The David M. Solinger Collection Evening Auction

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CONTENTS

11–25

THE DAVID M. SOLINGER COLLECTION BY JOHN ELDERFIELD 26–39

DAVID M. SOLINGER: A VISION FOR A NEW GENERATION 40–233

THE DAVID M. SOLINGER COLLECTION EVENING SALE, NEW YORK 234–283

MODERN ART DAY SALE, NEW YORK 284–291

ARTS OF AFRICA, OCEANIA, AND THE AMERICAS, NEW YORK 292–301

A LEGACY OF PHILANTHROPY: A SELECTION OF WORKS FROM THE DAVID M. SOLINGER COLLECTION GIFTED TO MUSEUMS AND INSTITUTIONS

HOW TO BID

CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS FOR BUYERS IN NEW YORK AUCTIONS 308 BUYING AT AUCTION

INFORMATION ON SALES AND USE TAX IMPORTANT NOTICES

INDEX OF ARTISTS

Introducing an exhibition of The David M. Solinger Collection in 2002, art historian Robert Rosenblum began by distinguishing four kinds of private collections: one, an anthology of big names like a miniature museum; one, a collection of contemporary art that attempted to be as up-to-date as possible; one that was simply quirky, the product purely of personal enthusiasm, indifferent to differences of good and bad; and one embedded in a passion for a particular moment in history. Rosenblum correctly insisted that David Solinger’s collection was of this fourth kind. I will speak here mainly on this subject; but first I want to mention a fifth kind: collections put together by artists.

Solinger studied painting at the Art Students League in New York City prior to buying his first painting, in 1948—a modest canvas by the Hawaiian-American Reuben Tam at the Halpern Gallery in New York. He continued to paint even as his law practice

JOHN ELDERFIELD © 2022

increased and as he continued to collect. Two great late-nineteenth-century painters, Gustave Caillebotte and Edgar Degas, put together extraordinary collections. Solinger was not in their league as either painter or collector, but he brought his amateur painter’s eye to his collecting. The great German Renaissance painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer said that only artists can judge art; for all others it is a foreign language. If that is true, then it is a foreign language that has to be learned by those who are not artists, which means that they too should be spending more time in front of paintings than reading books about them.

I do not doubt for a moment that Solinger read as well as looked; his collection speaks of his knowledge. But it speaks even more of the trust he developed in his judgments based upon his own, continual looking at works of art. As early as 1956, he told the Cornell Daily Sun that he was dedicating

six hours a week, roughly a full workday, to looking at paintings. And some twenty years later, in 1977, he told Whitney Museum of American Art curator Paul Cummings that to maintain your level of connoisseurship you have to see a lot of pictures.

Evidence of his trust in his own connoisseurship may be quantified: fewer than a half-dozen of the twenty-three works recorded in this catalogue had any prior reputation that may have influenced Solinger to acquire them, except that they came from trustworthy dealers. Three of his four works by Paul Klee had already been shown in early exhibitions, but the first that he purchased, from the Galerie Rosengart in Lucerne in 1951, had no prior public history. One of the two pictures by Joan Miró he bought that same year from the Galerie Maeght in Paris, had been published six years earlier in a short essay by the poet Tristan Tzara in Cahiers d’Art. And the final

1963 acquisition in this group of works, the Jean Arp sculpture of 1936, had been in the celebrated collection of David Thompson.

Solinger was not yet interested in art when the great 1927 canvas by Pablo Picasso, which he acquired in 1958, had been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art some twenty years earlier, but it is likely that Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who sold it to him, told him of that fact. The unique 1950 Willem de Kooning collage he bought from Sidney Janis in 1952 had been illustrated the previous year in

Thomas B. Hess’s book, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, however, Solinger had been looking at de Koonings since the artist’s first show at New York’s Charles Egan Gallery in 1948. In the main, then, he trusted solely his own judgment and that of the some-dozen dealers from whom he bought these two dozen works. Doing so, he was ahead of his time in his attraction to works by painters who would subsequently be acknowledged as of pivotal importance to mid-century art, or influential upon art of that period.

David M. Solinger (center) with Alan H. Temple (left) and B.H. Friedman (right), members of the Whitney Capaign Planning and Building Committees, circa 1960s

Franz Kline, Study for Chief (Modern Day Auction); Louise Nevelson, Black Disclosure #1 (Modern Day Auction). Lot 8, Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau)

Photo © Visko Hatfield

It is a fascinating coincidence that it was in the same year that he bought his first, hardly controversial canvas that he visited the Charles Egan Gallery and was so overwhelmed by de Kooning’s utterly unfamiliar paintings that he long remembered having stayed there the whole day. It seems fair to say that the experience shaped what his collection would come to comprise: in the main, a mid-century collection of works of the 1940s and 1950s. Only eight of the twentythree works recorded here were made prior to this: the five Klees, the Arp, the Picasso, and one of his three works by Fernand Léger.

The critic Clement Greenberg, who had described de Kooning’s 1948 exhibition as “magnificent” in the April issue of The Nation wrote a year later of Dubuffet’s self-description as “primitive” in the March 1949 issue of Partisan Review. However, he said that in creating what the artist also called “art brut ” (“raw art”), “Dubuffet borrowed from Klee the key to unlock the spontaneity in himself.” I do not know whether Solinger followed Greenberg’s writings in his admiration of de Kooning, Dubuffet, and Klee, but he was building such associations in defining his own taste

He admired these as predecessors, as he did in a different way the works of art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, which he began to collect in the mid-1950s. He was not alone in sensing an affinity between the forcefulness of such works and the striking material presence of some contemporary painting and sculpture; and one of his most admired artists, Jean Dubuffet, had famously adopted for his own work the disparaging description of “primitive,” then commonly used for pre-classic sculptures outside the orbit of Western art.

for art which was challenging because it seemed raw and spontaneous. It is likely that he saw the 1950 exhibition at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery of Young Painters in the U.S. and France, with a de Kooning and a Dubuffet juxtaposed on one of its walls. The dealer Leo Castelli, given his European contacts, had helped Janis to organize the exhibition, but supposedly said that “the show was a bit silly, and purists like Charles Egan, the dealer who handled de Kooning, took a very critical view. It proved one

Paul Klee, Gedenkstein für N. Henri Laurens, Le Repose (Modern Day Auction); Jean Dubuffet, Prompt Messager (Modern Day Auction)

1960s

Left Cover of the exhibition catalogue, Ancient Art in Middle America, The Stable Gallery, New York, 1956

Right Exhibition announcement for Jean Dubuffet: Recent Paintings, Collages & Drawings, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1954

thing, however, that there really was no connection, except on a very superficial level, between European and American painting.” Clearly, Solinger did not agree.

But before further considering his taste, I should mention a major work that he brought home and then parted with: Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist, one of the enormous horizontals in the artist’s late1950 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. As explained in the catalogue of the 2002 exhibition mentioned above, “in the middle of the night he heard a terrible cracking

budget. As Solinger drolly observed in his conversation with Cummings, “Paintings, like strawberries, should be bought when they’re plentiful and cheap.”

He had the perception to buy the right ones when they were. His perception was that the finest mid-century paintings were those in which the marked, tactile surface was prominent. Effectively, his taste re-engaged what had become prominent a century earlier, when the painter Eugène Delacroix complained of the early nineteenth-century Neo-Classical artist

sound. The huge Pollock had pulled the wall down, itself miraculously unharmed. Lavender Mist now hangs on sturdier walls at the National Gallery.”

Connoisseurs of missed opportunities will recall how Henry Pearlman likewise gave up Henri Matisse’s huge Bathers by a River, which went to the Art Institute of Chicago. Still, in both cases, one enormous canvas in a collection of easel paintings would have depreciated the power and the kinship of all the rest. And certainly challenged the

Jacques-Louis David for his “affectation of contempt for the material means.” David’s and his follower’s paintings, he said, “lack this precious quality without which the rest is imperfect and almost useless… the charm [of] the worker’s hand.” David was not a painter “whose execution rises to equality with his idea…. In Davidian painting, the epidermis is everywhere lacking.”

These words, which Delacroix wrote in his journal on several days of January 1857, are in the language of Romanticism, not

of modernism; yet their message was influential upon what had happened later in the nineteenth century, then on what had been growing in importance in the decade prior to 1957. Solinger would have agreed with Delacroix. In 1956, he told a reporter for the Cornell Daily Sun that “subject matter doesn’t matter,” and insisted to Cummings that art was a visual not an intellectual experience. Therefore, neither illusionistic painting, be it realistic or surrealistic, nor refined geometric abstraction, both of which had gained such attention through

de Kooning that so impressed him in 1948 were composed, as Greenberg observed, of thin paint spread smoothly that “identifies the physical picture plane with an emphasis other painters achieve only by clotted pigment.”

And the great 1950 de Kooning collage in the Solinger Collection was composed of multiple pieces of paper with thin paint spread smoothly across them. Those who saw de Kooning at work have described how he would make drawings, scatter them on top of each other; make a drawing from the result; reverse it, tear it in half; recompose it and make a drawing of

the 1930s, were of interest to him. What he admired was the work of a painter “whose execution rises in equality with his idea,” and came to believe that de Kooning was the greatest American artist of the twentieth century, since he, more fully than anyone else, had revived such emphasis on the material means of painting.

As Rosenblum pointed out, “Solinger’s taste was clearly for surfaces that were roughhewn and for emotions that still seem heated and unresolved.” However, the paintings by

that—then move into color, composing with planes, scattering, overlapping, and adjusting them until he was satisfied. His next and usually final step was to move into painting, replacing the paper planes as he did so. The Solinger work is a rare example of the extraordinary result when he did not take that final step: it comprises a sandwich of thin layers of color held together by thumb tacks within which what de Kooning called “slipping glimpses” of images appear and disappear as we look at it, notably the staring eyes in the top-left corner.

Checklist from the exhibition Picasso: Five Master Works 1958, Kootz Gallery, New York, in which Solinger’s Femme dans un fauteuil was included

“So I commenced to go around to commercial galleries and museums, in a very systematic way, and then ultimately, in 1948, I bought my first painting... That was an act of great courage.”

Nonetheless, while Léger fully deserves his place as an admired predecessor in this mid-century collection, his earlier School of Paris status does set his work apart. This is also true of what may justly be called the most extraordinary painting that Solinger bought, Picasso’s 1927 Femme dans un fauteuil. It earns its thematic place in the collection as an image of raw power, yet it speaks louder than anything else. Solinger bought this in 1958 and then loaned it (perhaps that was a condition of the sale?) to the exhibition, Picasso: Five Master Works,

which opened at the Kootz Gallery, New York, at the end of September of that year. We do not know whether he had been offered any of the three works in the exhibition that appear not to have been sold. If so, two were modeled in a vigorously three-dimensional manner, and the third was on the threshold of Surrealism. (The exhibition checklist is reproduced in the present catalogue.)

Solinger’s painting was the earliest, the flattest, and most conspicuously on the threshold of figuration and abstraction; by far the most adventurous.

True, many other works in the Solinger Collection reveal clotted pigment—or better, what Delacroix nicely described as an epidermis, a skin of paint, whose tactility is so accentuated as to make it seem rough-hewn. Such works include, most conspicuously, two of the Dubuffets in which sand is mixed into the paint; and, more programmatically, the wall-like Composition of Nicolas de Staël, a work that Solinger apparently bought in fifteen seconds, and which recalls one of Paul Cezanne’s friends, Antony Valabrègue’s description of his early tactile works as “mason’s painting.” Viewers may find allusions to built surfaces in works by other French artists in the collection: to a carpentry screen in Pierre Soulages’s Peinture 92 x 65 cm 7 fevrier 1954, and to a woven, partially transparent cloth in Maria Helena da Silva’s untitled composition, a work with the delicacy of Solinger’s own paintings. And his own interest in making works on paper that glow with an internal light unquestionably influenced—and was influenced by—his enthusiasm for Klee.

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, 1977, N.P.

Catalogue for the exhibition Alexander Calder at Curt Valentin Gallery, New York, 1955.

13, Nicolas de Staël, Composition;

3, Alexander Calder, Sixteen Black with a Loop;

7, Jean Dubuffet, Chamelier;

22, Joan Miró, Femmes et oiseau devant le soleil Photo © Visko Hatfield

The gracefulness of his Klees seemed to be a necessary corollary to the rawness of his Dubuffets; yet Klee also spoke to Solinger’s interest in the seemingly unschooled quality that Dubuffet had learned from Klee. And he could find imagery in Klee’s amazing inventiveness that associated it with works as different as those by Arp, Baziotes, and Miró. Moreover, Solinger’s adeptness in recognizing likenesses in unlike artists extended to seeing Arp’s famous characterization of his sculptures as “concretions”—signifying the natural process of coagulation and thickening in the natural world— as associating a work as elegant as his Fruit méchant with the densest of the Dubuffets in the collection. It was not difficult to see that a Dubuffet and a Giacometti had a lot in common; nor that a Calder was akin to a Miró. However, it took imagination to see that Mathieu’s Camp de Carthage would, for all its vehemence, be a good fit with Miró’s Femme, étoiles; and that Fernand Léger’s description, recorded in the 2020 catalogue, of a “personification of the enlarged detail” and “individualization of the fragment” in his packed compositions belonged to a modernism that included the 1950 collage by de Kooning.

David M. Solinger at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1981

David M. Solinger at Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1981

“To me, art is a pleasurable experience. I look at pictures. I like pictures that seduce the eye. That is not to say that I don’t also like pictures that are like a blow between the eyes, that are very strong, and are very powerful, that are very moving. I think pictures should be accepted on a visual basis.”

The Solinger family graciously agreed to loan me this work for the exhibition, Matisse-Picasso that I curated with colleagues in London, New York, and Paris in 2002-03. (They would similarly loan the de Kooning collage to my de Kooning. A Retrospective at MoMA in 2011, believing that Solinger would have wanted to share his most important works when they had not been seen publicly for decades.) In the catalogue for Matisse-Picasso, my colleague Elizabeth Cowling, comparing Picasso’s canvas to Matisse’s contemporaneous paintings of odalisques, described it as “an act of pure travesty; a monstrous female of indeterminate, primal species in place of the iconic beautiful female nude… [one whose] dream may be a nightmare and she is screaming in terror.” When faced by so astonishingly aggressive a work in a private collection, which was rare, William S. Rubin, who led MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture when I first joined the museum, would say to the collector, “It took courage to buy a work like this to live with.” It did; and, I venture to say, it will.

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART, 1977, N.P.

Baziotes, Figures

DAVID M. SOLINGER A VISION FOR A NEW GENERATION

“At the brief ceremony opening the Downtown Whitney Museum, the new financial district branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art, David M. Solinger escorted Mayor Lindsay around the elegant modern gallery overlooking the new Uris building at 55 Water Street, while commenting on each artist’s place in American art. They passed before Raphael Soyer’s Office Girls then strolled over to gaze at de Kooning’s Door to the River. The mayor, paying much more than a ritual visit, appeared fascinated and amused by Solinger’s insights. Solinger has been the Whitney’s president since 1966 and was in the first group of non-Whitney trustees appointed to the board in 1961. A founder and president in 1957 of the supporting Friends of the Whitney… Solinger was in a happy mood at the new branch opening. “

‘The significance of this event is that a number of museums have talked about opening branches but the Whitney has done it!’ Mr. Solinger noted that the gallery will serve some 100,000 residents of the area and 500,000 or so workers, ‘who come in every day and depart again.”

The Whitney Museum of American Art at the Breuer building in New York, 1960s. Photo © Ezra Stoller / Esto

SALLY HAMMOND, “DAILY CLOSEUP,” THE NEW YORK POST, 20 SEPTEMBER 1973

Above Portrait of David M. Solinger, 1959

Opposite Check from TIME Magazine to David M. Solinger paid for his legal expertise in 1948

David M. Solinger (far right), pictured at a Frank Sinatra concert circa late 1940s

The trajectory of David M. Solinger’s life and work is emblematic of a generation to emerge after World War II that recognized the importance of the arts and cultural institutions as critical to the civic and social health, and future, of a community, whether a city, suburb or small town. David M. Solinger’s passion for the arts led to leadership roles and the realization of new and innovative approaches to museums and institutions across America, marking early transitions toward agency and access. Solinger’s boundless energy, his quiet but resolute diplomacy and his extraordinary prescience were the personal and professional qualities that led to his transformational roles in a multitude of organizations. His legacy resists categorization: reaching beyond his career in law, where he was among the first to specialize in advertising and media law and as legal representative to a number of leading artists; to his transformational work as President of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first person from outside the Whitney family to hold this position; to his own exploration of art, where his personal confrontation with the challenges of painting brought him closer to the art and artists of his day; to his life-long generosity as a philanthropist, donating significant works to Cornell University (his alma mater), the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Smith College and others; and to today, where his singular eye for extraordinary pictures, his generosity, leadership and enduring vision – as collector, philanthropist and advocate – will continue to influence generations to come.

