Christie’s to offer exemplary works of 19th Century European Art this May

New York – Christie’s announces the sale of 19th Century European Art on May 23, which offers a strong selection of fresh to the market paintings, drawings, and sculpture by leading artists who reflect the extraordinary diversity of this pivotal period of art history. Painters of the Barbizon, French Realist and Orientalist schools are represented, as well as a strong selection of Belle Époque painters and important female artists. The tightly curated sale of 88 lots is primarily sourced from private collections with lots ranging in price from $7,000 to $1,200,000.

A highlight of the sale is Joaquín Sorolla’s (Spanish, 1863-1923), Algarrobo (The Carob Tree) painted when the artist was visiting the Spanish village of Jávea, in eastern Spain (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000). The artist was entranced by the beauty of the area, and this work is a striking example of Sorolla’s ability to capture the effects of heat and light using an almost abstract pattern of light and texture. It is considered among the first true landscape paintings by the artist.

New York – Christie’s announces the sale Timeless: Masterworks of African Art will take place on May 19 in New York. This exceptional sale features twelve Masterworks of African Art and the exhibition and auction will coincide with Christie’s 20th Century Week sales. Celebrating the diversity of form and innovation of African artistry, from the West coast, to Central and to South Africa, these rare works are fresh to the market and maintain distinguished provenance, which is further enhanced by their exhibition histories and published literature.

Susan Kloman, International Specialist, Head of Department, comments, “Timeless is a selection of twelve important works of traditional African art. Each work of art represented in this sale is powerfully resonant with subjects, which unite us as human – visions of prosperity, love, power, fear and order. From incarnations of gods, supreme beings and oracles to works of virtuosity and idealized beauty, this presentation is highly rich and was brought together not only to present top classical examples, in addition to the Dogon maternity, such as the Bédiat-Huston Baule mask and Matisse Fang Figure, but foremost works of innovation rarely seen on the market – such as the Grebo mask, the Pindi dancing figure, the Mfumte figure and the Tsonga female figure from South Africa.”

This Spanish painter, with deep British roots, feels as comfortable in London as he does in Madrid. His work has dazzled critics and art lovers alike, and after a long period away from the limelight, he has arrived back in London to shake a little bit the capital’s art scene.

Baletzena has taken a long gap since he last exhibited and now has chosen London for his reappearance in the public eye. His work is currently been shown at the West Contemporary Gallery in trendy Shoreditch. The artist is currently working on a series of paintings about London in which he gives an intimate and personal view of the City, depicting places and atmospheres where he feels immersed; familiar places that transmit him certain states of mind, in his own words: “Atmospheres that communicate to me in a very intimate manner”.

Strong, raw, expressive, bohemian and melancholic are some adjectives that describe his powerful oil paintings. Baleztena’s paintings are expressive psychological works, self-portraits of his soul and mind. Talking with the artist about what’s to come, he responds: “About my life and work in the future, I have to say that I don’t have any premonitions or clear visions, I just take life as it comes and will try to extract the important substance that it offers me”.

His portraits and self-portraits are particularly powerful. His unconventional approach to portraiture results in very powerful images, which leave the viewer with the impression that they are reaching into the soul of the subject through the emotions of the artist. Actually, his portraiture was exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery some years ago, as part of the BP Portrait Award.

Working on oil on canvas, Tomás immerses himself in the raw emotion of this medium, which is best reflected on his self-portraits, extremely intense and thought provoking. “They are psychological works, self-portraits of my soul and mind”, says the artist.

By Justine Waddell, founder of Kino Klassika

It is 100 years since the Russian Revolution, an event which unleashed a period of radical creativity across all the art forms, not least in film. The first generation of Soviet film-makers produced a new and provocative kind of filmmaking that, when it traveled around the world, truly challenged the status quo. The leading lights of that early Soviet film movement, among them film directors Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Dovzhenko and Vsevolod Pudovkin, created a new and highly influential language of filmmaking. They made some of the greatest and most powerful films of all time, films which to this day influence filmmakers across the world.

Yet, on the whole, we remain unaware of this far-reaching legacy. That is why, the charity Kino Klassika, dedicated to restoring classic Russian language film, has organised this year the film festival ‘A World to Win: A Century of Revolution on Screen’. The festival screens films from around the world at London’s iconic Regent St Cinema, to mark the impact of those early films and their legacy on generations of filmmakers.

