본문 바로가기


조회 수 1126 댓글 0

Highest Total for Any Auction Ever Staged in London

d
Impressionist, Modern & Surrealist Art Evening Sales
Total 
£194.7m / $240.8m / €227.6m

 

Led by Gustav Klimt’s Luminous Bauerngarten
- Third Highest Price for Any Work Sold At Auction in Europe -

 

5 Lots Sold for over £10 Million -

 

_TF24389

 

Helena Newman, Global Co-Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department & Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said: 
Tonight’s outstanding result is a new benchmark for London sales as much as it is a statement on the momentum of the global art market in 2017. The success of tonight’s sale lies in reading the market to know what buyers are looking for, and Sotheby’s having been entrusted by our clients with extraordinary works. This, combined with the pent up market demand for works of such extraordinary calibre, propelled global buying in our saleroom – particularly from Asia –  and it was wonderful to experience on the rostrum.”


Sotheby’s London, 1 March 2017: Sotheby’s Evening Sales of Impressionist & Modern Art and Surrealist Art at Sotheby’s London totalled £194,753,500 (est. £150.3-197.6m) – an increase of 108% (GBP) / 78.5% (USD) from the equivalent sale last year – with a sell-through rate of 88.9%.

 

The night was led by Gustav Klimt’s rare masterpiece Bauerngarten, which was competed for by four bidders to sell for £48m / $59.3m / €56.1m – the third highest price for any work ever sold at auction in Europe* and a record price for a landscape by the artist. One of the greatest works by the artist ever to appear at auction, Bauerngarten of 1907 came to the market tonight having remained in a private collection since 1994 and was most recently exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art London in the highly acclaimed ‘Painting the Modern Garden’ exhibition. A further work by Klimt, Girl in the Foliage saw heated bidding and doubled its high-estimate selling for £4m / $5.3m (est. £1.2-1.8m) to the Gustav Klimt Vienna 1900 foundation.

 

A further highlight of the sale was Pablo Picasso’s Plant de tomates of 1944, which was hotly contested by four bidders and soared above its high-estimate to sell for £17m / $21.1m / €19.9m (est. £10-15m). Painted days before the Liberation of Paris, his series of five paintings of a tomato plant in the apartment he shared with Marie-Thérèse are ripe with personal, political and cultural significance. This is the most complex and visually striking example of the most sought-after series of the war period. Last sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1976 for $198,000, the work had been in a private collection for four decades. The total achieved for eight works by Picasso over the course of the evening was £54.7m / $67.7m (est. £35.6m-51m), with three of these selling for above £10 millionincluding the monumental Femme nue assise, which sold for £13.7m / $16.9m (est. £9.5-12.5m).


Third Highest Price for Any Work Ever Sold in Europe 
Achieved Tonight at Sotheby’s London

KLIMT’S LUMINOUS FLOWER GARDEN SETS RECORD FOR A LANDSCAPE 

BY THE ARTIST AT £47.9 MILLION

 

RECORD FOR A STILL-LIFE BY PICASSO AT £17 MILLION

 

IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN ART SALE STILL ONGOING
WITH ALMOST £120 MILLION SOLD WITHIN FIRST HOUR

 

Third Highest Price For a Work Sold at Any Auction House in Europe*
FOUR BIDDERS COMPETE TO BRING KLIMT’S BAUERNGARTEN 

TO £47,971,250 / $59,321,248
The top lot of tonight’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art is Gustav Klimt’s Bauerngarten 
– one of the greatest works by the artist ever to appear at auction


PLANT DE TOMATES IS HOTLY CONTESTED BY FOUR BIDDERS
SOARING ABOVE ESTIMATE TO £17,033,750 / $21,063,935
Painted days before the Liberation of Paris, Picasso’s visually striking symbol of resilience and hope

MODIGLIANI’S POWERFUL INTROSPECTIVE PORTRAIT OF BARANOWSKI 
BRINGS £16,021,250 / $19,811,878

GAUGUIN’S SUBLIME DEPICTION OF TAHITI SELLS FOR £8,371,250/ $10,351,888

**Sotheby's Evening Sales of Impressionist & Modern and Surrealist Art Continue Now**
Watch the Sale Live

Please click here for a selection of gallery and press call photographs featuring these auction highlights – captions below.

 

A full press release including further auction records will be distributed after the close of the sale.

Further information on each of the works below.
PRE-SALE PRESS RELEASE

 

Follow Us on Twitter @sothebys for Updates

 

See the Full List of Results from Tonight's Impressionist & Modern Art and Surrealist Art Auctions Here

 

* Following: 
   Giacometti, Walking Man I - £65,001,250 (sold at Sotheby’s London, February 2010)

   Rubens, The Massacre of the Innocents - £49,506,648 (sold at Sotheby’s London, July 2002)

 

Gustav Klimt’s Bauerngarten (1907)

 

Among the finest works by Gustav Klimt ever to come to auction, Bauerngarten was painted during the golden period of Klimt’s career and was a highlight of the critically acclaimed ‘Painting the Modern Garden’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last year. This important and profoundly beautiful work was offered at auction for the first time in over two decades. 

 

Landscapes are integral to Klimt’s oeuvre, revealing a more personal and experimental side to his painting that differs from his portraits, which were, for the most part, commissions. The inspiration forBauerngarten was found in the rustic garden of a local farmer, with its informal profusion of poppies, daisies and roses transformed into a shimmering array of colour. At the same time, even in his landscapes, there is often an echo of a figure – here, the shape of a woman is almost tangible under the triangular composition of blazing colours of the flowers. Indeed, Bauerngarten was painted at the same moment as some of Klimt’s most celebrated and innovative figurative works, including his golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and the gilded The Kiss.