Born on February 17, 1906, at 95th Street and Broadway, David Solinger was the son of second-generation immigrants from Germany. His father, Morris D. Solinger, held a senior position in a wholesale meat business – an industry that did not appeal to David, who was keen to pursue a career that allowed for autonomy. His inherent drive and intellect led him to pursue higher education, first at Cornell University, and then Columbia Law School. For Solinger, law was a guiding force within his life and those around him, and one which shapes and protects the standards, values, and ethos of a rapidly evolving world.

His law practice was interrupted by the Second World War, however, and in 1942 Solinger was called to serve on the Eastern Defense Command. His innate skill as a communicator meant he was quickly enlisted to the public relations arm of the division, in which capacity he strategized a system for the dissemination of news in the event of an Atlantic Seaboard attack, with the sole aim of “informing the public accurately, and keeping them calm” (David M. Solinger: Oral History, 1989, 1-34).

“Law is precise, it doesn’t give the imagination much sway. That’s where painting comes in.”

DAVID M. SOLINGER

about the new Whitney building at the Breuer building, Art Voices Magazine

Upon his return to New York in 1945, Solinger resumed his law practice with Solinger & Gordon, the firm he co-founded. As a lawyer, his work not only included representation of key retail titans, such as Gimbel-Saks (later Saks Fifth Avenue) — but also pioneering partnerships in the developing fields of radio and television, advertising, and art law. “Lawyers without a specialty were beginning to be rarer and rarer. So I combined that perception with the fact that communications were developing, that television, particularly, as a new medium was developing. I decided that I would do whatever was necessary to be thought of as someone who was an expert in this field” (Ibid., 2-65). His foresight would make him one of the first lawyers to develop a specialty in the industry, preceding the vast majority of his peers.

Solinger’s advocacy for and interest in art was born from a chance encounter, shortly after his return from duty, when a friend enrolled for Monday night art classes at YMHA at 92nd Street and encouraged Solinger to join him. Despite his busy and rapidly developing career in law, Solinger made a practice of carving out time to paint. He describes: “I became not a Sunday painter, but a summer painter. I would take my vacation by going off to paint, much to the amusement of some professional artists who couldn’t understand how it could be a vacation for me to spend six or eight or ten hours a day painting” (Ibid., 2-71). Cathartic and freeing, art offered Solinger a key counterweight to the demands of a practice in law. “Law is precise, it doesn’t give the imagination much sway,” he once said, “That’s where painting comes in.”

David Solinger's personal cataloguing records (from left to right): Franz Kline, Study for Chief Pablo Picasso, Femme dans un fauteuil; Alberto Giacometti, Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau)

As Solinger’s love of painting grew, so too did his desire to understand how other painters addressed the same challenges he encountered. Beginning to visit galleries and museums, he quickly moved from admiring works upon gallery walls to a desire to live with art every day. After his first acquisition in 1949 of a painting by Hawaiian-born Reuben Tam – now in the collection of the Whitney Museum— from the legendary Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, Solinger was, in his own words, unstoppable: “It took a lot of courage for me to do that, because it meant that I was backing my own judgment in a sense. I was buying something that was unique. I was spending money that I had earned. And like a virus that gets into the blood stream, which can’t be cured with antibiotics but just has to run its course--it never did run its course, because I started seeing and buying other works of art” (Ibid., 1-45).

Collecting largely from the 1950s to the early 70s, Solinger found himself at the center of the art world in New York – a moment when New York itself was fast becoming the epicenter of literature, music, commerce, and the visual art world at large. From his frequent visits to museums and galleries, Solinger quickly forged lasting relationships with many of the most influential dealers and gallerists in the city – including Pierre Matisse, Samuel Kootz, Sidney Janis and Charles Egan – as well as with many of his favorite artists. He dined with Willem de Kooning and Jean Dubuffet, took painting classes from Hans Hofmann, spent summers in Provincetown with Hofmann and Franz Kline, and acted as legal representative for many others – John Marin, Louise Nevelson, and Robert Motherwell among them. Solinger was also very much engaged in the reemerging art climate in Paris, through his friendships with several gallerists, including Aimé Maeght, Michel Warren, Louis Carré, and the curator and critic Michel Tapié. As an early visitor from America to Alberto Giacometti’s Paris studio in 1950, Solinger was transfixed and obsessed with the artist and his work. Subsequently he acquired several works from Galerie Maeght beginning in 1951, and in 1962 gave Monumental Head, 1960, to the Museum of Modern Art.

Left Telegram from David M. Solinger to Willem de Kooning scheduling a studio visit, 1952

Right

Letter from Thomas B. Hess to David M. Solinger regarding the loan of Willem de Kooning's Yellow River, 1968

Cover of The Museum of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture Collection 1950

“A little over a year ago, a group of quick-thinking patrons banded together to see how the Whitney’s problem could be solved. They swiftly organized a non-profit membership organization called Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, ‘devoted to furthering the welfare and progress of contemporary art’ … David M. Solinger, lawyer and prominent collector (a long standing good amateur painter) was appointed president. He phrased the by-laws, quickened the detail work, and in no time, the Friends were operating full scale. Their aim was, and still is, to augment the Whitney’s meager allotment for the purchase of contemporary art.”

One of these new friends, Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, encouraged Solinger’s appreciation for museums and public institutions. Having attended Franz Kline’s inaugural solo exhibition together, Barr suggested that Solinger acquire one of Kline’s paintings and donate it to the Museum. Solinger promptly agreed; Kline’s Chief is now in MoMA’s permanent collection and has become one of the artist’s best-known masterworks.

In 1956, another friend, Lloyd Goodrich, reached out with an invitation to join a meeting with others who were interested in the Whitney Museum. As a result of this meeting, Solinger organized the non-profit corporation “The Friends of the Whitney Museum;” an entirely novel idea for the time, and one which proved to be an extraordinary success.

Within a decade, Solinger had risen to become President of the Whitney Museum – the first non-family member to hold this position. In this role, he steered the Whitney from a small private institution to the internationally acclaimed museum it is today, including planning and fundraising for the construction of the Marcel Breuer building at 75th Street and Madison Avenue. The now-iconic building established the Whitney as a taste-making force in the contemporary art scene, and under Solinger’s tutelage the museum built the reputation for driving innovation and challenging boundaries that continues to define it today.

In the course of all this, Solinger initiated the purchase of some of the museum’s greatest works. He recalls negotiating the acquisition of one masterpiece: “I called Bill de Kooning, whom I know…. [and] I met Donald Blinken at [his] studio. And as I entered…. I saw on the easel a picture that I immediately fell in love with and knew that this was the picture that the Museum had to have. [We had lunch at Luchow's and] in the course of the conversation, he told us he was very much interested in building a patrimony for his daughter, Lisa, then two or three years old. It was winter time, but the 1st of January had not yet arrived, and I suggested to him that he might consider giving the picture to Lisa in fractions over a three year period [and that] we would then buy her fractional interests [over a number of years]. That may have persuaded him to sell us the picture” (Ibid., 1-51-52). That work was de Kooning’s Door to the River

Further to his pioneering work as President of the Whitney Museum, Solinger’s generosity –as patron, leader, and visionary benefactor – was expansive. As a long-serving board member of the American Federation of Arts, he supported institutions, artists, and collectors in organizing travelling exhibitions, with the goal of making art more accessible to all. Always devoted to his alma mater, Solinger invested significant time and energy in developing Cornell University’s collection, serving as founding Chair of the Johnson Museum’s Advisory Council, and generously loaning and donating to the collection there. David Solinger’s legacy of insight, character, generosity and humanity has assuredly shaped new generations of institutional leadership, continuing his mission to ensure museums are strong and stable institutions, accessible, inclusive, and reflect the art of their time.

Left to right  Lloyd Goodrich, Director of the Whitney Museum; Mrs. Michael Irving; Marcel Breuer, architect' and Mrs. Flora Whitney Miller, President of the Board of Trustees.

Photo: Art Voices Magazine, Spring 1965

Flora Whitney Miller cuts the ribbon during the dedication ceremony for the museum's new building, 27 September 1966. Also pictured: the building's architect, Marcel Breuer; Mrs. John F. Kennedy; Lloyd Goodrich, director of the museum, and architect Hamilton Smith. Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images.

DORE ASHTON, “BIG YEAR FOR WHITNEY MUSEUM FRIENDS,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 5 JANUARY 1958, SECTION X, P. 15

“Mr. Solinger thinks of being president of the museum ‘as a job of being president of any institution. It’s a job of leadership. It’s incumbent upon a president to have imagination, to guide the destiny of an institution and, working with the trustees, to meet any challenges of the future’.”

"PRESIDENT OF WHITNEY: DAVID MORRIS SOLINGER,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 2 DECEMBER 1966, P. 34

David M. Solinger in the entry corridor of his apartment, New York, featuring a selection of works from The Collection

“Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb. But whereas the fruit of the plant, the fruit of the animal, the fruit in the mother’s womb, assume autonomous and natural forms, art, the spiritual fruit of man, usually shows an absurd resemblance to the aspect of something else.”

Simultaneously primordial and innately modern, shockingly new and hauntingly familiar, the joyously carved Fruit méchant encapsulates Jean Arp’s distinct ability to capture a sense of life in an object reduced to its essential form. At the heart of Arp’s success is the organic beauty of his sculptures, which seem to manifest from a vision unencumbered by any formal constraints. An important example of Arp’s early foray into sculpture, Fruit méchant is emblematic of the tenets which defined the body of sculptural work he went on to produce over the rest of his career.

Arp, like many of his fellow Dadaists, emerged from World War I with a raw sensitivity to the destructive capability of modern technology, disenchanted by the dictums of common sense which led society into a conflict of such senseless magnitude. The purpose of Dada, as Arp saw it, was “to destroy the swindle of reason perpetrated on man in order to restore him to his humble place in nature” (Jean Arp, “Notes from a Diary,” Transition, The Hague, no. 21, March 1932, p. 191). Arp’s early Dada reliefs sought to awaken the viewer to the tensions between man and his place in the world, but in the 1930s, as he transitioned to working with sculpture in the round, he instead became transfixed with the unity of man and nature. He found in sculpture the potential to collapse the distance between human and natural form, developing the distinct anthropomorphic language seen in Fruit méchant to describe what exists in between.

Both in title and in form, Arp personifies the Fruit méchant, imbuing it with human emotion and drawing a parallel between its shape and the human hand. The association defies conventional logic, but as such, the viewer comes to see their own experience as being like that of a fruit, and in turn, to see their relationship to the natural world through a new lens. The present work encapsulates the notion of the “surrealist object”—Andre Breton’s idea that the process of seeing an object anew, in a context diametrically opposed to its origins—awakens something in the unconscious that derives an entirely new understanding of the object’s meaning. There is a tension between the fluidity of form and rigidity of material that reflects Arp’s remarkable ability to create something at once tangible and entirely ephemeral. He imbues the banal with a mysticism, and in so doing gives physical shape to abstract emotions.

As Carola Giedion-Welckler writes: “The works of Jean Arp are strange artistic growths, which spring from an ancient and richly stratified cultural soil” (Carola Gidieon-Weleckler, Jean Arp New York, 1957, p. v). There is something inherently and recognizably natural about Fruit méchant—some quality that defies the notion that it was made by hand. The collapsing of this distance between the man and natural-made was the aspiration of Arp’s sculptural career. “I remember a discussion with Mondrian in which he distinguished between art and nature, saying that art is artificial and nature natural. I do not

Jean Arp at his studio, Clamart, France, 1950.

Photo: Michel Sima / Bridgeman Images.

ART © 2022 Jean Arp / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JEAN ARP, “L’ART EST UN FRUIT,” 1948, REPRINTED IN MARCEL JEAN, ED., JEAN (HANS) ARP: COLLECTED FRENCH WRITINGS, POEMS, ESSAYS, MEMORIES, LONDON, 1963, P. 241

share this opinion,” Arp wrote. “I believe that nature is not in opposition to art. Art is of natural origin and is sublimated and spiritualized through the sublimation of man” (the artist in ibid., p. 241).

The natural essence of Fruit méchant is accentuated by Arp’s choice to render the sculpture in pink limestone, a choice which also lends a unique quality to the work within Arp’s predominantly bronze oeuvre. The speckling of the stone and its earthy tones give credence to the notion that it could have one day sprouted from the ground, while the inherently pitted surface gives the sculpture the air of having been weathered by the elements. The pink limestone here further serves to naturalize the sculptural elements of the form. In keeping with the notion that his sculpture should be integrated with nature just as any fruit, flower or stone would be, Arp did not conceive of Fruit méchant with a specific directional orientation in mind. In a letter to David Solinger from Arp’s wife Marguerite, she gives instructions as to how Arp intended for the sculpture to be displayed: “Bad fruit can be placed in different positions and so you can do best to make a base which allows these different positions… As it is a ‘fruit,’ Arp

had placed it in our home on a rather low base, a sort of bowl or plate.” She continues on to explain that at the time he created Fruit méchant Arp thought that his sculptures could work “as well off squatting on the corners of tables as nestling in the depths of the garden or staring at us from the wall,” and as such “need no specially conceived base but can be put as any other ‘objet’ where you like and on what you like.”

With the present work and those made contemporaneously, Arp radically reconceptualized the notion of the “naturalistic” sculpture, liberating it from the constraints of figuration. Prior to Arp, sculptors working in the naturalist style primarily took the human figure as their subject and sought to depict it with the utmost verisimilitude to life. Arp, however, contended that natural objects should be free from a fixed representational scheme, that they did not have to be a simulacrum of nature in order to be natural. In so doing, Arp opened the door for the trove of modernist sculptors who worked alongside and after him. It is this legacy, of naturalist modern sculpture, that makes Fruit méchant—and the body of Arp’s sculptural work that accompanies it—so revolutionary.

Left Pablo Picasso, Figures on the Seashore, 1931.

Image: Musee Picasso, Paris / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Opposite Letter from Marguerite Arp, the artist’s wife, to David M. Solinger describing the orientation of the present work, dated 1963

WILLIAM BAZIOTES

- 1963

Figures in Net

signed Baziotes (upper right) oil on canvas 24 ⅜ by 30 in. 61.9 by 76.2 cm. Executed in 1948.

$ 100,000-150,000

PROVENANCE

Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, New York Acquired from the above in September 1950 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 23, illustrated

“Baziotes’ paintings are the vivification of his life dedicated to the spirit so defined. Insheathed in an aura of wonderment, they speak of the torments of a mind at its highest emotional pitch, mining the rarest gemstones hidden deep within the psyche, working them through multiple layers toward the surface, reaching toward the light which glimmers faintly from the most distant star.”

BARBARA CAVALIERE CITED IN “WILLIAM BAZIOTES: THE SUBTLETY OF LIFE FOR THE ARTIST” IN EXH. CAT., NEWPORT HARBOR ART MUSEUM, WILLIAM BAZIOTES: A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION, 1978, P. 27

Before a cerulean illusion of rippling aquatic depth, two amorphous figures emerge in William Baziotes’s Figures in Net from 1948, an ethereal example of the artist’s painterly penchant for the Abstract and Surrealist sublime. One of the most mysterious figures of the Abstract Expressionist circle working in New York at midcentury, Baziotes dedicated his painterly output to recreating dream-like states, often through biomorphic visual metaphors that resemble deep sea lifeforms or amoebic cells. Combining nature and artifact, organism and psyche, the present work perfectly expresses Baziotes’s artistic tendency for introspection and imagination as it invites the viewer to wander through its marine lattice in the profound search of a deeper truth.

In the 1930s, Baziotes frequently exhibited with a coterie of painters that included Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, all of whom dedicated their practice to principles of expressionism and abstraction. By 1940, however, when Baziotes befriended Roberto Matta, who introduced him to the tenets of European Surrealism, the artist began to espouse the psychic techniques of automatism, formulating them into his own abstractionist practice. Baziotes painted without prior compositional planning and instead manifested visuals from his wandering hand, unveiling and embracing the impulses of his subconscious. Seeking to intimate the phantoms of his own unconscious on canvas, Baziotes developed a rich visual lexicon of his own that was populated with the mythic yet organic biomorphic forms conjured from his imagination. As he reflected, “It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt” (the artist cited in “Notes on Painting,” It Is, 1959).

