja of 1940 is a foundational and key manifestation of the artist’s mature and signature style. It is a breakthrough painting that signals a departure from the artist’s earlier densely packed figurative works and announces a transition to a new more sparse, yet intensely colored hieratic style focusing on isolated figures. Richly brushed, delicate surfaces accentuate the sense of geometric forms and tactility within the composition. Creating his own new formal language, Tamayo synthesizes formal elements from pre-Columbian, folk and international modern art to create evocative figures. Throughout his oeuvre, Tamayo often used music as one among many elements that make reference to the senses – here, Instruments and song provide the means to visualize sound and touch (the strings of the mandolin). Music also served as a cipher for the painter’s practice, a trope found in much modernist painting, most famously in Picasso’s takes on the subject.
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  • Richard Prince, Park Avenue Nurse, 2002
    Estimate $5,00,000 – 7,000,000

    Immersed in a sensual haze of midnight blue dispelling into ashen white, Richard Prince’s Park Avenue Nurse is a powerful example of the American artist’s celebrated series of Nurse Paintings (2002-2008). The striking protagonist of the present work is at once seductive and anarchistic, alluring and aloof, encapsulating Prince’s complex conceptual project which has long sought to challenge and subvert notions of authorship, authenticity and identity in art through his signature technique of appropriation.
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  • Claude Monet, Charing Cross Bridge, 1903
    Estimate $20,000,000 – 30,000,000

    Steeped in fog and glowing, reflected light, the Charing Cross railway bridge emerges in this luminous composition from Monet's renowned London series—the most prolific painting campaign of the artist’s career. The present Charing Cross Bridge exudes lighter, ephemeral qualities, the paint strokes and reflections grounded only in the architecture of the horizontal bar of the bridge and its massive vertical pilings supporting it from underneath. Two trains move rapidly across, billowing great clouds of steam from their engines, tinged with reflections from the river and the sky, while boats at lower left and center faintly hint at the bustling traffic of the waterway.
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  • Kerry James Marshall, Vignette 19, 2014
    Estimate $6,500,000 – 7,500,000

    Exploding with chromatic brilliance and sensational verve, Kerry James Marshall’s Vignette 19 is the supreme embodiment of the artist’s unparalleled renegotiation of the Western art historical canon. A lush and decadent love saga, the present work explores and celebrates the ordinary romance of three black couples and in doing so, demonstrates the glaring absence of black figures from the history of Western painting.
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  • Remedios Varo, L’École buissonnière (hacienda novillos), 1962
    Estimate $800,000 – 1,200,000

    The remarkable creativity evidenced in the work of Remedios Varo stands as some of the most significant contributions to the story of Surrealism. The complex matrix of influences that serve as the foundational architecture and iconography for her paintings—from medieval history and Greek mythology to scientific reason and alchemy, nature, and pagan practices—is uniquely her own. L’École buissonnière (haciendo novillos) embodies Varo’s lifelong pursuit for freedom and ascension to a world of special, divine knowledge. Literally translating to “school in the bush”, and colloquially as “playing hooky”, Varo presents us with a youth who has snuck away to the forest in pursuit of accessing the secret connections between the human and otherworldly.
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  • Joan Miró, Peinture, 1952
    Estimate $3,00,000 – 4,000,000

    Miró's luminous Peinture is a work of exceptional creative achievement. Painted at the beginning of a new era in modern art, it is one of the artist's finest canvases from his post-war production. Executed in 1952 and exhibited at Pierre Matisse's gallery in New York the following year, it captures the whimsy and flight of fancy that characterized Miró's best paintings, but the picture itself also presents a mix of poetic lyricism, radical abstraction and semiotic complexity that was groundbreaking among the avant-garde during this period and typical of his finest work.
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  • Jean-Michel Basquiat, Famous Negro Athletes, 1981
    Estimate $2,500,000 – 3,500,000

    Held in Glenn O’Brien’s personal collection since its execution in 1981, Famous Negro Athletesserves as enduring testament to the creative partnership forged between Jean-Michel Basquiat and O’Brien over the course of the 1980s. O’Brien writes: “One day, I walked by the tire store near my apartment and there was a huge mural with three angry black faces and the legend ‘FAMOUS NEGRO ATHLETES,’ When I saw [Basquiat] later, I said: ‘That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.’ The next day he brought me one on paper.” (Glenn O’Brien in Exh. Cat., Ontario, Art Gallery of Ontario, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, 2015, p. 175)
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  • Kerry James Marshall, Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare), 2013
    Estimate $2,500,000 – 3,500,000

    Revealing a figure at once electric and elusive, commanding and alluring, sensuous and serene, Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare) from 2013 is a resounding testament to the poise, intellect, and extraordinary formal prowess of Kerry James Marshall’s celebrated oeuvre. Exemplifying Marshall’s remarkable reappraisal of traditional portrait painting, the present work typifies the artist’s career-spanning commitment to rewriting the tenets of race and representation: within the present work, the exquisitely rendered figure of Small Pin-Up (Lens Flare) confronts a legacy of glaring absence within Western visual culture through the celebratory and unapologetic insertion of black female subjectivity.
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  • Joan Miró, Personnage dans la nuit, 1960, reworked 1980
    Estimate $2,200,000 – 2,800,000