‘A World to Win’ takes its title from Marx and Engel’s Manifesto call to revolution. It is the aim of the film season to trace a suggestion of that legacy across 100 years. Highlights of the season include a unique screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Battleship Potemkin (1925), with a wholly improvised and unrehearsed accompaniment by Max Reinhardt, BBC Radio 3 Late Night Junction presenter and an ‘instant orchestra’ made up of expert jazz and contemporary musicians as well as volunteers from the audience. We also screen films by later generations of Russian film makers, such as Palme d’Or winner Mikhail Kalatozov’s passionate and poetic I am Cuba, which, while best remembered for its dizzying cinematography, is also an impassioned plea against the poverty and degradation of pre-Revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps my favourite screening of the season has been our rare showing of the omnibus film, Beginning of an Unknown Century (1967), directed by Larisa Shepitko and Andrei Smirnov.

Commissioned to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Revolution, these films are an excoriating examination of the costs to ordinary Russian people of the early years of Soviet life and were banned as soon as they were completed. At the screening on International Women’s Day, we were able to highlight a small part of Larisa Shepitko’s work. She remains one of Russia’s most talented (and yet unknown) female film directors. The gala screening was sponsored by Lombard Odier Uk. Their Managing Director, Duncan Macintyre, observed, “At Lombard Odier we take pride in challenging ourselves to find the best possible financial solutions for our clients. We are delighted to sponsor Kino Klassika in its own ambition to challenge audiences with the best of classic Russian language cinema”.

Other highlights of the season include screening a 35mm print of Jean Luc Godard’s surreal Weekend (1967), about a couple whose trip to the country is beset by a series of increasingly bizarre events which ends up with the husband being killed and eaten! Also Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1900 (Novecento), which follows the intertwined lives of two Italians born at the beginning of the new century, one a poor peasant (Gerard Depardieu) and the other the local landowner’s son
(Robert de Niro). At 5 hours and 20 minutes long this is a rare opportunity to see a 35mm print of the director’s preferred Italian language version. There was also our 35mm screening of Land and Freedom, Ken Loach’s war film, which tells the story of a young English volunteer caught up in another defining movement

in modern history, the Spanish Civil War. For modern audiences, the film vividly brings alive an episode that would shape later twentieth-century history almost as decisively as the revolutions of 1917. The season is accompanied by a series of introductions, programme notes and Q&As with leading journalists, directors, writers and commentators including Academy Award-winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton, double Academy-Award winning film director Bernardo Bertolucci, BBC Radio 4 Film Programme presenter Francine Stock, Chief Film Critic at the Guardian Peter Bradshaw and double Palme d’Or winner Ken Loach.

On October 26th, 2017, as the finale of this season, Kino Klassika will screen Sergei Eisenstein’s October, his silent film masterpiece which (re)imagines the storming of the Winter Palace. This will be accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra under the masterful baton of conductor the European Film Philharmonic’s Frank Strobel, at the Barbican Centre London. This gala screening will be introduced by Kino Klassika’s patron, Ralph Fiennes. As a Londoner, I was motivated to set up the charity after visiting Russia in 2007 to play the lead in a feature film, Target, a sci-fi version of Anna Karenina, penned by Alexander Zeldovich and Vladimir Sorokin, which also meant I had to learn Russian from scratch. To do that, I watched Russian films. Learning the language I became fascinated by the film culture, no doubt partly because the films seemed so different and unfamiliar to what was available outside of Russia. I always say I was a bit like Alice in Wonderland – I fell down a rabbit hole of film.

However, film was not travelling in the way Russian art, ballet or literature was. It seemed to me this was an opportunity to set up the charity, Kino Klassika, to do something to change that. My experience in Russia had given me an ongoing interest in the country’s film culture. I also passionately believe that culture can provide a space to communicate, question and generate familiarity and understanding separate from political pressure. We position what we do when working with these films as neither propaganda or entertainment but simply, art.

The screening of Eisenstein’s October also joins the ‘World to Win’ programme with a two-year long educational programme Kino Klassika has undertaken which focuses solely on the legacy of great filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein. This programme has included two London based exhibitions of drawings: ‘Unexpected Eisenstein’ and ‘Love, Lust and Laughter’, as well as an academic conference at the Courtauld Institute. It culminates in the long-awaited publication of ‘Eisenstein on Paper’, a 400-page book depicting never before seen drawings from the RGALI archive in Moscow, authored by the great Russian film scholar, Naum Kleiman and published with Thames & Hudson.