An intimately delicate composition, Figures in Net sees Baziotes move beyond the grand scale and action-based gestures of Abstract Expressionism: here, white curvilinear lines ellipse across the canvas in undulant routes, forming a “net” as the title suggests that sinks through shadowy depths into the melancholy background of murky indigo haze. Drifting

into focus before this atmosphere, two abstract elemental figures that luminate in ghostly white and bright yellow simultaneously recall oceanic creatures and otherworldly spirits. Fluid and ominous, the liquid movements of Baziotes’s brushwork in the present work seem to enter the quiet realm of dreams as they maneuver through the marine mysteries of the deep sea: as the artist states, “It is there when a few brushstrokes start me off on a labyrinthian journey that I am led to a more real reality” (t5he artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Newport Harbor Art Museum, William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1978, p. 44).

Executed at the apotheosis of Baziotes’s mature style in 1948, Figures in Net is a consummate example of the artist’s mystical and psychological practice that blends the fundamental tenets of both Abstract Expressionism and European Surrealism. In posthumous praise of Baziotes’s career, critic Grace Glueck wrote for the New York Times in 2001: “Baziotes seems to have reached the height of his powers in work from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s. His paintings from the mid-1930s…are more densely packed with colorful bits and pieces of monsters, animals, fish and arcane imaginings, tied together by webby lines. Their garrulous vivacity has its charms, but the later works, with sparer, more intense imagery, have a fluid, poetic eloquence that these busy early paintings lack” (Grace Glueck, “Art in Review; William Baziotes,” The New York Times, October 2001).

Left William Baziotes, circa 1947. Photo: Francis Lee / William and Ethel Baziotes papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Art © 2022 Estate of William Baziotes

Right Jean Arp, Étoile 1939.

Image: Israel Museum, Jerusalem / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2022 Jean Arp / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Following page Letter from “Bill” Baziotes to David Solinger, 7 July 1951

ALEXANDER

CALDER

1976

Sixteen Black with a Loop signed with the artist’s monogram (on the largest circular element) sheet metal, wire and paint 45 by 75 in. 114.3 by 190.5 cm. Executed in 1959. This work is registered in the archives of the Calder Foundation, New York, under application number A07539. $ 3,000,000-4,000,000

PROVENANCE

Perls Galleries, New York Acquired from the above in 1962 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, pp. 25-26, illustrated

Asuperb example of Alexander Calder’s highly innovative, iconic mobiles of the mid-twentieth century, Sixteen Black with a Loop from 1959 poetically glides through the air, its many discrete elements balanced with both mechanical and aesthetic precision. The present work was created during a pivotal decade for the artist in which his achievements were acknowledged on a wide international scale. Acquired by the Solinger family in 1962 and remaining in their collection for six decades, Sixteen Black with a Loop is a coveted and magnificent example of Calder’s entrancing exploration of immateriality and abstraction.

As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre elucidated in 1946, Calder’s mobiles spark wonder in the viewer; they are breathing, vitalized in a majestic way unlike any stationary sculpture: “They feed on the air, breathe it and take their life from the indistinct life of the atmosphere. Their mobility is, then, of a very particular kind. “ (JeanPaul Sartre in Exh. Cat., Paris, Galerie Louis Carré, Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations

1946, translation by Chris Turner, The Aftermath of War: Jean-Paul Sartre Calcutta, 2008). Calder was the product of multiple generations of artists. His paternal grandfather and father both achieved great success creating heroic public monuments, and his mother was an accomplished painter. Calder created art throughout his childhood, and he was always given a workshop when the family moved around the country for his father’s commissions. In 1923, after deciding to become a painter, Calder would dedicate himself solely to art, taking courses at the Arts Students League and traveling frequently between the United States and France into the next decade. During his transatlantic artistic development, Calder established himself deeply within the European art scene, making important ties with several notable artists, including Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1930, Calder made a visit to Mondrian’s home that he would later mark as a watershed moment in his career. Mondrian’s studio environment greatly impressed Calder, galvanizing the artist to devote much of the

Pull out Alexander Calder in his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, 1958. Photo: Phillip Harrington / Alamy Stock Photo.

Alexander Calder in his Roxbury, Connecticut studio, 1957. Photo © Arnold Newman / Getty Images. Art © Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Surely the elusive movements of Calder’s greatest mobiles of the 1940s and 50s are echoes or afterimages—if not indeed embodiments—of The Invisible”

EXH. CAT., LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, CALDER AND ABSTRACTION FROM AVANT-GARDE TO ICONIC 2013, P. 41

remainder of his career to abstraction. Just two years later, Calder famously remarked: “Why must art be static?... You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an intensely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion” (Alexander Calder quoted in Howard Greenfield, The Essential Alexander Calder New York, 2003, p. 67). Over the subsequent four decades, until his death in 1976, Calder investigated the concept of enlivened sculpture, creating moving works that Duchamp termed “mobiles” in 1931. Calder’s completely ingenious studies of volume, time, and space solidified his role not only as a pioneer of Kinetic Art, but also as a paramount artist of the twentieth century.

The present work is composed of sixteen elegantly balanced sheet metal elements, stretching across an impressive six feet and suspended in the air, weightless yet animated. Fourteen of these pieces are unique, angular

forms, each positioned to comprise an optimal compositional arrangement and practical interaction with wind and air. At the apex of Sixteen Black with a Loop, stretching up above the other fifteen elements, presides a perfect, circular form. Solar in its presence, this feature is the focal point of the sculpture, the center of a radiating orbit. Organized in a graceful cascade, the other metal components delicately and harmoniously swirl in the air around one another. For the first time in the 1940s, Calder began to perforate some of the elements in his composition, like he has done for just a single one in the present work. This pierced segment juts out in perfect balance with the other components of the mobile. Its ovular perforation echoes the two circular elements in the mobile, guiding the viewer’s gaze and enhancing the unity of the composition. Perpetually encircling itself and rotating on its central axis, the mobile encourages the viewer to circumambulate it and even observe it reverently from below.

Previous page

Letter from “Sandy” Calder to David Solinger, inviting him to visit for lunch, and a hand-drawn map of directions to his home, 5 December 1961

Above

Joan Miró, The Nightingale’s song at Midnight and Morning rain 1940. Image: Private Collection / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2022 Joan Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Engineered to be seamlessly powered by the circulation of air in space, Calder’s mobiles unify the natural world with the human made, simultaneously the product of basic principles of airflow and human ingenuity. Debasing the accepted conception of sculpture as a necessarily stationary art form, Calder developed his own manifestation of kinetic, seemingly living sculpture. Calder’s mobiles activate the surrounding air, becoming visible encapsulations of the intangible natural phenomena that govern our living world. Art historian Jed Perl has described, “Surely the elusive movements of Calder’s greatest mobiles of the 1940s and 50s are echoes or afterimages— if not indeed embodiments—of the invisible” (Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Calder and Abstraction from Avant-garde to Iconic 2013, p. 41).

While Calder’s hanging mobiles do embody certain characteristics of traditional sculpture, they also importantly eradicate one of its most

limiting aspects: a base or pedestal. Suspended from the ceiling, Calder’s hanging apparatuses do not require support from below. The mobiles rotate on multiple axes at once, perennially changing in composition and transcending static three-dimensionality. Observed by James Johnson Sweeney in the 1930s, “A new means to organize three-dimensional space was the search to which Calder as a sculptor was always returning” (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Alexander Calder, 1951, p. 56). Calder’s works not only innovatively investigate sculpture but also uniquely engage with a fourth dimension: time. Poetically dancing on its axis, Sixteen Black with a Loop is a delicate yet bold example of Calder’s intuitive investigation. Using simple cut metal and wire, Calder challenged the status quo of contemporary sculpture, revolutionizing the presupposed role and social function of the discipline. Eclipsing existing standards of contemporary art, Calder produced aesthetic and mechanical perfection in his mobiles.

JOAN MIRÓ

1893 - 1983

Femme, étoiles

signed Miró, dated 7-5-45 and titled (on the reverse) oil on canvas

44 ½ by 57 ¾ in. 114 by 146 cm.

Executed in Barcelona on 7 May 1945.

$ 15,000,000-20,000,000

PROVENANCE

Galerie Pierre, Paris

Galerie Maeght, Paris

Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Joan Miró 1948, no. 63 (titled Femme et étoiles

Stockholm, Galerie Blanche, Joan Miró målningar, keramik, litografier 1949, no. 6 (titled Femme, étoile

Ithaca, Cornell University, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger 1956, no. 16 (titled Woman and Stars

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Joan Miró, 199394, no. 179, p. 268, illustrated in color

Ithaca, New York, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 117, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Tristan Tzara, “Pour passer le temps…,” Cahiers d’art vols. 20-21, Paris, 1945-46, p. 288, illustrated (titled Femme et étoiles)

Jacques Dupin, Miró, Life and Work New York, 1962, no. 656, p. 550, illustrated (titled Woman, Star

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Catalogue Raisonne: Paintings, vol. III, Paris, 2001, no. 756, p. 80, illustrated

“Miró let go with the full range of his powers, showing us what he could really do all the time. Anywhere outside the world, and outside time, too—his voice echoes everywhere and always, a voice carried to us from afar, to join the chorus of the loftiest, most inspired voices the world has ever heard.”

Apoetic array of Joan Miró’s greatest motifs, Femme, étoiles can be viewed as a culminating opus of its era, chronicling the end of the Second World War and serving as a coda to the masterful Constellations begun at its onset. Of the related works from 1945, there is perhaps no other painting with more historical significance than Femme, étoiles. Painted on the 7th of May 1945, the present work marks he very day that the German High Command signed an unconditional surrender at Reims, marking a long-awaited and momentous end to the world’s deadliest war. Imbued with the import of the moment, Femme, étoiles presents an inherent dichotomy which speaks to horror of conflict and the hope of freedom; with the composition’s dueling expanses of light and dark, the alternately placid and menacing figures and the balance of heavy and fine lines, the elements within Femme, étoiles coalesce to create a work at once enveloping and anticipatory, expressing an excruciating lyricism rife with the poetics of tragedy and comity.

A favored cast of characters from Miró’s visual lexicon appear in the present composition as an anthropomorphic figure of a woman floats at left, seemingly emanating from a grey portal at right.

Varied stars and mellifluent lines dance across the surface, achieving a paradoxical balance of motion and stasis within the scene. Beholding the power of Miró’s work, one has the feeling of emerging from the long dark of night, headed at last toward a brilliant new dawn of possibility.

Engendered by the defining Constellations series begun in 1940, Femme, étoiles inherits the legacy of the iconic body of twenty-three works considered by Miró at the time to be “one of the most important things I have done” (quoted in Margit Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 168). As the name of the series implies, the works belonging to Miró’s Constellations are often set against a background of muted washes and darker tones evoking the night sky and providing a context for the abundant forms of women, birds and stars that mingle within them.

Miró began working on the watershed gouache compositions in January 1940 in the quiet northern French village of Varengeville, where he had settled after leaving his home country at the onset of The Spanish Civil War.

Like his fellow countryman Picasso, Miró’s most famed works would be defined in relation to shifts in the world order. At the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World’s Fair both painters present distinctly anti-war paintings on a monumental scale; Picasso’s revolutionary Guernica and Miró’s Le Faucheur.

By May 1940, Miró was again forced to relocate, this time back to Spain due to the German invasion of Paris. By the time his Constellations were done, the artist had moved to Mallorca (careful at first to avoid his native Catalonia out of fear of Francisco Franco’s secret police) and then to his family’s home at Montroig. Amid all the upheaval Miró found solace in his

Joan Miró with a related work from the series, Femme dans la nuit painted March 1945; now in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photograph by Sanford Roth. Courtesy of Scott Nichols Gallery, Sonoma, California Art © 2022 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

ANDRÉ BRETON CIRCA 1945, QUOTED IN JACQUES DUPIN, JOAN MIRÓ, LIFE AND WORK NEW YORK, 1962, P. 360.

art, stating in an interview with James Johnson Sweeney that “It was about the time that the war broke out. I felt a desire to escape. I closed myself within myself purposely. The night, the music, and the stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings” (quoted in Janis Mink, Joan Miró: 1893-1983 Cologne, 1993, p. 67).

Such fonts of inspiration carried on in the following years after Miró’s first major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1941 and his subsequent relocation to Barcelona in 1942, where, after months of careful dedication to his Constellations, Miró let his

imagination take flight in hundreds of unbridled and diverse works on paper centered around the theme of women, birds and stars. It was not until 1944 that he again took up oil painting, committing to an authority and decisiveness that the medium commanded.

At the same time that Miró’s Constellations opened to critical acclaim at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in early 1945, the artist embarked upon yet another defining series which would translate the idols of his earlier gouache masterpieces into indelible large-scale canvases like Femme, étoiles.

The present work installed in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1993 Joan Miró retrospective. Paintings from left to right: Danseuse entendant jouer de l’orgue dans une cathédrale gothique 26 May 1945 (Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan); Femme entendant de la musique (Private Collection); The present work. Art © 2022 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Discussing the significance of the artist’s work from this period, Jacques Dupin states, “The intimism of Miró’s entire production from 1939 on, and the invention of a new language which it made possible, lead to a magnificent series of large canvases painted in 1945, which are among the best-known and most frequently reproduced of all his works” (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró, Life and Work New York, 1962, pp. 378). On the iconography of Miró’s 1945 works, Dupin continues, “The space is taken up with big figures, birds, stars, and signs…No signs could be simpler, yet they are constantly renewed from one canvas

to the next, in strict obedience to mysterious laws governing their dimensions, number, direction, and distribution…The forms are, in the artist’s own words, ‘at once mobile and immobile.’ ‘What I am looking for,’ Miró also said, ‘is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called “an eloquent silence” or what St. John of the Cross referred to as muted music’” (ibid., pp. 379-80).

Of the eighteen other canvases in this remarkable series, ten are in museum collections including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Fundació

Joan Miró in Barcelona, among others. Painted on roughly the same scale (typically between 57 and 63 inches in the largest direction), the canvases from 1945 feature an evolution of female figures in the night. The first half of the series is dominated by playful figures and connected black dots against soft white grounds in horizontal format. The execution of the present work in May marks a turning point within the series, the grounds becoming increasingly modulated and rich in color. For the first time, the large orb of

grey encircles a black two-legged form—a feature which would carry over into the following two canvases from that month. Suddenly the main protagonist, ostensibly the namesake woman, bears a small set of sharp teeth, another motif which would in part define the remaining works of the series. While the impact of the composition on the whole is one of resounding eloquence, even calm, there exists a faint echo of antagonism; though the war had come to an end in Europe, the harsh realities of General Franco’s fascist reign in Spain remained.

In addition to the important gallery shows in Paris and Stockholm in the late 1940s, Femme, étoiles was notably featured at The Museum of Modern Art’s historic centennial exhibition dedicated to Miró’s legacy where it hung beside related works from the series and the fantastical sculptures that such paintings inspired.

Left

BELOW AND BEYOND THE HORIZON JEAN DUBUFFET IN THE DAVID M. SOLINGER COLLECTION

ELEANOR NAIRNE

According to the traditions of composition, an artist should place their horizon line one or two thirds from the base of the canvas. For the postwar provocateur Jean Dubuffet, this was a cardinal rule to be ruptured: he made his ground rise up to the brink of threatening to eclipse the sky and sink his canvas. Brume du matin sur la campagne, 1945, has only the skimpiest ribbon of vivid blue above the hazy countryside, while Scène dans un paysage de rochers ou trois malandrins dans les rochers, from the following year, has a band of navy so narrow and close in hue to the murky backdrop of the highwayman that a casual look might not discern it. By the summer of 1948, in Chamelier, this kind of sliver had been exaggerated into a signature device – used to offset the churning land below.

Dubuffet’s aim was radically simple: to return us to the earth and, in doing so, to remind us of the organic continuity between our feet and the ground beneath them. Looking at the two figures gambolling across the mass of wine-dark paint in Prompt Messager from 1954, I think of the character of Joane in Clarice Lispector’s first novel Near to the Wild Heart from 1943. ‘There were many good feelings. Climbing the hill, stopping at the top and, without looking, feeling the ground covered behind her, the farm in the distance. The wind ruffling her clothes, her hair. Her arms free, heart closing and opening wildly, but her face bright and serene under the sun. And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory.’1

Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart (London: Penguin Classics), p. 36. Lispector took her title from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life’.