    A striking example of Miró's late work, Personnage dans la nuit features the characteristic iconography that occupied the artist throughout his career. Executed with a technical assurance and the economy of pictorial means typical of the last decades of his life, the work at once reconciles the artist’s early embodiments of "anti-painting," his elegant starry arrangements, later forays into deep abstraction and the final resolution of bold color against brilliant white grounds.
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  • Wayne Thiebaud, Encased Cakes, 2010/2011
    Estimate $6,000,000 – 8,000,000

    A captivating example of Wayne Thiebaud’s singular painterly exploration of the American psyche, Encased Cakes from 2010/2011 allures not only in the lusciously delectable pastries it offers, but also in its sumptuous use of color and masterful command of brushstroke and shadow. First devised in 1961 at the onset of Thiebaud’s artistic career and periodically revisited, the confectionery motif has continued to charm over the course of the artist's career. Thiebaud's culinary compositions retain a nuanced dialogue with art history while deftly capturing the spirited exuberance and prosperity of 1960s America, while his masterful articulation of light and shadow imbue this composition with an unshakable sense of nostalgia.
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  • Gustave Caillebotte, Richard Gallo et son chien Dick, au Petit Gennevilliers, 1884
    Estimate $18,000,000 – 25,000,000

    Rich in crystalline blues and verdant greens under demure skies, Richard Gallo et son chien Dick, au Petit Gennevilliers presents one of the finest syntheses of Impressionist techniques and portraiture, and captures Gustave Caillebotte's dear friend and most frequently painted figural subject, Richard Gallo. A seamless blend of the traditional academic genre of landscape and portraiture, the work embodies the Impressionist exaltation of light, leisure and the fleeting moment, while recalling the Parisian cityscapes of Caillebotte’s earlier career.
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  • David Hockney, Yves-Marie in the Rain, 1973
    Estimate $8,000,000 – 12,000,000

    An exquisite rendering of his dear friend and lover Yves-Marie Hervé walking over the Pont des Arts to the Louvre Museum on a rainy afternoon in Paris, David Hockney’s Yves-Marie in the Rain from 1973 brilliantly captures the remarkable specificity and profound psychological depth that Hockney brings to his very best portraits. Articulated with a clean, economical use of detail, the work beautifully exemplifies Hockney’s ability to suffuse his paintings with an intangible sense of atmospheric place surpassing the formal qualities of the painting itself, here the romance of a rainy Paris afternoon and the introspective solitude of his subject Yves-Marie.
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  • Wifredo Lam, Au Commencement de la Nuit (Bonjour Monsieur Lam), 1959
    Estimate $700,000 – 900,000

    Like its famous namesake La Rencontre (Bonjour M. Courbet), in which Courbet depicts himself meeting friend and collector Alfred Buyas and his valet, M. Calas, on the road, Au Commencement de la Nuit (Bonjour Monsieur Lam) is a self-portrait. Painted in 1959, at the height of the artist’s mature period, it represents an exegesis of a critical moment from the artist’s early childhood in which he was awoken in the night by a bat darting through his room in a flash of light. A testament to Lam’s technical mastery, this work executed on burlap exhibits the rich darkness and rhythmic composition characteristic of his mature period.
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  • Charles White, Ye Shall Inherit the Earth, 1953
    Estimate $500,000 – 700,000

    Maternal and tender, heroic and harrowing, Charles White’s beautiful Ye Shall Inherit the Earth from 1953 is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s iconic, socially committed output. Gazing out at the audience with a quiet dignity, White’s totemic figure clutches her child to her breast, her left hand draped protectively over his head; while her pose suggests the statuesque solemnity of a Madonna, the figure is rendered in soft shades of charcoal, allowing sinuous lines, gentle highlights and the smooth grisaille palette to imbue the work with a restrained elegance and beauty.
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  • Fernando Botero, Rape of Europa (Abduction of Europa), 1992
    Estimate $1,800,000 – 2,500,000

    From the beginning of his artistic career over six decades ago, Fernando Botero has drawn inspiration from historical sources ranging from Roman and Greek classical sculpture to Renaissance and Baroque painting. In this formal masterpiece of composed volume and mass, Botero reimagined the story of Europa, giving her the agency to control her fate. No longer a victim, she is revealed as a powerful participant rejoicing in her choices.
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  • Robert Gober, The Split-up Conflicted Sink, 1985
    Estimate $4,500,000 – 6,500,000

    Executed between 1983 and 1986, Robert Gober’s sink sculptures comprise the artist’s first significant body of work and endure as among his most iconic, eloquently encapsulating the artist’s radical interdisciplinary practice. Surrealist in its ludicrous contortions and manipulation of the familiar object, The Split-up Conflicted Sink is a particularly evocative and rare example from a limited suite of just six ‘slanted sink’ sculptures, in which the washboard element has been stretched out and mounted to the wall at a diagonal slope, with the basin elements situated uselessly at the end of the slanted planes, such that any water would simply spill out. The five other ‘slanted sinks’ reside in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Goetz Collection in Munich, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and an esteemed private collection.
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  • Eugène Boudin, Venise, Il Campanile, Le Palais ducal, 1895
    Estimate $600,000 – 800,000