The publication of the book into several different languages is part of our determination to share the legacy of this filmmaking tradition with as wide an audience as possible. Eisenstein was really a kind of Leonardo da Vinci of his time – not just a film director but a radical innovator, film theorist, artist, and experimentalist. There is a whole other side to his legacy which we don’t know much about. Our aim at Kino Klassika is to open the door to these great and radical innovators and make accessible to new audiences the legacy of that film-making tradition.

One of the things I am most proud of is our first film commission, Eisenstein on Lawrence. We asked British film-maker Mark Cousins (The Story of Film, Film and Childhood, What is this thing called Love?) to make an essay film about Sergei Eisenstein as part of our Eisenstein programme. Sergei Eisenstein was a great anglophile so Cousins took as his starting point an imagined conversation between Eisenstein and a journalist who quizzes him on his views of an English writer whose writing Eisenstein greatly admired, D.H. Lawrence. Like many of his other films, Cousins filmed this entirely on a mobile phone, using inter-titles and photographs. He created a film where he invites us to listen in as Eisenstein muses on DH Lawrence’s views on film, “there’s a far greater beauty in Charlie Chaplin’s face than there ever was in Valentino”, the role of the artist, Lady Chatterley’s lover, repression and landscape. It is a witty and lyrical piece of time travel, which brings alive to us, through the new accessible technology of a mobile phone camera, the voices of two of the 20th Century’s cultural titans.

We are starting to work internationally. We are thrilled to be partnering with leading English cultural historian, Prof. Catriona Kelly of Oxford University, and Séance Magazine in St Petersburg to launch, in the autumn of next year, a programme called Nevaland, the History of St Petersburg on film. At minimum, this will be an exhibition exploring the history of the great city on film – how film has contributed to the creative imagination of the city and vice versa. But I hope it will be more ambitious, with cutting-edge educational tools, filmed artistic commissions by contemporary film-makers and an interactive app to make sure the exhibition reaches a wide audience. We like to use new technology to reinvigorate the past. Exciting times ahead.

The Gala Screening to mark the 100th Anniversary of the Revolution with Sergei Eisenstein’s October will be held on October 26th at the Barbican Concert Hall with the London Symphony Orchestra. Tickets are available through the Barbican Centre website.

Egon Schiele and Vincent Van Gogh to star in impressionist and modern art sale

London – Leading highlights by Egon Schiele and Vincent van Gogh are now on display at Christie’s New York until 17 May 2017 ahead of London’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in June. Schiele’s Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) (1915, estimate: £20,000,000-30,000,000) was painted in the middle of the First World War and exemplifies the artist’s visionary understanding of landscape, which he used as an allegory of human emotion. Van Gogh’s Le Moissonneur (d’après Millet) (1889, estimate: £12,500,000-16,500,000), was painted in 1889, the same year that he left Arles and admitted himself into an asylum. The auction will take place on 27 June 2017 as part of 20th Century at Christie’s, a series of sales that take place from 17 to 30 June 2017. The works will tour to Hong Kong from 25 to 29 May 2017 and will be on view in London from 17 to 27 June 2017.

EGON SCHIELE: Schiele created landscapes filled with melancholy, charging the natural world with a deeper spiritual meaning. The autumnal setting of Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) can be seen as a metaphor for mortality; the crumbling facades of the townscape and surrounding trees used as an alternate physical expression of the elemental forces of growth, death and decay. As with almost all of Schiele’s townscapes, the buildings in Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) appear to represent his mother’s hometown, Krumau, a medieval Bohemian town on the Moldau River, known today as Český Krumlov on the Vltava in the Czech Republic. Schiele painted Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen) on the reverse of a fragment of an older picture known as Monk I that dates from 1913. It is believed to have formed part of one of his largest attempted projects, Bekehrung (‘Conversion’), and is linked to the two monumental allegories that he produced the same year, of which only fragments, sketches and photographic evidence are now known.

VINCENT VAN GOGH: Painted in September of 1889 Le Moissonneur (d’après Millet) is one of ten paintings that Van Gogh made after a series of drawings by Jean-François Millet entitled Les Travauxdes Champs (1852), seven of which now reside in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, with the other two in private hands. The work of Millet became a major focus for Van Gogh during this period, following the gift of a set of engravings of Millet’s Les Travaux des Champs by Jacques-Adrien Lavielle that was sent to Van Gogh from his brother Theo van Gogh the same year. Le Moissonneur (d’après Millet), employs the composition of Millet but is filled with Van Gogh’s own dramatic and intense use of colour. With his back to the viewer, bent over as he works the fields, the male figure is illuminated against the deep blue sky and golden yellow fields.