Lot 5, Jean Dubuffet, Scène dans un paysage de rochers; Maurice Estève, Maréchal-Ferrant, The David M. Solinger Collection, Sotheby’s Paris, December 2022; and a selection of Pre-Columbian and Mezcala figures to be offered Sotheby’s New York, Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, 22 November 2022

Photo © Visko Hatfield

When Dubuffet had his first solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin on the Place Vendôme in Paris in October 1944, Jean Paulhan wrote a letter for the catalogue, delighting in the fact that his friend’s ‘paintings were not at all a ministry, nor a theorem, but a sort of rejoicing, something like a public celebration’.5 In fact, visitors were not sure how to respond to his crude imagery, which must have felt like the rudest interruption into the particularly French history of la belle peinture Some even staged protests outside the gallery –which only spurred the artist on. His fundamental commitment was to matière, as the base truth to all existence; ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Lispector was just 23 years old when she published her blazing novel, leaving Brazilian critics to grapple with what one called her ‘bewildering verbal richness’.2 Dubuffet was nearly twice her age by the time he committed to being an artist (after a successful career as a wine merchant) but he shared many of her interests in breaking traditional idioms in order to ‘surprise the symbol of the thing in the thing itself’.3 Or to put it another way: what if a seemingly childlike image of a craggy landscape, with sand and gravel embedded into the very paint, had a better chance of rendering its qualities than any picturesque easel painting could hope to?

‘Grope your way backwards!’ Dubuffet liked to exclaim; amateurism made a new kind of sense in the wake of the barbarity of the Second World War, which so thoroughly discredited western notions of human rationalism and civility.4

Opposite Cover of the exhibition catalogue, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1947

Cover of the exhibition catalogue, Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie Rene Drouin, Paris, 1946

Above Jean Dubuffet, Brume du matin sur la campagne The David M. Solinger Collection, Sotheby’s Paris, December 2022

A photograph of Dubuffet in his studio in 1951 by Robert Doisneau, makes him look like more like an eccentric cook than an artist – with pots and pans and palette knives at the ready to ice his latest creation. Gastronomical metaphors were at home in Dubuffet’s writing. As a man who railed against specious intellectualism, he felt more at ease comparing his work to provisions than Picasso. ‘Let the artist’s mind, his moods and impressions, be offered raw, with their smells still vivid, just as you eat a herring without cooking it, but right after pulling it from the sea, when it’s still dripping,’ he encouraged. He was equally fond of animalistic imagery. Indeed, the hautes pâtes, of which the three highwayman is a prime example, were infamous for taking on a life of their own. In his catalogue essay for Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie at the Galerie René Drouin in 1946, Michel Tapié wrote of ‘one painting, over the course of an entire night [which] spat all over the harmonium… Dubuffet enjoys these adventures enormously, calling them “hippopotamus perspiration”’.7

Benjamin Moser, ‘Hurricane Clarice’, Near to the Wild Heart xi Moser, ‘Hurricane Clarice’, Near to the Wild Heart xi Jean Dubuffet, ‘Notes for the Well-Read’ [‘Notes pour les fins-lettrés’, 1945], trans. Joachim Neugroschel in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternate Reality (New York: Pace Publications / Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 67.

Jean Paulhan, Letter to Jean Dubuffet in Exposition de tableaux et dessins de Jean Dubuffet exh cat, Galerie René Drouin, Paris, 1944, n.p. Dubuffet, ‘Notes for the Well-Read’, p. 77.

Michel Tapié, ‘Mirobolus, Macadam et cie: hautes pâtes de J. Dubuffet’, reprinted in Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, vol. 2, ed Max Loreau (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1966), p. 119.

Opposite Jean Dubuffet in his Paris studio, 1951.

Photo © Robert Doisneau/GammaRapho/Getty Images.

Art © 2022 Fondation Dubuffet, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The anecdote speaks to Dubuffet’s essential concern with how he could use humble materials (household paint, asphalt, glue, shards of glass, frayed string, coal dust and so on) to make his pictures teem with life. After the fields that were destroyed by battles, how could an artist paint a landscape any other way? Dubuffet worked with his canvas or board directly on the floor of his studio so that it had a literal relationship to baseness; he used a kind of putty to build a tactile relief onto the surface to create ambivalence about whether we are looking at a cross-section of a landscape or an aerial view. As part of his search for new perspectives, Dubuffet made three extended trips to Algeria between 1947 and 1949, where he learned Arabic and lived with Bedouin communities, inspiring works such as Arab and Camel from 1948.

Once back in Paris, he attempted a kind of landscape painting that would capture the spirit rather than the likeness of these extreme Saharan environments. As he explained in his catalogue text for Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1952, a paysage such as Chamelier was not intended to represent a specific site or an idealized place (although the title may point to one of the recent Algerian excursions) but to offer a journey into ‘the country of the formless’ – a landscape of thought.8 His intention was for these works ‘to show the immaterial world which dwells in the mind of man: disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images, where they cross and mingle, in a turmoil, tatters borrowed from memories of the outside world, and facts purely cerebral and internal – visceral perhaps’.9

8 Jean Dubuffet, ‘Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy’ in Peter Selz, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, exh, cat, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1962), p. 63. Dubuffet wrote this text in English with the help of the artist Marcel Duchamp for the eponymous exhibition catalogue at Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 12 February – 1 March 1952.

9 Dubuffet, ‘Landscaped Tables’, p. 71.

“Ultimately, it’s about the universe that surrounds us, the places that confront us, all the objects that meet our gaze and occupy our thoughts.”

JEAN DUBUFFET, LETTER TO ANDREAS FRANZKE, 3 AUGUST 1980

As time wore on, Dubuffet increasingly withdrew into this territory of philosophical enquiry. Why paint the world as seen in the mind’s eye when the mind’s eye could be an image in itself? His ‘L’Hourloupe’ works, for example, were began quite by accident when he was doodling while on the telephone in July 1962. The fluid figures he had absent-mindedly drawn with his four-colour ballpoint pen were then embellished with diagonal stripes and cut out and mounted onto black card – which became the beginning of a series that would possess him for more than 12 years, including paintings, sculptures, architectural environments and performances. Épisode from 22 January 1967, is characteristic, with its sinuous faces and shapes enmeshed in a patterned matrix – a reminder that we all belong to the same universal soup. The membrane between the so-called real world and the imaginary appears to be finer than we might have chosen to believe.

Playful and provocative to the very end, Dubuffet found new ways to conjure the vibrancy of our fragile existence. Finally abandoning his horizon line altogether, in his later decades he embraced a journey into the formless, much like Joana experiences in Near to the Wild Heart : ‘All of her body and soul lost their limits, mixed together, merged into a single chaos, soft and amorphous, slow and with vague movements like matter that was simply alive. It was the perfect renewal, creation’. 10

10 Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart p. 90.

Above Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart,1944

Left Exhibition poster for Jean Dubuffet: Retrospective Exhibition, 19431959 Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in which Scène dans un paysage de rochers was featured

JEAN DUBUFFET

1901 - 1985

Scène dans un paysage de rochers, ou Trois malandrins dans les rochers

signed J. Dubuffet and dated 1946 (on the reverse); titled (on the stretcher)

oil, enamel, sand, and pebbles on canvas 21 ¼ by 25 ½ in. 53.9 by 64.8 cm. Executed in June 1946.

$ 1,200,000-1,800,000

PROVENANCE

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Mr. and Mrs. Lee Ault, New York (acquired from the above in 1947)

Kende Galleries, Inc., New York

Acquired from the above in June 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, J. Dubuffet: Paintings, 1947, no. 19

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Jean Dubuffet: Retrospective Exhibition, 1945-1959 1959, no. 12, illustrated

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, 1962, no. 31

Ithaca, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art, 2002-03, pp. 46, 49, illustrated

LITERATURE

Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule II: Mirobulus, Macadam et Cie (1945-1946), Lausanne, 1966, no. 150, p. 131; p. 100, illustrated

Gaëtan Picon, Le travail de Jean Dubuffet, Geneva, 1973, p. 48

A n early paragon of his emotionally intuitive experimentation with technique and media, Scène dans un paysage de rochers, ou Trois malandrins dans les rochers anticipates the entire course of Jean Dubuffet’s aesthetic revolution. Executed in 1946, the present work realizes a critical moment in the genesis of Art Brut. Belonging to Dubuffet’s seminal Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie series, which he created between April 1945 and 1946, the execution of this work is concurrent with Dubuffet’s second solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in Paris. Eliciting simultaneous controversy and acclaim, this show ultimately cemented Dubuffet’s reputation as a forerunner of Paris’ post-war cultural avant-garde. Reflecting its significance within his Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie cycle of works, Scène dans un paysage de rochers was exhibited as part of his first museum retrospective in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as a retrospective exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1959. In a letter requesting this work for the exhibition, Pierre Matisse writes, “Dubuffet thinks very highly of this painting and wants to have it in the show,” underlining the work’s singular quality. A riveting and important example of Dubuffet’s uniquely innovative praxis, Scène dans un paysage de rochers profoundly demonstrates the mastery of material that has come to define his inimitable career.

Defying nearly all traditional precepts set forth throughout the history of painting, Scène dans un paysage de rochers crystallizes the key tenets of Art Brut. The present work was executed one year following Dubuffet’s crucial 1945 trip to Switzerland, in which he studied the paintings and drawings of asylum patients and self-taught artists, including Adolf Wölfli and Madge Gill, whose work demonstrated complete indifference to cultural norms. Consumed by the need to rid visual art of its affected heroics and inhibitions, Dubuffet concurrently became preoccupied with the haphazard aesthetics of city walls, graffiti, and eroding surfaces as photographed by Brassaï. From this Dubuffet developed Art Brut, influenced by Hans Prinzhorn book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, meaning “raw art” or “outsider art,” as his classification for a mode of art produced by non-professionals working outside the aesthetic norm.

Depicting highwaymen, Scène dans un paysage de rochers typifies Dubuffet’s fixation on quotidian, insignificant, or lowly subjects. Invalidating the traditional aims of portraiture to create verisimilitude or portray beauty standards among the dignified upper class, which he viewed as a pretentious and isolating practice, Dubuffet instead relied on the categorical oversimplification and depersonalization of his subjects to extract features shared by all. “It is the man in the street whom I feel closest to,” he writes, “with whom I want to make friends and enter into confidence, and he is

Above, left  Jean Dubuffet, Archetypes 1945. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. ART © 2022 Fondation Jean Dubuffet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Above, right  Brassaï, Sans titre from the series Graffiti [Masques et visages], 1945-1955, printed circa 1960. Sold Sotheby’s Paris, 7 June 2017. © Estate Brassaï – RMNGrand Palais

The present work installed in the exhibition

The Work of Jean Dubuffet, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962. Image courtesy of MoMA. Art (©) 2022

Fondation Jean Dubuffet

/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York the one I want to please and enchant by means of my work” (the artist quoted in Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Paris, 1946, p. 62).

Superbly conjuring its titular rocky landscape, the caustic terrain of Scène dans un paysage de rochers presents one of the most masterful iterations of Dubuffet’s radical haute pâte composite medium. A touchstone of the Mirobolus paintings, this hastened, gestural use of a paste with asphalt, tar, lead, varnish, plaster and cement, offers an innovative alternative to the predictable use of oil paint. Applied thickly to the support, Dubuffet then embeds this medium with tar, bits of string, or other detritus from his urban environment. Likening the materiality of his works to the corporeality of man’s interaction with the natural

environment, Dubuffet expounds, “the essential gesture of the painter is to cover a surface… to plunge his hands into full buckets or bowls, and with his palms and fingers to putty over the wall surface with his clay, his pastes, to knead it body to body, to leave as imprints the most immediate traces of his thought, the rhythms and impulses that beat in his arteries and run along his nerves” (The artist cited in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, 1993, p. 33). Each variegated inch of oil, wax and sand upon the surface of Scène dans un paysage de rochers offers a microcosm replete with torrents of textural intensity. Bearing every trace of his application of medium, this surface associates paint with earth and flesh to not only represent nature but also embody it.

Epitomizing Dubuffet’s central ambition to animate and inject life into raw material, the rudimentary contours of the highwaymen emerge from sculptural, ploughed environs. Inscribed into a freshly applied surface with white pigment, the consciously flattened figures are inherent to Dubuffet’s graphic vernacular. Dubuffet eschews illusionistic perspective in the present work: instead of only constituting the rocky surface upon which the highwaymen stand, the textural plane encompasses the totality of the composition. In so doing, Dubuffet accesses a mode of pictorial flux that upturns the formal traditions of Western painting; privileging intuitive fantasy over referential naturalism. Substituting such traditions

with emotive intuition, Dubuffet here manifests the visceral energy of creation integral to Art Brut as described by Peter Schjeldahl: “Material and line collide—the paint pushing outward, the line digging inward—to create a surface not so much laid on flat as dynamically flattened: smashed and impacted between opposing forces… The effect recalls an old, ethereal aesthetic ideal of Symbolism, synesthesia, realized this time with earthy directness. The effect requires prolonged looking, rewarding a patient viewer with wave upon wave of virtually timed-release pleasure” (Exh. Cat, Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963: Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages 1993, p. 16).

JEAN DUBUFFET

1901 - 1985

Épisode

signed J. Dubuffet and dated 67 (lower right); signed again, titled Episode and dated Janvier 67 (on the reverse) acrylic on canvas 57 ½ by 64 in. 146.1 by 162.6 cm. Executed on 22 January 1967.

$ 3,500,000-4,500,000

PROVENANCE

Galerie Beyeler, Basel

The Pace Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in January 1968 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, pp. 48 and 55, illustrated

LITERATURE

Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule XXII: Cartes, Ustensiles (1966-1967), Lausanne, 1972, no. 289, p. 187, p. 110, illustrated

Enveloping the viewer in a mesmerizing web of densely interlocking faces, patterns, and forms, Épisode from 1967 radiates with the jubilant and spontaneous spirit of Jean Dubuffet’s iconic L’Hourloupe cycle. Seamlessly morphing between abstraction and figuration, the present work articulates the ambitious conceptual heights of his widely celebrated and longest-running series through the visual device of l’écriture logologique. Evoking the wanderings of the unconscious mind and the triumph of chaos over order, Épisode embodies that perpetual visual innovation that defines the enduring legacy of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist.

Épisode bursts from Dubuffet’s subconscious, its imaginative forms and visages allowing each of us a brief voyage in the fantastic world of L’Hourloupe An expansive body of drawings, paintings, and sculptures executed between 1962 and 1974, the L’Hourloupe cycle of works originated with a simple doodle in ballpoint pen that Dubuffet scrawled absentmindedly on a scrap of paper as he spoke on the telephone. Dubuffet’s neologism ‘hourloupe,’ invented to imply a wonderful object or a grotesque creature, recalls both the French verbs ‘hurler’ and ‘hululer’—meaning ‘to roar’ and ‘to hoot’ respectively—as well as the word ‘loup’, the French noun for ‘wolf’. Through scribbles, the stylistic crux of the entire L’Hourloupe series, Dubuffet channels the instinct-driven creative fervor integral to his Art Brut aesthetic, which sought to elevate the strange, the outcast, and the outsider over academic methods and art world norms. “This cycle of work was characterized by a much more seriously arbitrary and irrational mood than anything I had done before,” Dubuffet explains. “This was a plunge into fantasy, into a phantom parallel universe. My renewed interest in outsider art was no doubt not unconnected with this sudden new development” (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Salzburg, Museum der Moderne (and traveling), Jean Dubuffet: Trace of an Adventure, 2003, p. 174).

Adhering to yet expanding the stylistic lexicon of L’Hourloupe, Épisode immerses the viewer in a jigsaw of visual complexity achieved by bewilderingly simple medium and form.

Building upon Dubuffet’s longstanding interest in portraiture, patterns of biomorphic shapes emerge from the sheer two-dimensionality of the picture plane as discrete faces. Melding with methodically executed cellular structures to create a vibrant pictorial syntax, these forms present an ebullient expression of unrestricted impulses and liberated thought.

Épisode arrives at a critical moment for L’Hourloupe as the series both sensationally explodes onto the international art world stage and undergoes a decisive conceptual shift. Executed on 22 January 1967, the present work follows Dubuffet’s notable 1966 Guggenheim exhibition dedicated to L’Hourloupe. Equally, Épisode showcases the visual lexicon of l’écriture logologique (logological writing) that emerged in L’Hourloupe works beginning in late 1966. Borrowing the term logology, Dubuffet endeavored to redefine logos through his oeuvre.