    Venise, Il Campanile, Le Palais ducal is one of the seventy-five paintings and sketches Boudin produced during a two-month stay in Venice in 1895. The work alludes to some of the artist’s previous compositions of northern port cities such as Camaret, Trouville and Antwerp, yet in the present work clusters of gondola riders take the place of the fashionable groups of men and women populating the beaches of Boudin’s earlier canvases.
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  • Roy Lichtenstein, Dr. Waldmann, 1979
    Estimate $4,000,000 – 6,000,000

    A stunning depiction and emblematic portrait from Roy Lichtenstein’s corpus of German Expressionist-inspired paintings, Dr. Waldmann represents the ultimate crescendo of the artist’s pioneering investigation into the nature of painting itself throughout the 20th century. Fixing the viewer with an intense gaze that is utterly elusive, the subject of the present work, Dr. Waldmann, embodies the crystallization of Lichtenstein’s engagement with the enduring genre of portraiture. The work has been widely exhibited at esteemed museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Seattle Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Fort Worth Art Museum.
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  • Fernand Léger, Paysage animé, 1921
    Estimate $1,200,000 – 1,800,000

    A master of balance and harmonious tension, Léger set himself apart from other avant-garde artists in the early 1920s with a revolutionary new genre born from the tensions of the past and future. The epitome of Léger’s nuanced and genre-bending work from this period, Paysage animé presents itself at the crux of figuration and abstraction, suspended between the alternating yet cohesive worlds of modernity and classicism.
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  • Joseph Cornell, Soap Bubble Set, 1948
    Estimate $1,800,000 – 2,500,000

    Richly symbolic and deeply deliberate, Joseph Cornell’s work can be understood as metaphorical models that balance visual allusions to these myriad inspirations with allegorical and connotative references. In Soap Bubble Set, Cornell arranged carefully chosen items against the backdrop of an antique lunar map, the roundness of the moon suggesting the titular spherical soap bubble. For Cornell, these bubbles symbolized the relationship between science and imagination, as well as recalling the vocabulary of vanitas and the transience of worldly life.
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  • Vincent van Gogh, Paysan brûlant de mauvaises herbes, 1883
    Estimate $600,000 – 800,000

    In the fall of 1883, van Gogh left The Hague to spend three months in the rural Dutch province of Drenthe – it was a brief but deeply impactful chapter in his early career as an artist. Paysan brûlant de mauvaises herbes was completed the same year, and shows the clear influence of the Dutch Old Masters in the choice of palette and subject matter. A related sketch for the present lot features in a letter van Gogh wrote to Theo in mid-October of 1883, in which he describes the weed-burner and writes, “the vastness of the plain and the gathering dusk, and the small fire with the wisp of smoke is the only point of light.”
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  • Georg Baselitz, Sterne im Fenster, 1982
    Estimate $5,000,000 – 7,000,000

    One of a group of eight 98-inch square paintings executed by Georg Baselitz for the seminal Zeitgeist exhibition in 1982, the remainder of which are housed in institutional and prestigious private collections worldwide, Sterne im Fenster epitomizes the revolutionary physicality and compositional intelligence of the artist’s work from the 1980s. The work evinces a savage beauty, as well as the conceptual rigor that characterizes the very best of Baselitz’s oeuvre. Included in some of the artist’s most important exhibitions, including his pivotal 1995-96 traveling retrospective starting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Sterne im Fenster is a literal upending of the figurative tradition that creates a unique relationship between subject and style.
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  • Pierre Bonnard, Pêches, 1916
    Estimate $600,000 – 800,000

    Shortly after its execution, Pêches made its way into the collection of Dr Emil Hahnloser, one of Bonnard’s most supportive patrons in the early twentieth century. The painting has remained with the Hahnloser family since its acquisition circa 1920, and this auction debut marks its first appearance on the market in 100 years. The artist's command of his imaginative palette is on full display in the work: subtle variations of yellows, oranges and purples on the surface of the fruit give them a convincing texture while the nearly abstract depictions of the background and table foreshadows the way Color Field artists would employ planes of color in their canvases.
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  • Jesús Rafael Soto, Double écriture noir et vert, 1966
    Estimate $800,000 – 1,00,000

    Double écriture noir et vert is one of the earliest and most complex examples from Jesús Rafael Soto’s heralded Écriture series to appear at auction. Executed in 1966, Double écriture represents the most definitive and triumphant example of Soto’s fully-formed kinetic vocabulary; for him, the Écriture series was the apex of expressive perfection. Having surpassed the confines of Neo-Plasticism, which Soto conceded as the only valid point of inception for significant and historical painting, he reaches a personal and original language with Double écriture noir et vert, one influenced by music’s relational structure, its codification of sound and temporality to create a phenomena of illusion.
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