S
otheby’s is pleased to announce its upcoming Paris Evening Auction, taking place on April 16th. This distinguished Evening Sale brings together a carefully curated selection of masterpieces from Claude Monet to Lucio Fontana, offering a compelling journey across more than a century of artistic innovation. From the rise of Impressionism and the European Avant-Garde to the Contemporary era, the auction provides a comprehensive perspective on artistic evolution and the enduring impulse to challenge and redefine established norms throughout art history.
"These works mark a milestone on the path toward the Nymphéas. In Les Îles de Port-Villez, as in Vétheuil, Effet du matin, Monet still clearly differentiates the elements, yet the water already draws attention through its chromatic richness and materiality. Gradually, he comes to paint nothing but the water itself, down to the fragment. Monet is the painter who would forge artistic modernity: he paints toward the future."
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Law Offices – Notary Public (1981) occupies a pivotal position within the artist’s production, marking the moment at which the language of the street was transposed into painting while preserving its immediacy and critical intensity. Executed in acrylic on a vinyl window blind, the work is both materially improvised and conceptually precise. It is presented at auction for the first time in the past 25 years.
With the exception of the Bible, foundational pillar of his artistic creation, Marc Chagall was always fascinated by the universe of the circus. It was a world he had discovered as a very young child in his hometown of Vitebsk, where the arrival of these traveling performers, who journeyed across all of Russia, evoked and summoned dreams and freedom. Throughout his long life, Chagall would always retain these figures of renewal, hope, and generosity.
In the 1950s, he created a masterful series of 38 gouaches and washes that would foreshadow the publication, in 1967 by Tériade, of the great illustrated book Circus (Cirque), published by Verve. A whole universe emerges, populated by tightrope walkers, jugglers, clowns in glittering costumes, trapeze artists, and animal tamers who advocate the reconciliation between the animal world and humankind. All of this unfolds through a creative genius that sets in motion “the great play of color,” as his friend André Malraux described it—along the paths of creation and poetry.
Jean-Louis Prat
In 1950s Italy, a generation of artists reduced the work of art to its most essential gesture, pushing the boundaries of what painting, sculpture and material could still signify. This private collection, gathered in the 1980s and animated by that same vision, offers a reading of rare coherence. It is built around a single impulse: that of artists who, confronted with the exhaustion of post-war artistic languages, radically redefined the possibilities of the work of art.