Left  Jean Dubuffet in his studio, Vence, France, 1964. Photo © Archives Fondation Jean Dubuffet / Max Loreau. Art © 2022

Fondation Jean Dubuffet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Above Fernand Léger, Contrast of Forms 1913. Museum of Modern Art, New York / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2022 Fernand Léger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The artist writes, “I endow this word with the opposite of its usual meaning, since it commonly designates the mental operation of name and classification…my intention is, on the contrary, to wipe out categories and turn back to an undifferentiated continuum… The aim of these works is, by breaking down the conventional logos, to set up or, rather, to suggest a new one, to reveal the arbitrary and specious character of the logos with which we are familiar and the enduring possibility of reinterpreting the world and basing our thinking on a logos of a very different kind” (the artist quoted in Jean Dubuffet and Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards and Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 223).

The present work is a transposition of Dubuffet’s work on paper, Texte Logologique IX, executed exactly two weeks prior. The black marker drawing constitutes pages twenty-four and twenty-five of Parade funèbre pour Charles Estienne (Funeral procession for Charles Estienne), a book commemorating the recent death of Charles Estienne, the French art critic and writer who was a noted proponent of Dubuffet’s practice. Texte Logologique IX, alongside eleven other textes logologiques, comprise the “text” of Dubuffet’s epitaph, communicated via an intermingling of myriad amorphous forms in place of written language. Épisode magnifies the explosive visual dynamism of Texte Logologique IX, rendering its composition in the palette of

L’Hourloupe with saturated and striated zones of red, blue, and white contoured by sinuous black lines. As such, Épisode serves as an important precursor to Dubuffet’s Cabinet Logologique, a logological installation undertaken shortly after his execution of this painting. Intended to fill a space in which Dubuffet could meditate on his artistic practice, the Cabinet is now a French national monument within the Closerie Falbala, a structure designed to enclose the Cabinet

Épisode culminates as a visual script of seemingly endless readings and interpretations, firm in its spirit of perpetual evolution and revelation. As such, the canvas captures the crux of his logological works, embodying the visual effect described by art critic Max Loreau, “Logologie Logos redoubled, logos atop logos, logos taking as objects its own secretions... The word indicates that such discourse is not about things or what is called reality, but rather about the language of things or the painter himself; that it is a reflection of the logos on itself, that it consists only of what becomes logos when it turns towards itself and only itself, far from things and the world, without support—being its own support, in sum, the discourse here is a free proliferation of logos. This results in melees of melees, profusions of indefinite affluences” (Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule XXII: Cartes, Ustensiles (1966–1967), Lausanne, 1972, p. 11).

Left Jean Dubuffet, Parade Funebre pour Charles Estienne: Texte Logologique IX, M.327 1967. Sold Sotheby’s London, 11 February 2015. Art © 2022 Fondation Jean Dubuffet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Opposite Letter from Jean Dubuffet to David Solinger, 2 January 1963

JEAN DUBUFFET

Chamelier

signed J. Dubuffet and dated juin 48 (on the reverse)

on

⅜ by 28 ½ in. 100 by 72.4 cm. Executed in May-June 1948.

2,000,000-3,000,000

PROVENANCE

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York Acquired from the above in December 1954 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jean Dubuffet 1943-1963: Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages, 1993, no. 26, p. 147; p. 70, illustrated in color

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, pp. 46, 51, illustrated

LITERATURE

Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule IV: Roses d’Allah, Clowns du Désert (1947-1949), Lausanne, 1967, no. 226, p. 214; p. 117, illustrated

Max Loreau, Jean Dubuffet: Délits, déportements, lieux de haut jeu, Lausanne, 1971, p. 592; p. 64, illustrated

“This is a Dubuffet, which once hung in Pierre Matisse’s house... It is a picture [Chamelier] of the Arab period, which was 1948. I think it’s quite wonderful, but then, as I once said to someone, I’ve never seen a Dubuffet I didn’t like... This is Dubuffet’s way of describing the sands of North Africa. He has a camel. He has a sheik. He has footprints in the sand... And it has the typical richness that I always associate with Dubuffet’s work.”

An enthralling vision of the desert’s essence, Chamelier encapsulates the enduring influence of the Sahara and its inhabitants on Jean Dubuffet’s inimitable oeuvre. Executed between May and June 1948, the present work is one of the most compelling and dynamic works that emerged from Dubuffet’s transformative voyages to southern Algeria. As one of only eighteen works on canvas created as part of this cycle—titled Roses d’Allah, clowns du desert Chamelier is a rarity within Dubuffet’s oeuvre. Attesting to the importance of this output, paintings from this series belong to prestigious museum

collections including The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. An evocative rendering of the desert’s atmosphere rather than its literal appearance, the present work is a quintessential example of Dubuffet’s career-long investigation of memory, representation and the possibilities of paint.

Chamelier emerged from Dubuffet’s three transformative extended sojourns with his wife Lili to the oasis of El Goléa, Algeria, between 1948 and 1949. Sensing a deep malaise following World War II, Dubuffet sought to rid visual art of its cultural inhibitions. Following in the tradition

of other European artists who traveled to North Africa, such as Eugène Delacroix, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, Dubuffet was enraptured by his novel Saharan environs and by the customs of the Bedouin people. Dubuffet deliberately immersed himself in local life to detach himself from the conventions and doctrines of European culture, with the ancient traditions of nomadic desertdwellers appealing to his enchantment with unprocessed visual languages and the instinctive, raw sensibilities that governed his Art Brut practice. Merged with the artist’s environmental solitude, this cultural reawakening heralded new artistic inquiries for Dubuffet: “Perhaps it was the time I spent in the deserts of White Africa that sharpened my taste…,” he writes, “for the little, the almost nothing, and especially, in my art, for the landscapes where one finds only the formless” (the artist cited in Mildred Glimcher, Jean Dubuffet: Towards An Alternative Reality, New York, 1987, p. 9).

Left  Jean Dubuffet in El Golea, Sahara, 1948. Photo © 2022 Archives Fondation Jean Dubuffet, Paris

Above Jean Dubuffet, Nomads with Camel 1948. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Art © 2022 Fondation

Jean Dubuffet / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Following page  Cave painting, Camel Period (from 300 AD). Ouan Bender, Tassili n’Ajjer (Unesco World Heritage List, 1982), Algeria.

Limited by the materials available in the desert, Dubuffet primarily executed drawings and gouaches while in southern Algeria. His returns to Paris between his trips offered an opportunity to use a full range of media to convey his newfound liberation from his learned artistic techniques and to eschew the Modern sensibilities of his Pre-War style. Chamelier is one of twelve oil paintings Dubuffet created when returning to Paris between April 1948 and March 1949, all of which feature figurative elements. With Dubuffet’s sanctuary to the anti-cultural positions of Art Brut, the “Foyer de l’Art Brut,” enlarged and renamed to the “Compagnie de l’Art Brut” during these months, the desert became an ideal subject matter to convey a newly unfettered, intuitive artistic approach.

Heaved from mixes and scrapes of earthen ochres, the topographical surface of Chamelier broadens the expressive possibilities of oil paint. A vast terrain of sand dunes, broken only by an extremely high horizon, erupts across the canvas with raw intensity. Vitalized by this raw landscape, the captivating camel-driver and his companion emerge in a near-cadmium negative relief. Through the hypnotic smears, scrawls, and incisions of his palette knife, Dubuffet

embellishes his portrait with face-framing headgear and geometricized garb. Pointedly frontal, these figures synthesize the exquisite pictorial nature of the Arabic characters that Dubuffet intensely studied and his existing visual vernacular, which derived from the art of children and the insane and the aesthetics of graffiti and cave paintings.

The textural depth and energy of the surface exposes Dubuffet’s fascination with the flowing continuity of the Sahara’s vast, ever-shifting landscape. Chamelier’s multidirectional tactility echoes sand’s capacity to efface human markmaking and endlessly renew itself, becoming a tabula rasa ad infinitum The present work manifests the revelatory power of sand on Dubuffet’s practice, as described by art historians Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott: “The true discovery, the one he had no doubts about, was the sand, a fluid and ductile medium that stretches out to infinity. Undoubtedly here he had found material without form, but above all a complete modification of the relationship between the individual and the space that surrounds him: drunk with immensity in this world dominated by vertigo where the threat always exists of blacking out or

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, 1989, 9-482

losing consciousness… Sand is the only material on which the memory of time is not imprinted. These prints are ephemeral, gradually erased and soon forgotten. We are far from the spaces of memory which characterise Western civilization and which retain the impact of time” (Valerie da Costa and Fabrice Hergott, Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writings and Interviews, Barcelona, 2006, pp. 41-44).

During his excursions, Dubuffet found footprints to be an apt vehicle of this sentiment: “Footprints are delightful…They do not last long, they are erased by other just as delightful footprints from other feet. All the oasis’s ground trampled thus again and again and filled with marks and signs is like a huge notebook, a book of improvisations, like a vast school

blackboard full of numbers, in which we live, immerse ourselves, dissolve ourselves, scupper ourselves” (the artist in a letter to Jacques Berne, February 5, 1948). Pervading the desert landscape of the present work, footprints evidence a fleeting human presence and, in turn, places the work in a specific temporal space.

A mirage of memory, Chamelier showcases the liberating nature of the mutable Algerian landscape for Dubuffet. The present canvas illustrates the inception and development of many aesthetic possibilities, from the landscapes of his Paysages grotesques to the flattened forms of his seminal Corps de dames, that cement Dubuffet’s status as one of the foremost visual innovators of the twentieth century.

LITERATURE

Exh. Cat., Basel, Kunsthalle, André Masson— Alberto Giacometti, 1950, no. 107, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Alberto Giacometti, 1950, p. 4, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., Kassel, Germany, Documenta II 1959, no. 1, p. 75, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, XXth Century Artists, 1960, illustration of another cast

Jacques Dupin, Alberto Giacometti, 1962, p. 245, illustration of another cast

Poul Vad, “Giacometti” Signum II Copenhagen, 1962, p. 35

Palma Bucarelli, Alberto Giacometti Rome, 1962, pl. 33, illustration of another cast

Michel Courtois, “La Figuration magique de Giacometti,” Art International vol. 6, no. 5/6, Summer 1962, p. 39, illustration of another cast (titled Groupe: 3 hommes )

Exh. Cat., Zurich, Kunsthaus, Alberto Giacometti, 1962-63, no. 34, p. 8, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Alberto Giacometti, 1963, no. 33, illustration of another cast

Raoul-Jean Moulin, Giacometti: Sculptures New York, 1964, pl. 5, illustration of anther cast Alexander Watt, “Alberto Giacometti: The Pursuit of the Unapproachable,” Studio vol. 167, no. 849, New York, 1964, p. 22, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti 1965, no 32, p. 55, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., London, Tate Gallery, Alberto Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings 19131965 1965, p. 5, illustration of another cast Michel Ragon, “Alberto Giacometti, Peintre et sculpteur,” Jardin des Arts no. 158, January 1968, p. 7, illustration of another cast (titled Groupe de trois hommes)

Franz Meyer, Alberto Giacometti: Eine Kunst existentieller Wirklichkeit, Frauenfeld, Stuttgart, 1968, pp. 158 and 160

Carlo Huber, Alberto Giacometti, Geneva, 1970, p. 76, illustration of another cast

Bettina von Meyenburg-Campell and Dagmar Hnikova, eds., Die Sammlung der Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Zurich, 1971, p. 123, illustration of another cast (titled Trois hommes qui marchant (séparés))

Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti New York, 1971, no. 126, pp. 126, illustration of another cast

William Rubin, Three Generations of TwentiethCentury Art: The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972, pp. 110-11, 184 and 226, no. 30, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Alberto Giacometti. A Retrospective Exhibition, 1974, no. 55, p. 88 and on the cover, illustration of another cast

Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1984, no. 183, illustration of another cast

Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Pompidou, Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne?, 1986, no. 208, p. 180; p. 183, illustration of another cast (dated 1948-49)

Albert E. Elsen, “What Isn’t Modern Sculpture?” ARTnews vol. 86, no. 1, January 1987, p. 145, illustration of another cast (dated 1948-49)

Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, 1988-89, p. 138

Exh. Cat., Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Alberto Giacometti, 1989, no. 14, pp. 48 and

“There is one of the great Giacomettis called Three Men Walking... I first saw Giacometti’s work in Pierre Matisse’s gallery in the 1950s and immediately fell in love with it; undoubtedly one of the great artists of the twentieth century. His vision was unique. He saw the human figure as no one else sees it or saw it… There’s an energy in those figures. If one comes to earth thousands of years from now and sees this sculpture, he’ll get some of the feeling of energy, the rush of city people.”

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, 1989, 9-499-500

Nothing is more emblematic of a city than a multitude of human figures in a limited space. From streets to train stations to city squares; from places of business and of habitation—the nature of the urban environment is that of physical bodies in close proximity to one another. “In the street the people astound me and interest me more than any sculpture or painting,” said Alberto Giacometti. “Every second the people stream together and go apart, then they approach each other to get closer to one another…. They unceasingly form and reform living compositions in unbelievable complexity” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966, 1988-89, p. 138). Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau) takes as it subject this constant movement, formation and reformation of the body in motion. Created at the pinnacle of Giacometti’s post-war production, just a year after Le Nez, Tête sur tige, L’Homme au doigt and Le Main, the present work is a masterpiece from its edition, held in the same private collection since its creation and further

set apart by Giacometti’s delicate hand-painting of each aspect and element of the bronze.

Giacometti created a number of works in the late 1940s and early 1950s which employ multiple figures on a common base, from static female figures in a variety of scales in La Clairière to the striding of four male figures around a static female form in La Place The concept of male figures in movement and female figures rooted in place would continue for the rest of Giacometti’s career. The present work, of three men walking, is one of two versions of the subject, Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau) and Trois hommes qui marchent (petit plateau) both created in 1948. In the petit plateau version, the base on which they stride is smaller in area, creating a more claustrophobic space where a view at any point from around the sculpture necessitates a visual overlapping of the different forms, whereas the Grand plateau version allows for more room between each figure, as so evocatively captured on the catalogue cover for the 1974 Giacometti retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Alberto Giacometti in his studio, circa 1949, with a cast of the present work visible at left. Photo © Archive Photos / Getty Images. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

The first iteration of the present work included only the three figures and the bronze base immediately below their feet. Evidence of this can be seen in a number of sketches the artist created in 1948, which show the sculpture balanced atop the cage-like structure containing Le Nez The same year Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau) was created, however, the artist already had a firm understanding of the special base arrangement. In a letter to Pierre Matisse dated 2 September 1948, the artist sketches the entire arrangement, noting that it was much more difficult to make than the other works sketched out in the same list.

Giacometti’s bases and the sizes of his figures were meant to impose his own concepts of scale and distance on the viewer. The thinness of each body, which came to dominate his work at this time, was also closely tied up in these concepts: “The thinning down of Giacometti’s figures was another outcome of his faithfulness

to reality ‘A man walking in the street weighs nothing, much less anyway than the same man lying dead or unconscious. He is balancing on his legs. One does not feel his weight. That was what, subconsciously, I wanted to convey, that lightness, by making my silhouettes thinner.’ Trois hommes qui marchent with its three figures on a square shelf, seemingly suspended in a void, is an eerie representation of fugitive and indistinct silhouettes encountered on the street. Giacometti was successfully meeting the challenge he had announced to Sartre in 1947, of reinventing sculpture as unfixed, despite the medium’s inherent nature. Gordon Parks’s 1951 photograph of Trois hommes qui marchent ingeniously captures the sculpture competing with the fixed shadows of real-life passersby, presenting it as a more convincing image of human movement” (Exh. Cat., New York, Gagosian Gallery, Alberto Giacometti—Francis Bacon. Isabel and Other Intimate Strangers 2008, pp. 233-34).

Above

The cover of the exhibition catalogue for Alberto Giacometti. A Retrospective Exhibition

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1974. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Opposite

Alberto Giacometti’s letter to Pierre Matisse, 2 September 1948, The Pierre Matisse Archives, The Morgan Library, New York. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Alberto Giacometti, The Studio (Two Pieces of Sculpture), 1948.

Image: The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

This concept of works of art conveying truth— whether of movement or form—by the very fact of their extreme manipulation to something almost as far from naturalistic reality as can be imagined, was one that Giacometti focused on in his most important works. His figures’ craggy surfaces and their extreme thinness was usually combined with a lack of precision in facial details, and of extreme stylization where precision did exist. “In time I realized what sculpture was all about…. Have you ever noticed that the truer a work is the more stylized it is? That seems strange, because style certainly does not conform to the reality of appearances, and yet the heads that come closest to resembling people I see on the street are those that are the least naturalistic—the sculptures of the Egyptians, the Chinese, the archaic Greeks, and the Sumerians” (quoted in Reinhold Hohl, Alberto Giacometti, New York, 1971, p. 136). Indeed Giacometti studied ancient artwork of human figures with regularity, sketching sculpture and reliefs he saw at the Louvre.

