Stories & Videos

Monet, Klimt, Picasso & More Impressionist and Modern Art Highlights

Launch Slideshow

The Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sale features an array of paintings and works on paper by the late 19th and early 20th century's most prominent artists. The auction will also offer a number of outstanding sculptures, led by Shaping a Legacy: Sculpture from the Finn Family Collection, a diverse and esteemed collection of modern sculpture amassed over more than 50 years. Must-see works include early portraits by Schiele and his mentor Klimt, as well as serene landscapes by Signac and Monet, including a work from the artist's iconic Nymphéas series. For a look at the remarkable works from our evening sale, click ahead.

Impressionist & Modern Art Evening
16 May | New York

Monet, Klimt, Picasso & More Impressionist and Modern Art Highlights

  • Egon Schiele, Danaë. Estimate $30,000,000–40,000,000.
    Painted in 1909 when the artist was just nineteen years old, Danaë is Egon Schiele’s first early masterpiece and an extraordinary example of his daring technique. Danaë introduces the artist’s iconic aesthetic, and epitomises the Jugendstil movement’s influence at the time. The composition also pays homage to Schiele’s informal mentor, Gustav Klimt, who championed the young artist throughout his career.

    View Auction
    Share
  • Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux nymphéas. Estimate $14,000,000–18,000,000.
    The selection of Impressionist pictures on offer this May are led by Claude Monet’s Le Bassin aux
 nymphéas, a powerful testament to the artist’s
 enduring creativity in his mature years. Monet’s paintings of his water lily 
pond at Giverny rank among the most celebrated
Impressionist works. Painted circa 1917-20, Le Bassin
aux nymphéas captures the famous pond that served 
as a boundless source of inspiration, providing the major themes that dominated his final decades. The enduring impact of these late paintings is evident in abstract works by artists including Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell and Gerhard Richter.

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Claude Monet, Vétheuil. Estimate $4,000,000–6,000,000.
    Monet’s Vétheuil is a stunning depiction of the artist’s hometown. This picturesque location was the site of some of Monet’s most successful Impressionist landscapes during this period and continued to fascinate him well into his late career. Painted in 1880, the work has descended within the same family collection since 1914. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition with Plane in Projection. Estimate $12,000,000–18,000,000.
    A strong group of early Abstract works are led by Kazimir 
Malevich’s Suprematist Composition with Plane in Projection of 
1915 – a prime example of the artist’s 
“Suprematist” paintings, which are extremely rare. Coined by the 
artist during his exhibition at the 0.10: Last Futurist Exhibition of
 Paintings in Petrograd in 1915 – in which the present work most
 likely hung – the term refers to Malevich’s fascination with the
impact of colour and form. For the exhibition, Malevich displayed 39
 paintings detached from figurative subject matter. The appearance
 of Suprematist Composition with Plane in Projection in our May auction is particularly timely: Malevich is a focus of the Royal Academy of Art’s recent exhibition Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Alberto Giacometti, Buste de Diego. Estimate $10,000,000– 15,000,000.
    Sculpture from the Finn Family Collection is led by Alberto Giacometti’s Buste de Diego, one of the artist’s most radical and engaging works. Measuring just over two feet in height, the work’s significant size contributes to its robust personification of the Existentialist movement during the contentious years of the Cold War. The bronze depicts one of Giacometti’s most frequent inspirations: his younger brother, Diego. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Diego Giacometti, Bibliothèque de l'île Saint-Louis. Estimate $2,000,000–3,000,000.
    Speaking of Diego: the May sale offers Diego Giacometti’s striking Bibliotheque de l’île Saint-Louis, one of the most important works of the artist’s career. Measuring over ten-and-a-half feet in height and twelve feet in length, the Bibliotheque de l’île Saint-Louis is among Giacometti’s largest-scale comissions. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Pablo Picasso, Tête d'homme. Estimate $8,000,000–12,000,000.
    Painted in 1969, about a week before his 88th birthday, Pablo Picasso’s self-portrait Tête d’homme was first exhibited in a one-man show that the artist curated himself in the hallowed halls of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Its grand scale, sweeping Gothic arches and quatrefoil windows were ideally suited to the great scale and impact of Picasso’s paintings from the period, including the present work. In many ways Tête d’homme epitomises Picasso’s obsession with and admiration for Vincent van Gogh, echoing several elements of that artist’s Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat from 1887. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Gustav Klimt, Dame im Fauteuil (Woman in An Armchair). Estimate $7,000,000–9,000,000.
    Painted in 1897-1898, Gustav Klimt’s Dame im Fauteuil (Woman in Armchair) is a rare example of the artist’s early portraiture. The work also illustrates his affiliation with the Symbolist painters of the late 19th century. The female sitter is swathed richly in a matching red dress and hat, her narrow waist belted in a deep green. The serenity and delicate pallour of her face is mirrored in the ghostly quality of the two outlined heads in the upper left of the composition. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Georges Braque, La Pianiste. Estimate $6,000,000–8,000,000.
    La Pianiste represents the pivotal moment in Georges Braque’s career when he synthesised his Cubist sense of space with the vibrant palette of his early Fauve years. Part of what is considered Braque’s first true series, and recognised as the beginning of his late period, La Pianiste is the only major example of this seminal group to remain in private hands. Other works from this series reside in the most important collections in the world: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Lyonel Feininger, Fin de séance. Estimate $6,000,000–8,000,000.
    Feininger made his debut into the world of avant-garde painting in Paris
 with the spectacular Fin de séance. The artist 
chose to include this impressive canvas in the annual Salon des
 Indépendants in the spring of 1911, where it hung alongside works by
 Matisse and Kandinsky, as well as the debut of Picasso and Braque’s 
revolutionary Cubist compositions. When Feininger moved to the United 
States in 1937 on the eve of the war, Fin de séance was one of
 approximately 50 works from his early oeuvre that he left in the care of
 an associate in Quedlinburg, Germany. It was not until 1984, nearly 30 years after his death, that the pictures were finally returned to Feininger’s heirs in the United States. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Paul Signac, Le Pin de Bertaud. Estimate $3,500,000–5,000,000.
    Works emerging from a distinguished private collection include Impressionist pictures by Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley and Pierre Bonnard, as well as an important early sculpture by Alexander Archipenko. The group is led by Signac’s Le Pin de Bertaud, a spectacular view of Saint-Tropez painted in 1899-1900 at the crescendo of his time as leader of the Neo-Impressionists. 

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
  • Edgar Degas, Le Ballet. Estimate $2,000,000–3,000,000.
    By the time Degas painted Le Ballet, he had been immersed in the world of opera and dance for at least twenty-five years. Much of his activity occurred backstage and his studies of training sessions in the classrooms and of numerous personalities from the company give a remarkably complete view of the workings of this complex organization. In Le Ballet four ballerinas are captured on point in brightly colored garb. Gliding in front of a painted backdrop with a landscape of rolling hills, the stage is separated from the viewer by the bulbous head of a cello.

    View Lot View Auction
    Share
/
Close