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Impressionist & Modern Art

Works by Renoir, Chagall, Picabia, Picasso and Other Important 20th Century Artists

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The Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale on 20 June in London features a selection of remarkable works by Pablo Picasso, of which a 1967 canvas is a prime example, and works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin. The sale also includes works by Chaïm Soutine, a vibrant example of Francis Picabia’s Monster series and a cubist still-life by the Modernist master Georges Braque, as well as an abstract work on paper by the leader of the Russian avant-garde Wassily Kandinsky. An exceptional collection of Alfred Kubin works, restituted to the heirs of Max and Hertha Morgenstern by the Lenbacchaus in Munich are also included in the sale. Click the image above to view the slideshow. Click the image above to view the slideshow.

Past Auction
Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale
20 June 2019 | 10:30 AM BST | London

Works by Renoir, Chagall, Picabia, Picasso and Other Important 20th Century Artists

  • Chaïm Soutine, La Femme au col rouge, circa 1929.
    Estimate £700,000–1,000,000.
    Property from an Important Private Collection

    La Femme au col rouge exemplifies the extraordinary talents of Chaïm Soutine, one of the most innovative portraitists of the early twentieth century who turned to everyday people as a source of inspiration for his most successful works. Painted circa 1929, the present work epitomises Soutine's portraiture of the middle-and late-1920s which is characterised by expressiveness of pose, rhythmically charged brushstrokes and strong colour contrasts.
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  • Marc Chagall, Jour et nuit, 1945.
    Estimate £450,000–650,000.
    Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

    Painted in 1945 during his exile in America, Jour et nuit is Chagall’s poignant ode to love, loss and longing. Figures from Chagall’s famed pictorial iconography populate this sombre, moon-lit scene, yet his enduring motifs appear evolved, reflecting the artist’s recent loss of his beloved wife Bella. Even within the context of a subdued twilight, the vision of le Coq au nuit illustrates Chagall’s skill as a master colourist.
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  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Au bord de la rivière (La Seine), circa 1890.
    Estimate £400,000–600,000.
    Property from a Distinguished Private European Collection

    Renoir’s Au bord de la rivière (La Seine), circa 1890, is a remarkably assured landscape, exuding a luminous quality which captures the myriad effects of light and shade. Abandoning his previous smooth brushstrokes, Renoir returns to the vibrant technique of small touches and creates a serene and evocative vision which embodies the fresh spontaneity of the artist’s later plein-air painting.
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  • Marc Chagall, L'Ane au violoncelle ou Cirque au soleil ou Variante du "Cirque sur fond noir"
    – recto Esquisse non retenue pour la Commedia dell'Arte
    – verso, 1969, recto, 1958, verso.
    Estimate £400,000–600,000.
    Property from a Private Collection, New York

    The present work is a cacophony of colour, filled with Chagall’s most emblematic characters, each contending for the attention of the viewer. For Chagall, the circus was the captivating conduit between the tangible world that encircled him and the hyper-reality of his pictorial world. The jugglers, acrobats, flying fish and musical cockerels that Chagall depicted throughout his career are a vivid metaphor for the life he had decided to lead.
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  • Francis Picabia, Couple amoureux, circa 1925-26.
    Estimate £400,000–600,000.
    Property from a Private European Collection

    Executed circa 1925-26, Couple amoureux belongs to one of the most celebrated series of works in Francis Picabia’s œuvre: the Monstres. Dubbed the ‘Monster’ paintings by Marcel Duchamp, Picabia was unrestrained by the rules of human and animal anatomy and created fantastical deformations and distortion of features that were unlike anything that came before. The artist uses warm pink tones to emphasise the couple’s passionate aura, while the graphic elements in the background situate the silhouettes within a pastoral landscape.
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  • Pablo Picasso, La Parade, 1970.
    Estimate £350,000–450,000.
    Property from a Private Swiss Collection

    Virulent and light-hearted, the playful vitality of La Parade, created when Picasso was in his eighties, paradoxically reflects the artist’s waning youth and vigour and the time he collaborated with the Ballet Russes in 1917. For the ballet La Parade Picasso produced a magnificent Cubist stage and a neoclassical curtain. Executed in pencil, Picasso creates a strange cast of extravagantly thespian characters, giving La Parade a striking individuality; it has the spontaneity of a whimsical drawing but is coupled with a rare breadth of decorative vision.
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  • Wassily Kandinsky, Ohne Titel (671) (Untitled (671)), 1940.
    Estimate £180,000–250,000.
    Property from a Private Italian Collection

    Executed in 1940, Ohne Titel (671) is an elegant gouache infused with the vibrancy and musicality characteristic of Kandinsky’s mature Parisian period. Escaping the great uncertainty and austerity which riddled Paris throughout the Second World War, the artist immersed himself in the spiritual reassurances of the visual form. The present work reflects his inventive pictorial language which expounds that colour itself cannot stand alone but must rely on geometry.
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  • After Fernand Léger, Les Trois femmes, executed before 1990.
    Estimate £180,000–250,000.
    Property from a Private Collection

    Fernand Léger relished the exploration of different mediums on a large scale and Les Trois Femmes displays the artist’s passion for working beyond the studio and his ludic relationship with scale, colour, light and form. Reflecting the artist’s training as an architect, the bold, brightly coloured and graphic representations of the three figures in the present work also allude to the hallmarks of the pop lexicon.
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  • Auguste Rodin, Le Baiser, réduction no. 3, conceived 1886.
    Estimate £200,000–300,000.
    Property from a Private Collection

    One of the most celebrated sculptures in Western art, Baiser Réduction, No. 3 shows the ill-fated lovers from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno - Paolo and Francesca - who were banished for their adulterous passion and doomed to spend eternity in an embrace. The viewer becomes immersed in the spiralling rhythms of the entwined bodies and the sensuous finish of smooth limbs against the pitted rock. The work’s pertinence to Rodin’s contemporaries was immediate and its continued relevance in today’s visual culture has solidified the sculpture’s legacy.
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  • Alfred Kubin, Die Todesstunde (The Hour of Death), 1900.
    Estimate £100,000–150,000.
    Property Restituted to the Heirs of Max and Hertha Morgenstern
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  • Pablo Picasso, Le Peintre. Buste de profil, 1967.
    Estimate £1,000,000–1,500,000.
    Property from a Private Swiss Collection

    This intimate depiction of a handsomely-bearded gentleman painted in 1967 is from the dashing musketeer series that Picasso undertook in the 1960s. Le Peintre, Buste de profil does not relinquish his vital identity as a painter but creates an inner world without boundaries, time or place, a direct reaction to his old age, where psychical delight in the real world was sadly diminishing. Brimming with painterly verve and stylish invention, the spontaneous brushstrokes are manipulated in order to present a person with a startingly vivid presence.
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