Occasionally Giacometti would enhance the patinas of select casts by either chemically manipulating the patination process to produce varying tonality of the bronze—usually carried out by his brother Diego in the studio—or by Alberto directly applying paint onto the surface of the bronze, as is the case in the present work. According to Valerie Fletcher the artist “… painted some casts spontaneously, for example when they were first brought back from the foundry or as they were being installed in an exhibition” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti 1901-1966 1988-89, p. 66). With the support of a small armature, Giacometti first created this work in clay, molding and pinching his forms to achieve highly tactile final figures. Next, he relied on his brother Diego to supervise the casting of the work in bronze, preserving every nick and impression that he had created in the original clay. This splendid cast, which was made during the artist’s lifetime, bears all the markings and

fine details of this hands-on process. The quality of the hand painting on the surface of the present work is particularly notable from the dark hair of each male figure to the green-gold details of each figure and the broad, brushy swaths of gray green on the platform, surmounting a deep red base. Most works bearing this kind of precise detail are now held in museum collections and those that have come to auction account for some of the highest prices ever achieved for the artist’s work.

It is no accident that such a beautifully painted sculpture entered David M. Solinger’s collection. After viewing a number of works by Alberto Giacometti at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, Mr. Solinger wrote to an

intermediary (who was overseeing the shipment of two works by Giacometti that Solinger had acquired from Galerie Maeght) “The Matisse pieces.... have a very beautiful patina.... Giacometti himself has, with his own brush, applied some color to the bronzes. For example, in the head there is a wonderful languorous, mysterious look in the eyes of the Long Head woman... This wonderful look results from the fact that after the bronze was finished at the founder’s Giacometti actually applied color to the bronze (as you probably know, the ancient Greeks colored their statuary too)... Since my pieces will be... in the artist’s hands... if he could and would at the same time give them a... beautiful patina

Above Alberto Giacometti at the 31st Venice Biennale in 1962.

Photo © Fondo Paolo Monti. Art ©

2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Courtesy BEIC, Milan Right Trois hommes qui marchent photographed by Gordon Parks in 1951.

Photo © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Art

© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

“A man walking in the street weighs nothing, much less anyway than the same man lying dead or unconscious. He is balancing on his legs. One does not feel his weight. That was what, subconsciously, I wanted to convey, that lightness, by making my silhouettes thinner.”

and finish it would enhance my pleasure in them greatly” (David M. Solinger to A. Deris, 9 November 1951). In a letter some months later, Mr. Deris replied “Please be informed that.... Mr. Giacometti has worked afterwards so to give them the kind of patina which you prefer. These sculptures will be completely dry in about a week’s time and we shall then proceed with the shipment of same. Incidentally, Mr. Maeght told me that Giacometti is only too pleased to give your sculptures that kind of patina...” (A. Deris to David M. Solinger, 6 February 1952).

Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau) was not the only work by Alberto Giacometti that Mr. Solinger held in his collection. An avid admirer of the former’s work, Solinger owned a number of other sculptures and oils by the artist. He was sadly not successful in acquiring each work that he sought out. Writing to M. Clayeux at Galerie Maeght in May of 1958 he inquired earnestly after a cast of Giacometti’s Chien: “I am interested in acquiring a cast of the dog, which Giacometti made. I saw the plaster in his studio in 1951 and just learned from Pierre Matisse that he had it cast. If you have a cast, will you please reserve it for me and let me know the price? As far as I know, he has only made one dog, so I think there will be no question about which object I refer to” (David M. Solinger to L.G. Clayeux, 9 May 1958).

Other casts of Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau) are held in the collection of

the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, The Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung, Zurich and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Casts of the Petit plateau are found at the Fondation Maeght in SaintPaul-de-Vence, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Giacometti Fondation, Paris.

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, LETTER TO PIERRE MATISSE, 2 SEPTEMBER 194

GEORGES MATHIEU

1921 - 2012

Camp de Carthage

signed Mathieu and dated 51 (lower right); titled and dated 1951 (on the reverse)

oil on panel

63 by 47 in. 160 by 119.4 cm.

Executed in 1951.

This artwork is referenced among the authentic artworks of the Archives by Jean-Marie Cusinberche on Georges Mathieu

An attestation of the Archives by Jean-Marie Cusinberche on Georges Mathieu will be provided to the buyer.

$ 400,000-600,000

PROVENANCE

Kootz Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in March 1954 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Kootz Gallery, Georges Mathieu 1954, no. 1 Arts Club of Chicago, Mathieu / Soulages, 1954, no. 1

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 114, illustrated

LITERATURE

James Johnson Sweeney, “The Young Guard— Painters in Paris,” Harper’s Bazaar, vol. 87, no. 2907, February 1954, p. 109, illustrated (with the artist in his studio)

“Reviews and Previews,” ARTnews, vol. 53, no. 2, April 1954, p. 45, illustrated

Georges Mathieu, Mathieu, 50 ans de création, Paris, 2003, p. 47, illustrated (installed in Mathieu’s Paris apartment, 1954)

Exh. Cat., Milan, Galleria del Centre Culturel Français de Milan; and Brescia, Galleria Agnellini Arte Moderna, Georges Mathieu: 1948-1969, 2011-12, pp. 177-9, 181-2; p. 177, illustrated (installed in Mathieu’s Paris apartment, 1954)

A n explosive riot of abstract form, Camp de Carthage evinces the rapid yet deliberate gestural primacy of Georges Mathieu, a triumphant pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction. Executed in 1951, during the same period that Mathieu began exploring Eastern aesthetics and philosophy, the present work is a seminal painting in the artist’s oeuvre that echoes the grand tradition of calligraphy in brilliant crimson and inky black. A testament to the significance of Camp de Carthage in Mathieu’s career, the present work was exhibited in the artist’s dual exhibition with Pierre Soulages, Mathieu / Soulages, held at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1954 as he gained esteem in the United States. In the present work, intersecting dashes, elliptical geometries, and faint linear traceries writhe together across the canvas with a visceral sense of immediacy, expressing the frenetic improvisation with which the French artist famously executed his paintings.

Camp de Carthage perfectly evinces the almighty gestural bravado of Mathieu, who pioneered a method of applying dripping paint

“Georges Mathieu, who appears to feel a real companionship with the New York painters, is the latest addition to [Kootz] Gallery’s roster of avant-garde Frenchmen. Unlike the Americans, almost all concerned with engaging the entire surface, his images are thrown, like 3-D projections, more or less, in the middle of their canvases.”

IN “REVIEWS AND PREVIEWS,” ARTNEWS, VOL. 53, NO. 2, APRIL 1954, P. 45

directly from tube to canvas in order to keep pace with his lightning painterly fervor. Working with intense speed and risk guaranteed freedom in the act of painting for Mathieu, allowing him to develop a vigorous response to abstraction that liberated him from normative aesthetic conventions. As he explained, “Speed therefore signifies the definitive abandonment of the artisanal methods in painting in favor of methods of pure creation…Speed and improvisation are the reasons we are able to associate the creative forms of this painting with those of liberated and direct musical forms like Jazz or with Oriental calligraphy” (the artist quoted in “De l’abstrait au possible – Jalons pour une exégèse de l’art occidental,” Éd. du Cercle d’Art Contemporain à Zurich 1959). Camp de Carthage is a consummate and early example of Mathieu’s creative manifestos and methods: erupting in the searing red strokes before a pool of jet black, the present work sees the artist take inspiration from the gestural rhythm of Eastern calligraphy by imitating its line and velocity.

One year prior to the present painting’s execution, the Minister of Culture in France, André Malraux, had already esteemed Mathieu as a “Western calligrapher” at his seminal 1950 exhibition at the René Drouin Gallery, connecting him to the Eastern calligraphic tradition. The artist, however, did not actually travel to East Asia until 1957, when he famously visited Japan and influenced the Gutai movement with his impromptu painting demonstrations; if Mathieu adopted elements of Eastern aesthetics into his style, he had done so from afar. Working in Paris during the early 1950s, when he painted the present work, Mathieu had been simultaneously theorizing on his ideas of lyrical abstraction, leading him to study the execution and abstract spontaneity behind the calligraphic discipline.

Entitled Camp de Carthage, the present example also nominally pays homage to Carthage, one of the most important trading hubs of the

ancient Mediterranean in what is now Tunisia, attributing the Classical city with the majestic force that the abstract composition visually achieves. Executed in 1951, five years prior to Tunisia’s declaration of independence from France, this work thus belongs to a series of paintings Mathieu created throughout his career that he famously titled after noteworthy provinces or communes in France, including Vaires and Orly. An ode to the ancient Mediterranean power, with its swift uproar of pigment and line, Mathieu’s Camp de Carthage exemplifies a tour de force of Mathieu’s precipitous yet precise painterly output that distinguishes him as one of the most groundbreaking abstract artists. By radically privileging gesture over intent and form over content, Mathieu dedicated his work to the creative liberation of the artistic practice, a mission perfectly embodied in the searing eruption of blood red strokes of the present work.

Opposite  Jackson Pollock, Free Form 1945. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

© 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Right

The present work installed in Mathieu’s Paris studio, December 1953. Photo © Robert Descharnes. Art © 2022 Georges Mathieu / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Mathieu Archives.

WILLEM DE KOONING

1904 - 1997

Collage

signed de Kooning (upper right) oil and lacquer with thumbtacks on paper 22 by 30 in. 55.9 by 76.2 cm. Executed in 1950.

$ 18,000,000-25,000,000

PROVENANCE

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in April 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Wildenstein Gallery, XXth Century American Paintings 1952, no. 39

Boston, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, De Kooning: 1935-1953 1953, no. 12

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger, 1956, no. 11

New York, Museum of Modern Art; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Tate Gallery; Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Willem de Kooning, 1968-69, no. 41, p. 162; p. 69, illustrated

Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh International Series: Willem de Kooning 1979-80, no. 19, p. 50, illustrated

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Willem de Kooning: Paintings 1994-95

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, pp. 34-35, illustrated

New York, Museum of Modern Art, de Kooning: a Retrospective 2011-12, no. 68, pp. 211-212, illustrated in color

London, Royal Academy of Arts; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abstract Expressionism 2016-17, no. 143, p. 44; p. 291, illustrated in color (London), no. 113, p. 253, illustrated in color (Bilbao)

LITERATURE

Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase New York, 1951, p. 159; p. 7, illustrated in color

Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collage: Personalities, Concepts, and Techniques, Toronto, 1967, no. 315, p. 222, illustrated

Gabriella Drudi, Willem de Kooning Milan, 1972, no. 67, p. 34; p. 67, illustrated in color

Willem de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, Willem de Kooning New York, 1974, no. 85, p. 8; p. 150, illustrated in color

John Russell, “Two Artists Share the Carnegie International,” The New York Times 18 November 1979, p. 40

William C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, Washington, D.C., 1983, no. 31, pp. 20, 34, 47, 147 p. 77; n.p., illustrated in color

Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning, the First Twenty-six Years in New York Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1986, no. 223, p. 171; p. 172, illustrated

Florian Rodari, Collage: Painted, Cut & Torn Papers Geneva, 1988, p. 134; p. 133, illustrated in color

Charles Brock, Describing Chaos: Willem de Kooning’s Collage Painting Asheville and its Relationship to Traditions of Description and Illusionism in Western Art Masters of Arts thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 1993, no. 21, pp. v, 31, 34-36; p. 99, illustrated

Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning New York, 1997, no. 37, p. 50; p. 51, illustrated in color

T.J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Rosalind Krauss, ed., October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996 Cambridge, 1997, p. 55, illustrated

David Anfam, “De Kooning, Bosch, and Bruegel: Some Fundamental Themes,” The Burlington Magazine vol. 145, no. 1207, London, 2003, p. 711

Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning, Works, Writings and Interviews Barcelona, 2007, p. 47; p. 55, illustrated in color

Daniel Louis Haxall, Cut and Paste

Abstraction: Politics, Form, and Identity in Abstract Expressionist Collage Ph.D. dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2009, pp. 47-48

Valerie Hellstein, “Process and Memory in Women Singing II,” Tate Research Publication online, 2017, illustrated in color

Simonetta Fraquelli, Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint, Philadelphia, 2021, p. 89, illustrated in color

A n irrepressibly vibrant and exquisitely rare jewel, Collage from 1950 declares a moment of pivotal importance within Willem de Kooning’s legendary oeuvre.

Bursting forth in a chromatic eruption of compositional dynamism across every inch of the intimately scaled surface, Collage is immediately recognizable as a quintessential example of the artist’s mature abstract mode. And yet, with its richly textured surface, built up in layers of paper, paint, charcoal, and even scattered silver thumbtacks, Collage is wholly unique for its manifest inclusion of the elements that define its eponymous mode of production. Throughout

the 1940s and 50s, de Kooning would often use a collage method to plan his compositions of juxtaposed forms, tracing the shapes onto paper and arranging them in various ways across a painting’s surface; here, however, he did not remove these layered elements, preserving the traces of a method that defines his most significant canvases from this period. Asheville (1948, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), Attic (1949, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Excavation (1950, The Art Institute of Chicago) all evince this mode, their surfaces characterized by jumps, breaks, and visual ruptures between passages that mimic

collage. As famed critic and curator Thomas Hess explains, pointing to the present work, “In de Kooning’s works of 1945-1956, shapes do not meet or overlap or rest apart as planes; rather there is a leap from shape to shape; the ‘passages’ look technically ‘impossible.’ This is a concept which comes from collages, where the eye moves from one material to another in similar impossible bounds... An assembly of sliced pieces of paintings thumbtacked together in 1950 is the prototype of the technique of collage-painting that has been very widely adapted, first in America, now internationally” (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum

of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning 1968, p. 47). Befitting its importance, the present work has been featured in several of the most important exhibitions of the artist’s work, including among others the landmark 1968-69 travelling survey; a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2011-12; and most recently the celebrated Royal Academy show Abstract Expressionism in 2016-17. Within Collage ’s barrage of “impossible” visual cues and dynamic marks, we witness a fully realized interplay of linear elegance, painterly gesture and sumptuous color, a superbly resolved summation of de Kooning’s legendary praxis.

The present work installed in the exhibition de Kooning: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar.

Art © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pull-out Rudy Burckhardt, Willem de Kooning New York, 1950 Photo © Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Art © The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“As for Mr. de Kooning’s contribution, it is of spectacular quality almost from beginning to end… It would almost be worth crossing the country to see the collage of 1950, with its big thumbtacks so firmly signposting an acrobatic tumble of cut paper. If Henri Matisse were not going to be Mr. Cut Paper until the end of time, this collage would give Mr. de Kooning the title.”

Offering its viewer an archaeological survey of the creative strata that accumulated to form de Kooning’s extraordinary aesthetic, Collage acts as a kind of Rosetta Stone, deciphering the arc of his painterly practice at this critical juncture in his career. From within the pulsing net of sensuous lines and glowing jewel-toned hues, de Kooning’s trademark oscillation between abstraction and figuration emerges; in the upper left, two eyes top a female form with a silver tack for a navel, while in the lower right, de Kooning’s recurring motif of the window emerges from the fiery orange and stark white pigment. These references and others, composed of both painted gestures and

underlying collaged paper, visibly delineate the artistic process that defined de Kooning’s practice during this time. Using collage methods as a means of exploring visual juxtapositions, the artist would tear his own drawings and rearrange them in new configurations, temporarily tack paper overlays to the working surface, or place scraps of magazine photos on a painting in progress for visual reference and position. In most cases, the papers were ultimately removed, and the jumbled, masticated chaos of imagery was rendered entirely in vigorous swathes of paint. In the present work, however, the physical elements remain, resulting in a pictorially bewitching synthesis between

Left Willem de Kooning, Woman circa 1952. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Art © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Right Detail of the present work

JOHN RUSSELL, “TWO ARTISTS SHARE THE CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL”, THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 18, 1979, P. 40

the fragmented visual effects of collage and the fluid integration of painting. At once graphic and painterly, Collage is itself a masterwork of de Kooning’s signature invention.

Indeed, it is through its remarkable symmetry with de Kooning’s greatest canvases of the time that Collage can be measured. In the indescribably sophisticated Asheville, acquired by The Phillips Collection in 1952, a silver tack is drawn in the upper left quadrant, just as several tacks are physically present in Collage Asheville also features the classic trompe l’oeil gesture of a piece of paper curling off the surface of the painting near the center of the picture, seen literally in Collage.