London – Christie’s will present Sculpture in the Square an outdoor sculpture garden set within St James’s Square, London, on view to the public from 23 May to 29 June 2017. The exhibition will display a dozen works that will be offered in the Modern British Art and Impressionist & Modern Art sales as part of 20th Century at Christie’s, a series of sales that take place from 26 to 29 June 2017. Artists include Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick, Barry Flanagan, Elisabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. Presented in the garden square adjacent to Christie’s headquarters on King Street, the one-off exhibition will showcase the

Left: Henry Moore, Seated Woman, 1958-59, cast in 1975, 201 cm high, estimate: £600,000-900,000
Centre: Barry Flanagan, Nijinski Hare, bronze with grey/green patina, conceived in 1986, 244 cm high, estimate: £600,000-800,000 Right: Dame Barbara Hepworth, Curved Form (Bryher II), 1961, 212 cm high, estimate: £1,500,000-2,500,000 works as they were intended to be seen, in a landscape setting. Sculpture in the Square will coincide with the opening of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, which runs from 23 to 27 May 2017.

Exhibition curator Nicholas Orchard, Senior Director, Modern British & Irish Art at Christie’s: “This exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to appreciate leading Modern sculptures within the landscape surroundings that the artists intended for them. These monumental forms will lead the Modern British & Irish Art Evening Sale and are a key element of the 20th Century season at a time when London is a focal point for the cultural and horticultural worlds. It is an honour to present these pieces within the prestigious garden setting of St James’s Square at a moment when the artworks will be complemented by the flora and fauna of this landscape.”

A focal point for the exhibition is a group of sculptures from The Tuttleman Collection. During their marriage, Edna and Stanley Tuttleman curated one of the most eclectic and diverse collections of art, which spans multiple decades and a variety of media. Leading the group is Barbara Hepworth, who consistently pointed to the significance that landscape and its interaction with human beings had for her as a sculptor. Curved Form (Bryher II) (1961, estimate: £1,500,000-2,500,000) is pierced with a large hole, an essential element in Hepworth’s sculpture from 1932 onwards. Hepworth used holes as a device for creating abstract form and space, and to unite the front and the back of the work. Curved Form (Bryher II) belongs formally to her ‘Single Form’ series, which she first approached in the 1930s and developed throughout her career. This group of works – first in wood and marble then later in bronze – has become enmeshed with the story of the much- respected second secretary-general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, and their relationship. Hepworth found in him a kindred spirit, sharing political views on the responsibility of the artist in the community and more broadly the individual within society. Other casts of Curved Form (Bryher II) are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, and at the De Doelen Concert Hall, Rotterdam.

Further highlights from The Tuttleman Collection include Sir Anthony Caro’s London (1966, estimate: £500,000- 700,000). Caro played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century sculpture; after assisting Henry Moore in the mid-1950s, Caro visited New York where he met the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, along with leading American artists including Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski and the sculptor David Smith. On his return to England, Caro’s work of the 1960s incorporated industrial materials, which he painted in bright household colours and transformed through cutting and welding to create urban, radical assemblages.

More works central to the exhibition include Barry Flanagan’s Nijinski Hare (1986, estimate: £600,000-800,000). Always active, suggesting speed lightness and grace, Barry Flanagan’s leaping hare became the leitmotiv of his work. The ongoing series was first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and the present work is based on the Polish-born Russian ballet dancer Bronislava Nijinska. Flanagan used the natural agility of the hare to represent both the delicacy and power of her performances.
Elisabeth Frink’s Horse (1980, estimate: £700,000-1,000,000), which was originally commissioned by the Earl of March for Goodwood Racecourse in Sussex. Throughout her life Frink was drawn to nature, but her work was not intended as an exact likeness, instead she strove to capture the characteristics and

Sir Anthony Caro, London, steel painted red, conceived in 1966, 206 cm long, estimate: £500,000-700,000

Dame Elisabeth Frink, Horse, bronze with a grey/brown patina, conceived in 1980, 252 cm wide, estimate: £700,000-1,000,000 idea of each creature. Life-sized, in Horse Frink portrays the strength and speed of the racehorse emphasised through its muscular body, long extended neck and delicate legs, which she depicts in motion, giving a wonderful sense of dynamism to the work, complemented by the horse’s pricked ears and alert nature.

