Corneille

Galerie Ariel, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

To be offered across the Contemporary Art Evening and Day sales, the homogenous group of works assembled in this Important Private Scandinavian Collection reunites some of the undisputed titans of the Post-War European avant-garde. Each in their own, idiosyncratic way Serge Poliakoff, Mariá-Helena Vieira da Silva, Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky and Corneille set the tenor and legitimacy of Ecole de Paris abstraction and Cobra modes of figurative expression, irrevocably altering the pace and direction of twentieth-century art.

Offered in the Evening sale, Poliakoff’s Verte au Cercle Rouge (lot 27) is the epitome of his declared aim of achieving Le Silence Complet – the stilling of commotion achieved by the harmonious balance between colour, form and proportion. While expressing the same concern for balance, Vieira da Silva’s Les Chemins IV (lot 28) adopts an alternative mode of abstraction: in contrast to Poliakoff’s solid, inscrutable, interlocking forms, Vieira da Silva’s linear abstraction, derived from architectural study, dematerialises space and perspective.

The group of works offered in the Day sale (lots 171-176) constitutes a cohesive group of masterpieces by the bastions of the Cobra movement. Tête, 1954 is a monument to Karel Appel’s anti-elitist, spontaneous application of materials, unhampered by anxieties about technique. With its boldly coloured, thick impasto erupting from the surface of the canvas, the naïve, childlike technique epitomised in Tête transcends the prevalent austere visual lexicon borne out of the sombre post-war atmosphere. Similarly, Alechinsky’s Le Nord exists as an antidote to melancholy: with its swirling, snake-like patterning, this dream-like image combines poetry with painting and experiments with all the techniques and theories prescribed by the movement to create a vibrant and enrapturing masterpiece.