Executed the following year, Attic also bears traces of the collage-painting technique in the shadowy vestiges of transferred newsprint glimpsed across its surface, revealing moments when de Kooning laid newspaper over the wet paint on his canvas. Further, the monumental Excavation with its staccato medley of overlapping planes, delineated shapes, and assorted colors, illusionistically renders the complex visual effects literally encountered in

Collage For instance, the edges created by the paper fragments in the present work form borders and outlines where space and gesture collide; a similar effect is created in Excavation, as the framework of thin black lines define and separate planes and contours of shapes, creating an impression of layering and depth. In both works, positive and negative space become unstable and interchangeable, producing the highly charged, dynamic compositions that crackle with visual energy.

The contextual chronology surrounding the present work’s creation spans momentous events in the New York art world and in de Kooning’s own life and work. The late 1940s was a culmination of creative ferment in post-war New York and de Kooning was at the heart of an artistic community that changed the course of Modern Art. Together with Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, de Kooning’s works from this period catapulted the burgeoning school of Abstract Expressionism to the forefront. His collagepainting technique mirrors the irrepressible energy of New York as the new center of the

“In de Kooning’s works of 1945-1956, shapes do not meet or overlap or rest apart as planes; rather there is a leap from shape to shape; the ‘passages’ look technically ‘impossible.’ This is a concept which comes from collages, where the eye moves from one material to another in similar impossible bounds... An assembly of sliced pieces of paintings thumb-tacked together in 1950 is the prototype of the technique of collage-painting that has been very widely adapted, first in America, now internationally.”

art world, shifted from Paris: the frenzied interplay between voluminous matter and tempestuous brushstrokes fills his composition to the edges, expressing the teeming life, grit, and cacophony of the city. In Collage, although the templates are physically present, reinforced by the tacks legible on the surface, de Kooning’s characteristically vigorous gestures visually undermine this. Pigment splashes and overflows across the cutouts and the substrate beneath them, blurring the boundaries between positive and negative, background and foreground. Some

shapes command the surface, while others collide with a crunch underneath. The resulting pictorial immediacy and spatial organization evokes the experimental perspective of Cubism or Surrealism, revealing de Kooning’s continued admiration for European modern masters like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, translated into the new American vernacular. Collage thus stands as a spectacularly vital and vibrant painting that powerfully conveys the artist’s genius for innovation, firmly establishing him as a new master for the contemporary age.

Opposite The present work installed in the exhibition Willem de Kooning The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969. Photo by James Mathews. Art © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Right  Willem de Kooning, Asheville 1948. Image: Phillips Collection / Bridgeman Images. Art © The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

EXH. CAT., NEW YORK, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, WILLEM DE KOONING, 1968, P. 47

The present work installed in the exhibition Abstract Expressionism

by Dr. David Anfam at the Royal Academy of Arts, London,

Royal Academy of Arts, London;

Arshile

Marcus J Leith.

/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Willem de Kooning on Leo Castelli's front porch, East Hampton, August 1953. Photo: Tony Vaccaro / Getty Images

DE KOONING APOCALYPSE NOW

DR. DAVID ANFAM

Willem de Kooning’s Collage compresses a veritable universe into its relatively modest dimensions. The compact size – significant per se – encompasses myriad associations, ideas and deep meanings. Collage also dates from a key moment in Abstract Expressionism. For de Kooning in particular, the year 1950 was probably the greatest watershed in a highly fecund career spanning seven decades and two continents, Europe and North America. In its complex style and enigmatic references, Collage nods, so to speak, to both the Old and the New Worlds. So did de Kooning.

Born in 1904 in Rotterdam, de Kooning journeyed from there as a twenty-two year old stowaway aboard a British ship to Newport News, Virginia. The errant Dutchman avoided Ellis Island’s legal immigration hub by taking a boat to Boston, train to Rhode Island and then another boat to Manhattan, eventually reaching Hoboken, New Jersey, that summer on the Hudson ferry.1 This ordinary, youthful craftiness set a pattern, mingling fluidity and fixity, the savvy and the sly,2 for imaginative things to come. Flash forward two decades.

Attaining his full artistic maturity in New York from around 1946 onward (notwithstanding a classical training at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences), de Kooning rapidly approached abstraction with a series of more or less monochromatic phantasmagorias done on canvas, board and paper. Some explored a fearful blackness, such as Dark Pond (1948) and Night Square (c. 1949). Others veered in the opposite direction. That is, the deathly pallor evident in Mailbox (1948) and Attic (1949). This evolution climaxed in 1950 with de Kooning’s magnum opus, Excavation That same year, he began the iconic Woman I that would consume almost three years, initiating sundry “Women” variants and offspring continuing to the 1960s.3 Thus Collage represents a historic nexus. Past, present and future trends coalesce in a masterful mix – an interface between figurative shards and an ambiguous whole. Classical draftsmanship – note the precision-honed contour lines – meets avant-garde boldness. The resultant pictorial tumult whooshes across our visual field with almost frightening speed. A tearaway.

For the biographical minutiae, see Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

In the best sense of a now-prohibited word, de Kooning ever pretended to play the idiot savant. His many eminently quotable, deadpan jests should therefore be no surprise.

Not to mention the antic women that de Kooning sculpted in the early 1970s.

Tearaway? Yes, because in American English this adjective captures the essence of Collage’s tectonics, a process which in this instance involves reconfiguring paper torn from other painted pieces into a novel medley. In British English, the noun “tearaway” also means a wild, wayward person. Set the two together (a merger that my transatlantic mindset cannot resist) and… hey presto, the result is a double entendre that encapsulates the dual aspects to Collage, wherein the actual medium incorporates its messages.

Firstly, tearing or cutting lends an existential edge to this visceral labyrinth: fleshy pinks seem simultaneously wrenched apart and crowded together. Put another way, de Kooning at once dissected erstwhile corporeal surfaces (as often happens in Surrealist imagery) and resurrected them. Hence Collage’s quirky humanoid curves. Bodies may no longer be recognizable though their movements pulse everywhere. Scant wonder that de Kooning later named a major painting Easter Monday (1955–56).4 That titular calendar day serves to commemorate a certain human incarnation, hitherto nailed to a cross on a Friday (de Kooning titled a 1948 composition Black Friday) and cruelly pierced with a lance, then next transfigured (much later, in the 1960s and early 1970s de Kooning sketched numerous drawings based on the Crucifixion).5 A comparable play between tactile immediacy and unseen forces animates every square inch of Collage The outcome is a ferocious tussle, an almost kinetic, optical hide-and-seek. Collage electrifies Collage

Secondly, as a self-declared “slipping glimpser”,6 collage suited de Kooning’s perennial impulses to a tee. His quintessential urge was never to stay still, while always jamming together otherwise disparate or conflicting elements. The artist’s quip speaks volumes, “I have to change to stay the same.”7 Collage is all repetition and renewal as kindred shapes shift into different parts or conjunctions. Historically, such metamorphoses were rooted in Cubism as developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. On this score, a study of the subject merits quoting at some length: “By its very nature, collage connotes the temporary, the ephemeral. The fragment can be a bit of newspaper or a theater ticket, a found object or a ready-made, but in combination with other dissimilar fragments the collage fragment proposes a dislocation in time and place. Collage also layers into a works of art several levels of meaning…. The technique of collage was ideally suited to capture the noise, speed, time, and duration of the twentieth-century urban industrial experience. Collage became the medium of materiality… capturing the topical, the transitory, and the absurd.”8 These lines might as well have been tailored to describe de Kooning’s fascination with metamorphosis, tactility, transitions and disjunctions. He was also the urban, nocturnal wanderer par excellence, finding shapes in the cracks and patterns of Manhattan’s sidewalks. Such strands of memory, chance and changefulness infiltrate Collage’s structure and multiply its ramifications. In de Kooning’s hands collage became a dense hybrid of additive and

subtractive energies. Momentarily we might sense a shoulder, a breast or some other anatomical members – notice the apparent spectacles perched vertically and a bit to the upper right of the center in Asheville – only to find them dissolving into cryptic planes, angles and gaps. Such was de Kooning’s elusive goal to conjure “something I can never be sure of, and no one else can either.”9

Likewise, collage demands a context. On the one hand, the sole Abstract Expressionist to raise collage to epic proportions was the still-underestimated Conrad Marca-Relli. Significantly, Marca-Relli was also a transatlantic soul, albeit replacing de Kooning’s Netherlandish ancestry with his Italian one. Aptly, the two became good friends. Both evinced a preoccupation with the violence and physicality that collage can evoke, especially given that Marca-Relli slashed his canvas swatches with a razor blade.10 Think too of the title chosen by another distinguished Abstract Expressionist exponent of the same medium, Robert Motherwell: The Tearingness of Collaging (1957). Tellingly, in view of the numerous orange and red swathes that de Kooning interleaved throughout the passages (the French

Opposite Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Triumph of Death circa 1562.

Image: Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images

Above  Willem de Kooning, Judgment Day 1946. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

4 Kirsten Hoving Powell, “Resurrecting Content in de Kooning’s ‘Easter Monday’”, Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4 (Summer–Autumn 1990), pp. 86–101.

5 For example, see Klaus Kertess, Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing (New York: Arena Editions, 1998), pp. 36–67.

6 de Kooning (1960), in George Scrivani, ed., The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning (New York & Madras: Hanuman Books, 1988), p. 177.

7 de Kooning (1981), in Judith Wolfe, Willem de Kooning: Works from 1951-1981 (East Hampton: Guild Hall of East Hampton, 1981), p. 16.

8 Diane Waldman, Collage Assemblage, And the Found Object (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), p. 31.

9 de Kooning, in Harold Rosenberg, “Interview with Willem de Kooning”, Art News (September 1972), p. 58.

10 The most succinct recent overview is David Anfam, “Conrad Marca-Relli – Ben Marcato’", in Conrad Marca-Relli: Il Maestro Irascible (Rome & Milan: Mattia de Luca and Skira, 2022), n.p.

11 Megan M. Fontanella, ”Bloodstains and Bullet Holes: Motherwell, Collage, and World War II”, in Susan Davidson, Robert Motherwell: Early Collages (New York: Guggenheim Publications, 2013), pp. 42–53.

word that defines painterly crossings, transitions, and so forth) that teem in Collage, in the same period Motherwell linked them to bloodiness – appropriately enough during and in the immediate aftermath to the bloodiest human conflict in history.11 However, whereas Marca-Relli took collage to unprecedented limits while even Motherwell’s later paper works could grow as tall as six feet,12 de Kooning stuck to the smaller scale that Collage typifies. Why? Because he valued intimacy: “If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are – that is all the space I need as a painter.”13 This is what the twentieth-century French philosopher of space and sentience, Gaston Bachelard, termed “intimate immensity”.14 Make no mistake, Collage has a macrocosmic whiff condensed into its microcosm to the extent that its torqued shapes almost look to burst out from the format. Therein lies its pungent immediacy, like some grand spectacle that pours from the imaginative stage into our somatic geography. Or else compare the small mouth snipped from a magazine advert with which Woman I began, before it exploded into a bigger spatial and temporal battleground. Whatever, for de Kooning little and large nourished each other.

Bloodied bodies, kaleidoscopic spaces, steel tacks, dazzling colors, and so forth could attest to de Kooning’s modernist ties. Accordingly, the foregoing list and other qualities might allude, respectively, to Chaïm Soutine’s meat carcasses (New York’s Museum of Modern Art gave the Belarussian émigré his largest retrospective to date in autumn 195015); Cubism’s “all-over” compositional tactics; modernism’s love affair with the fragment, fetish and found objects; and the garish contrasting hues that Pablo Picasso sometimes foregrounded. In fact, Collage’s palette – bright yellows and reds, black lines, strong green and blue incidents – is near-identical to the Spaniard’s in, say, his celebrated Weeping Woman (October 26, 1937).

Not to mention also the outsize hues conspicuous in Broadway’s neon, American billboards, film posters and their ilk. Certainly, de Kooning weaponized Cubism together with more than a glance to Max Beckmann’s bold colorism and compacted interiors, such as The Night (1918–19), as well as Italian Futurism.16 The modernist connections could continue apace. Yet stop for a second and peer further back, as de Kooning surely did. One piece is missing in the jigsaw puzzle of his works and thoughts.

Scholars had long recognized de Kooning’s deep attachment to his homeland. The art historian David Sylvester neatly summarized this factor at the start of an essay for the National Gallery of Art’s 1994 survey of the artist’s paintings. “The Dutch masters of the seventeenth century worked at home,” wrote Sylvester, adding that “the Dutch masters of modern times worked abroad.”17 Moreover, observers had noted that such a painting as Man (1967) stemmed from the Satan-type figure in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1490–1510). But none had joined all the proverbial dots. In short, de Kooning was heir on manifold fundamental levels to the Netherlandish Old Masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Specifically, Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.18

Suffice it to take two clues in Collage to reach a wider conclusion. For a start, de Kooning did not spike its surface with tacks merely out of convenience (instead, he could have used glue or tape). A small, unusual Abstraction (1949–50, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) reveals the deeper intent. At its lower right corner a spike lies beside a ladder and a skull. We are in an apocalyptic place, Golgotha, site of the Crucifixion, where drops of blood also appear to rain down on the catastrophe. Far-fetched? No.

On the one hand, remember that de Kooning painted a Judgment Day four years prior to Collage At its dead center is an extraordinary touch. Resembling a trompe-l’oeil tack, four biomorphs surround this white circle. The artist himself went so far as to characterize the iconography as “the four angels at the Gates of Paradise”.19 True to type, he was being a wit. Heaven and Hell converge in one unique precedent that, by no coincidence, has a circle at its center, Bosch’s Table of the Seven Deadly Sins. In it, Christ warns, “Beware, beware, God sees [all].” Consequently, the vital circle in Judgment Day is an oculus, an eye onto the fleshy chaos around it.20 God is literally in the details. Clinching the argument, Judgment Day anticipates Collage’s chromatic scheme – yellow, pink, reds, green and specifically a vivid turquoise band left of center. Two banderoles feature in Bosch’s Table the upper one poised between Death and the Last Judgment.21 Another, final leitmotif completes the whole equation.

Opposite Hieronymus Bosch, Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, 16th century. Image: Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman

Images

Above

Willem de Kooning, Abstraction 194950. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Art © 2022

The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The essentially dissimilar critics of the American mid-century period, Thomas B. Hess and Clement Greenberg, nevertheless pinpointed the same expressive force that drives Collage and the epochal works constellated before, alongside and soon after it. Hess evidenced de Kooning’s “Procrustean” methods, an allusion to the ancient Greek bandit who sliced his victims legs to fit them to the size of an iron bed, while the customarily more temperate Greenberg invoked “savage dissections”.22 The blood-like streaks in Collage that recur in Asheville, Attic and Excavation and render Gansevoort Street (c.1949) a total blaze have a famously cataclysmic precursor. Fire’s redness engulfs Bruegel’s bloodthirsty Triumph of Death where it fuses with countless lacerations and spikes. The day after Excavation left for the XXVth Venice Biennale in 1950, de Kooning revealed to his wife Elaine one of his inspirations, a reproduction of the selfsame Breugel.23 Collage changes beyond recognition these apocalyptic echoes from the distant past and much more beside, making them new – an indelible, endlessly dynamic spectacle for our eyes even now.24

© ART EXPLORATION CONSULTANCY LTD 2022

16 David Anfam, “Beckmann and Abstract Expressionism: The Space of Existence”, in Jutta Schütt, ed., Beckmann & Amerika (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), pp. 262-69.

17 David Sylvester, “Flesh was the Reason”, in Marla Prather, Willem de Kooning: Paintings (Washington D.C, New Haven & London: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2014), p. 15.

18 David Anfam, “De Kooning, Bosch and Bruegel: Some Fundamental Themes”, The Burlington Magazine 145 (October 2003), pp. 705–15. For additional Netherlandish links, see Anfam, Garden in Delft: Willem de Kooning Landscapes 1928–88 (New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2004).

19 Sally Yard, interview with Thomas B. Hess, in Yard, Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Years in New York, 1927–1952 (New York & London: Garland, 1986), p. 146.

20 Charles Brock, “Describing Chaos: Willem de Kooning’s Collage Painting Asheville and Its Relationship to Traditions of Description and Illusionism in Western Art”, Master of Arts thesis (University of Maryland, College Park, 1993) is a worthy analysis of the themes at stake.

21 Note also the Bosch’s distinctive greens, red and yellow.

22 Thomas Hess, “De Kooning Paints a Picture”, Art News 52 (March 1953), p. 31. Clement Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting” (1955), in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3 (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 222.

FERNAND LÉGER

1881 - 1955

Une femme brune et une plante jaune

signed F. LEGER and dated 50 (lower right); signed and dated again and titled (on the reverse) oil on canvas

28 ¾ by 36 ⅛ in. 73 by 92 cm. Executed in 1950.