LONDON – For the 22nd time Christie’s London will set the stage for the annual South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art auction. The majority of the works to be offered are sourced from private collections and are fresh to the market– these are works which have been acquired directly from either the artists or their galleries and are coming to auction for the first time. Led by a masterpiece by Tyeb Mehta, the London auction on 25 May will offer 68 works spanning from Bengal School masters Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore, to a body of work consisting of 54 individual works designed to be a set of playing cards; where each ‘card’ is by a different artist from masters like Syed Haider Raza to young contemporary artists like Shilpa Gupta.

This year’s sale will pay particular tribute to the Progressive Artists’ Group and their contemporaries which celebrates 70 years since its foundation on the eve of Indian independence in 1947. In the 1930s and 40s in India, the idea of modernism was linked with the growth of individual consciousness and internationalism as it was with the new sense of national identity in the country. Its expression in the arts then had important historical and sociopolitical dimensions. It was in this environment, just before India gained independence in 1947, that the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG) was formed. The founding members included the masters Francis Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Syed Haider Raza and, Sadanand Bakre, Krishnaji Howlaji Ara and Hari Ambadas Gade. Though unique in their individual style, the modernist vocabularies of each of the founding members of the PAG were united in their antithetical position to the academic, romantic and orientalist schools of art that they succeeded in replacing.

Their conviction and commitment to the ideal of building a new, modern cannon of art for India remained unchanged. It is not surprising then that the founding members of the PAG and their close associates such as Tyeb Mehta are counted among South Asia’s most important modern artists. This year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of their foundation, Christie’s will present a selection of exceptional examples of rare early works by all six original members and several of their illustrious associates. These works recognise these luminaries as the standard bearers for avant-garde Indian modern to this day. The centrepiece of the auction will be Tyeb Mehta’s (1925-2009) Untitled (Woman on Rickshaw), a painting from 1994 that epitomises the artist’s instantly recognisable minimalist format, and resonates with the quiet emotive poignancy that embodies the art of this modern master. Here, Mehta monumentalise’s the iconic rickshaw, making it a symbolic stage on which he casts an abstracted female figure, transformed by Mehta into an allegory for human suffering, indignity, subjugation and struggle for survival.

The image of the more traditional hand-pulled rickshaws can be found in Mehta’s works dating as far back as the 1950s, but only appears in his oeuvre on a grand scale much later, following a two year period from 1983, when Mehta was invited to be artist-in-residence at Viswa Bharati University, Santiniketan. “The rickshaw is not a simple means of transport but a sign of bondage.”– Tyeb Mehta The present painting is meticulously executed, extolling Mehta’s virtuosic technique. The sumptuous expanses of vivid colour are dissected by the subtle diagonals of the rickshaw handles and wheels and the failing limbs of its occupant, while the abstract use of fattened forms and the segregated monochromatic areas create a sense of harmony and stillness. For its lifetime the painting was in the same important Indian private collection and will be offered for the first time at auction with an estimate of £1,500,000-2,000,000 / $1,900,000-2,500,000).

In recognition of the breadth of Tyeb Mehta’s artistic evolution, his 1961 expressionist painting Thrown Bull is one of his earliest uses of the image of the iconic bull, a motif that would remain at the core of the artist’s oeuvre and the same subject that would win him the Gold Medal at the inaugural Indian Triennale in New Delhi in 1968. Thrown Bull is also one of the earliest examples of Mehta’s gestural expressive style which he developed during his stay in the United Kingdom. Having arrived in London in 1959, this painting is indelibly tied to the artist’s new experiences where he encountered European Expressionism, a breakthrough moment for him that saw his style undergo a radical change. During this period, Mehta’s works were dominated by muted colours and thick textured impasto, the most sculptural of his entire oeuvre. This significant early work by the modern master has remained a part of the illustrious collection of Nuffield College, Oxford since the 1960s (estimate: £120,000-180,000 / $150,000-220,000).

“I was looking for an image to express this anguish and years later, I found it in the British Museum. I was fascinated by the image of the trussed bull in the Egyptian bas relief and created my first major painting”

Tyeb Mehta