 

The influence of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists on Klimt’s landscapes is evident, from Claude Monet’s treatment of his famous waterlily pond – executed in the same square format – to Vincent van Gogh’s ability to make canvases pulsate with energy. PLEASE SEE THE DEDICATED PRESS RELEASE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS WORK.

 

Pablo Picasso’s Plant de tomates (1944) (est. £10,000,000-15,000,000)

Symbolic of victory in Europe, Picasso’s series of five paintings of a tomato plant in bloom in the Paris apartment he shared with his lover Marie-Thérèse are ripe with personal as well as wider political and cultural significance – a way of reflecting the spirit of hope and resilience that characterised this time. The most complex and visually striking example from the most sought-after series of the war period,Plant de tomates has been in a private collection for four decades.

In the summer of 1944, in the weeks before the Liberation of Paris from the Nazis by the Allied Forces, Picasso began to take notice of the potted tomato plant that was growing besides the window of the apartment. These were not uncommon in civilian households throughout Europe at a time when food rations limited the amount of available produce for consumption. Seeing the lush and fertile plant as a sign of hope as it continued to bear fruit, Picasso painted five canvases of the plant on a window sill between August 3 and August 12, 1944 – varying in degrees of abstraction. The background view outside the window is painted with varying shades of yellow and grey, calling to mind the smoke and gunfire that could be heard throughout the city during these frightening last weeks of the war. Rarely has Picasso invested a still-life with such meaning and sociological importance. Picasso’s art was blacklisted by the Nazi regime and the paintings that he completed during this period remained in his studio – only to be exhibited after the war. PLEASE SEE THE DEDICATED PRESS RELEASE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS WORK.

 

Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait of Baranowski (1918) (est. £10,000,000-15,000,000)

Working in Paris for most of his career, Modigliani is today considered one of the most celebrated portrait artists of the 20th-century. Portrait de Baranowski, depicting a young man with fragile good looks and a pensive, introspective air, is a wonderfully elegant composition that powerfully synthesises all the elements of Modigliani’s portraits in this period – from geometric simplification of the stylised human form to the almond, vacant eyes that render the sitter impenetrable.

The painting is a quintessential example of Modigliani’s role as the chronicler of the vie bohème of Montparnasse, depicting the androgynous Polish painter Pierre-Edouard Baranowski. The sitter’s gentle youthful looks inspired Modigliani to create one of his most outstanding yet melancholy portraits, combining the characteristics of the individual with the lyricism of a poetic idea – at a time when the artist’s own health and looks were destroyed by heavy drinking and drug taking. Exhibited at the 1930 Venice Biennale show dedicated to Modigliani, the work is also an example of the artist’s mannerist style that was partly derived from his fascination with the Old Masters of his native Italy.

 

Paul Gauguin’s Te Arii Vahine – La Femme aux mangos (II) (1896) (est. £7,000,000-10,000,000)

 

Painted in Tahiti, this is an important and extremely rare work from the artist’s best period. Executed during Gauguin’s second and last visit to the South Seas, Te Arii Vahine is inspired by the lush environment that surrounded him, displaying the vivid, sensuous atmosphere and vibrant palette that characterises his most celebrated Tahitian paintings. Attracted by the freedom, wilderness and simplicity of this remote place, Gauguin produced works in which the fluidity and expressiveness of the brushstrokes reflect the sense of artistic liberation. The work is a smaller version of a large masterpiece of the same title – translated as The Noble Woman or King’s Wife – now in the collection of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, which is currently on view in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in the highly acclaimed exhibition of The Shchukin Collection.

Gauguin’s dynamic treatment of paint reflects the richness of nature that excited the artist, dominated by bold contrasts of bright blue and green tones and strong, flame-light reds and yellows – these sumptuous colours inspired by the sunlight that bathed everything around him. Mango trees were abundant in Tahiti, a part of the everyday life of the islanders, and attracting the artist with their exotic appeal and potential for luminous colours. The composition also draws on the Western canon with the subject of a reclining female nude, which harks back to many precedents in European Old Master paintings. Gauguin references Christian imagery, with a nod to the tree of knowledge from the Garden of Eden and the implication that the female is a sinless, Tahitian Eve – contrasting the two worlds and their conceptions of sexuality.

 

 

IMAGE CAPTIONS:

 

Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale
1 March 2017, Sotheby’s London

 

Lot 8
PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT COLLECTION

Pablo Picasso

PLANT DE TOMATES
signed Picasso (lower right); dated 6 aout 44 on the reverse
oil on canvas
92 by 73cm.
36 1/4 by 28 3/4 in.
Painted in Paris between 6th and 9th August 1944.

Estimate £10,000,000 — 15,000,000

 

Lot 10
Amedeo Modigliani

PORTRAIT DE BARANOWSKI
signed Modigliani (lower left)
oil on canvas
112 by 56cm.
44 1/4 by 22in.
Painted in 1918.

Estimate £10,000,000 — 15,000,000

 

Lot 11
Gustav Klimt

BAUERNGARTEN (BLUMENGARTEN)

signed Gustav Klimt (lower right)
oil on canvas
110 by 110cm.
43 1/4 by 43 1/4 in.
Painted in 1907.

Estimate Upon Request

 

Lot 15
PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED COLLECTION

Paul Gauguin

TE ARII VAHINE – LA FEMME AUX MANGOS (II)
oil on canvas
26.2 by 32.7cm.
10 3/8 by 12 7/8 in.
Painted in 1896.

Estimate £7,000,000 — 10,000,000

 

 

Description: Description: http://www.sothebys.com/etc/designs/redesigns/sothebys/redesignlibs/source/img/logo.png

34-35 New Bond Street

London W1A 2AA