$ 2,000,000-3,000,000

PROVENANCE

Estate of the artist

Galerie Louis Carre, Paris Kootz Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above circa 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, New York, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger 1956, no. 24 (titled Brunette with Yellow Plant)

Moscow, Pushkin Museum, Fernand Léger, 1963

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art, 2002-03, p. 103, illustrated

LITERATURE

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, 1949-1951, Paris, 2003, no. 1356, pp. 68-69, illustrated in color

“[Une Femme Brune et une Plante Jaune], which I find very exciting, a glorious 1950 Léger... You may say it’s very representational and indeed it is. Léger was a representational artist in every sense of the word. But no one could have painted that picture other than Léger. Very much his unique handwriting.”

A n arresting and dynamic composition from the final years of Fernand Léger’s life, Une femme brune et une plante jaune from 1950 conveys decades of pictorial experimentation within an enlivened populist aesthetic. A serene yet pronounced presence, the female figure is rendered in a newly bold style that emerged during Léger’s stay in the United States. In part inspired by the stamina and agility of female entertainers such as dancers and acrobats, Léger was drawn to the curvature of their bodies and the strength of their features. This influence manifests in the present figure through the accentuated curves of her upper body and the robust linearity of her posed arms. Situating the woman amongst sinuous organic

forms rather than juxtaposing her against mechanized and industrial shapes, Léger recalls his 1930s works. Reflecting the artist’s aspiration to magnify the human figure by emphasizing its monumentality, the woman is also positioned closest to the viewer and eludes all confines of the canvas. A bold and dynamic composition, Une femme brune et une plante jaune utterly encapsulates the hallmark elements of Léger’s mature painterly aesthetic.

Dating to his most intense involvement in the French Communist Party following his 1946 return from wartime exile in the United States, Une femme brune et une plante jaune typifies Léger’s celebration of working-class people and the activities of modern life. Throughout

Léger’s final years, the dominant themes of his paintings alternated between images of manual labor, particularly of construction workers, which explore the relationship between man and industrialization, and depictions of such workers in the act of enjoying leisurely activities like bicycling and resting in the countryside. Engrossed with the concept of social progress, Léger sought public appeal for his works through figurative depictions of comprehensible subject matters in a rejection of the rarefied aesthetic of Post-War abstraction. The same year Léger executed the present work, he expounded upon the relevance of this body of work to contemporary society: “We are witnessing a return to the broad subject, which must be comprehensible to the people. The people, tied down, bent over their work all day long, without leisure activities, are completely overlooked by our bourgeois epoch; that is the tragedy of today” (Fernand Léger, “Mural Painting and Easel Painting”, in Functions of Painting , New York, 1950, p. 178).

Opposite

Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières 1884.

National Gallery, London.

Image: Bridgeman Images

Right

Fernand Léger, The Construction Workers, 1950. Musée National Fernand Léger, Biôt.

Image: RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Fernand Léger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

A superb incarnation of the theme of leisure, Une femme brune et une plante jaune incorporates the central tenets of his important “country outing” series. Situated against an extensive landscape, the central figure appears lost in thought as her placid gaze drifts beyond the titular plant at the far-left edge of the composition. The boating hat and newspaper directly suspended above her head reference recreational activities, further evoking an atmosphere of pure enjoyment. Léger was a life-long admirer of Édouard Manet, deeming him one of the most important innovators in the history of art; the woman in the present work echoes the relaxed pose of the central figure in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Equally, the solidity of form depicted here directly recalls the paintings of Georges Seurat, whose influence permeated Léger’s works for decades.

Une femme brune et une plante jaune typifies the melding of pictorial genres that began in Léger’s late 1940s oeuvre, unifying elements of landscape, still-life, and figural narrative within a single composition. Objects commonly associated with still-life paintings, such as a table, a plant,

and a vase, indistinguishably fuse into the myriad swathes of hues that compose the landscape. Retaining his characteristic highly geometric style, Léger here renders all pictorial elements with the pronounced black outlines that are characteristic of his mature work. Concurrently, the artist maintains an equal compositional balance between linear, structural elements. Rather than depicting a likeness of the world that surrounds him, Léger paints a compelling arrangement to convey the primacy of the objects he represents: to articulate the entirety of the vase, for example, Léger illustrates the plant growing from the edges of its mouth. Une femme brune et une plante jaune incarnates his primary artistic concern of maintaining a purity of form: “I placed objects in space so that I could not place an object on a table without diminishing its value. I selected an object, chucked the table away. I put the object in space, minus the perspective. Minus anything to hold it there. I then had to liberate color to an even greater extent” (the artist quoted in Dora Vallier, “La Vie Fait l’oeuvre de Fernand Léger” in Cahiers d’arts no. 2, Paris, 1954, pp. 152-53).

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, 1989, 9-494-495

Rendered in evocative hues, Une femme brune et une plante jaune differs markedly from Léger’s characteristic adherence to a palette of primary colors, white, and black.

Echoing the signature stylistic practice of his late work, however, each element of the present painting is constructed in unmodulated areas of fully saturated pigment. The stark juxtaposition of organic shapes rendered in near-florescent shades of fuchsia, yellow, and tangerine against their gray environs generates spirited movement within the composition.

Articulating the full potential of both color and form, one of his primary artistic aims, Léger largely separates these pictorial elements. The contrast between the two is brought into greater relief through infrequent patches of incongruous shading on the plant, the edges of the newspaper, and the woman. In so doing, Léger reduces each element of this composition to its visual essence.

Une femme brune et une plante jaune wholly embodies Léger’s experimentations with color, transparency, and movement that had begun in the United States. Incorporating the pictorial possibilities achieved through the medium of film, one of his lifelong inspirations, the present work articulates the possibilities of perspective and superimposition. Léger here accomplishes “[his] great achievement during the post war period,” as described by curator Brigitte Hedel-Samson: “to conclude the experiments with color, transparency and movement that had taken specific shape in the United States…. Transparency and movement, framing, the play of light, and the possibilities for superimposition all intrigued him, and his pictorial experiments were dominated by ‘moving images’” (Exh. Cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Fernand Léger. Paris—New York 2008, pp. 123-24). Superbly unifying the myriad artistic aims and interests of Léger’s career, Une femme brune et une plante jaune is a superlative iteration of Léger’s 1950s output.

Above  Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d’Alger (D’après Delacroix) (Version N), 1955. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis. © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Right  Fernand Léger in his studio, 1952. Photo © Lucien Herve / Artedia / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2022 Fernand Léger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

MARIA HELENA VIEIRA DA SILVA

1908 - 1992

Sans titre

signed Vieira da Silva and dated 50 (lower right) gouache, tempera and oil on burlap 18 ½ by 22 in. 47 by 55.9 cm. Executed in 1950.

$ 300,000-500,000

PROVENANCE

Galerie Michel Warren, Paris

Acquired from the above in December 1956 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Public Education Association, Galleria Odyssia, Seven Decades 1895-1965: Crosscurrents in Modern Art 1966, no. 236, p. 132, illustrated (titled Abstract)

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art, 2002-03, p. 147, illustrated (titled Abstrait)

LITERATURE

Guy Weelen, Vieira da Silva: Catalogue Raisonne, vol. II, Paris, 1994, no. 696, p. 137, illustrated

Gaston Diehl, La Peinture Moderne dans la Monde, Paris, 1961, p. 173, illustrated (titled Abstrait)

Gaston Diehl, The Moderns: A Treasury of Painting Throughout the World New York, 1973, p. 173, illustrated in color (titled Abstract)

Avertiginous sapphire labyrinth of manifold perspectives, Sans titre from 1950 sees Maria Helena Vieira da Silva simultaneously meld elements of Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism into a crystalline pictorial syntax. One of Vieira da Silva’s earliest oil paintings on burlap, the present work presents a matrix that sparkles in teal, white, and ochre markings interspersed throughout a loose grid of azure shades and geometries. By returning repeatedly to the question of spatial construction, Vieira da Silva’s oeuvre radically transformed the rational grid of the centralized perspective into an oscillating, compulsive mesh of horizontal and vertical lines, suggesting a multiplicity of perspective suspended between chaos and order, reality and imagination. The dazzling rectilinear lines in Sans titre emerge from the flatness of the picture plane to hover within the confines of a vast, imaginary space, while vanishing lines dissipate into patterns of effervescent rhythm that inspire the canvas with cool brilliance.

Vieira da Silva rose to prominence as the most highly regarded Portuguese artist in the post-war Paris art scene, as well as one of the few women therein. Following the end of World War II, when she returned to Paris from exile in Brazil, Vieira da

Silva drew inspiration from urban scenes of streets, subways, and bridges, infrastructural elements she interpreted as symbols of humankind’s existence in the modern world. From the 1930s onwards, Vieira da Silva gradually abandoned the figurative representation of space from a single point of view in favor of the divulgence of an inner vision—an enigmatic, dream-like world of mystic imagination. Influenced by Picasso and Braque, whom the artist had met upon her original arrival in Paris, Vieira da Silva would abolish the centralized perspective and single vanishing point in favor of the fragmented, often contradictory and arbitrary character of human perception. Her resulting visual language renders architectural landscapes teeming with color and energy, perfectly encapsulating the Zeitgeist of the post-war era in Paris, which was, at the time, the artistic capital of the world.

In Sans titre from 1950, the picture plane fragments into a glistening lattice of overlapping patterns and line, presenting a singular composition that is as compelling as it is disorienting. Rendered on rough burlap, the present painting confronts the viewer with the tactile materiality of a familiar, everyday fabric. Meanwhile, prismatic layers of thin, regimented lines weave across the fibrous canvas, compelling

the viewer’s eye to dart up and down, left and right, as if traversing the longitudes of the kaleidoscopic labyrinth condensed within the two-dimensional surface. As Vieira da Silva would later profess about her art, “I do not want people to remain passive, I want them to come and take part in the game, go for a walk, climb up, go down” (the artist quoted in Gisela Rosenthal, Vieira da Silva 1908-1992: The Quest for Unknown Space, Cologne, 1998, p. 71).

Inspired by the complex ways in which the artist came to conceptualize the urban infrastructure and systems of modern life, Sans titre unravels by immersing the viewer

into a wondrous constellation of opalescent ochers and deep blues. By abandoning the formal rules of composition to which she had dedicated her early education, Vieira da Silva’s paintings actively compel a radical reconsideration of perception and perspective, thereby creating a visual parallel to the tumultuous changes she observed in postwar European society. With the abstract wonderland of the present work, Vieira da Silva translates an uneasy sense of place in the universe, distilling it into a scintillating vision of eternal movement and grace.

Opposite  Giotto, ceiling vault of the Scrovegni (Arena) Chapel, Padua, circa 1305. Photo © Raffaello Bencini / Bridgeman Images

Above  Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, 1960. Photo © Ida Kar / National Portrait Gallery, London. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

NICOLAS DE STAËL

1914 1955

Composition

signed Staël (lower right)

oil on canvas 35 ⅛ by 45 ¾ in. 89.2 by 116.2 cm.

Executed in 1951.

$ 1,500,000-2,000,000

PROVENANCE

The artist Theodore Schempp, New York (acquired from the above) Acquired from the above in January 1953 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger 1956, no. 23

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 39, illustrated

LITERATURE

Jacques Dubourg and Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël Paris, 1968, no. 292, p. 162, illustrated; p. 167, illustrated in color

Guy Dumur, Nicolas de Staël Paris, 1975; New York, 1976, p. 27, illustrated in color

Françoise de Staël, Nicolas de Staël, Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint Paris, 1997, no. 300, p. 664; p. 304, illustrated

“The purple and gray de Staël [Composition, 1951], for example, is a picture that I bought in fifteen seconds. I’d never heard of de Staël. I’d never seen one of his pictures. It was a case of love at first sight… I feel the same about the picture today that did then.”

Executed at the height of Nicolas de Staël’s inimitable career, Composition from 1951 displays the artist’s highly assured and utterly distinctive painterly language to superb effect. Encrusted with richly textured striations of pigment set like jewels into a mosaic, the surface of the composition is imbued with a remarkable sensation of energy and dynamism, while the impastoed paint appears sculptural in its extraordinary depth. Formed of a concentrated cluster of violet, slate, ivory, and mauve blocks floating above a sage ground, Composition is a magnificent incarnation of de Staël’s mature aesthetic. These simplified, irregular squares, applied with a knife for maximum density, imply through their varied hues and tightly syncopated structure the atmospheric feeling of a bustling city. The artist’s singular mastery of the evocative qualities of paint are strikingly displayed in the present work’s juxtaposition of exquisite coloration and depth of texture, turning a quotidian urban scene into an abstract visual impression brimming with vitality and animation. Painted in 1951, Composition reveals the influence of an exhibition on the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna which de Staël had recently seen and is arguably one of the most visually striking of a group of paintings which feature this highly distinctive segmentation into a blocklike structure. His previous works of the 1940s had employed a somber palette, the violent passages of thickly worked pigment evocative of a certain darkness appropriate for the post-war mood; but by 1950, de Staël had shifted to more radiant tonalities, and works like Composition take on a luminous glow. Art historian Eliza E. Rathbone notes the importance of this series of works within the artist’s mature development: “Form as an evocation of mood or landscape is essentially banished from these works, which in their layering of hues suggest a search for subtle harmonies and variations on a theme, of point and counterpoint as in a piece of music” (Eliza R. Rathbone in: Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection (and travelling), Nicolas de Staël in America, 1990, p. 19). This concept of “musical harmonies” seems particularly apposite in the case of the present work, not only in the choice of title but also in the methodical layering of compositional elements, which appears to echo the repeated segments of a musical quotation or theme. Music was an important influence on de Staël’s work of the early to mid-1950s, an interest

Nicolas de Staël in his studio, 1951. The present work seen far right.

Photo: Serge Vandercam / Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, 1989, PAGE 9-470-471

which is reflected in the titles of other paintings from this period including Nocturne (1950) and Fugue (1951-52), both in The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

De Staël’s growing reputation in Europe by the beginning of the 1950s coincided with the artist’s increasing confidence in his own mastery of media, as he gradually began to superimpose his canvases with several layers of paint, often using unconventional tools like the palette knife. The refined abstraction of layered tesserae, his sensibility to imbue the picture plane with an inherent sense of space and velocity as well as his delicate color compositions ranging from bold contrasts to smooth complements are deeply rooted in a Modernist tradition. Indeed, as Rathbone observes, “To a large extent de Staël saw his work in relation to the great art of the past—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Cézanne, Soutine, Matisse. De Staël studied the work of older masters both as a young man and throughout his years as an artist, from his frequent visits to the Louvre in the 1940s to his travels to Holland, Paris, Italy and finally in Spain, where he studied Velásquez and Goya” (ibid. p. 16). De Staël’s lifelong obsession with landscape motifs recalls the splendid compositions of Rembrandt and Vermeer, while the rectangular shapes in the present work allude to the post-Impressionist patchwork patterns of Cézanne or the magnificent square

compositions in Klimt’s portraits and landscapes, and the simultaneity of perspective and visual experience resonates with the Cubist paintings of Braque. Revealing the influence of these great masters in its opulent painterly facture, Composition draws together several elements from these past titans’ creative endeavors yet re-interprets and superbly re-imagines them through de Staël’s unique praxis.

A key element of this practice is de Staël’s signature fusion of abstraction with figuration, reconciling two ostensibly opposing styles while hovering thrillingly on the cusp of both, as deftly displayed by Composition De Staël discussed his belief that a painting should follow both stylistic schools equally: “I do not set up abstract painting in opposition to figurative. A painting should be both abstract and figurative: abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent that it is a representation of space” (the artist quoted in ibid. p. 22). The immediacy of de Staël’s response in Composition to a visual scene such as an urban landscape is prophetic of his later works, which were stimulated by lively motifs such as football players or the ballet. By merging things seen with things imagined, de Staël’s bold simplifications are joined by a vague image of the actual reality that translates through astonishing technical virtuosity into a pictorial vision of colorful sensation.

Jean Dubuffet, Apartment Houses, Paris 1946.

Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022

Fondtion Dubuffet, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Lot 13, Nicolas de Staël, Composition Henri Laurens, L’Espagnole (Modern Day Auction)

PAUL KLEE

AND THE ART OF THE FRAGMENT

ROBERT BROWN

The “creation of a work of art” Paul Klee said, “must… be accompanied by [a] distortion of the natural form. For, [only] therein is nature reborn” (Paul Klee, One Modern Art, London, 1954, p. 19). Art, “does not repeat the visible,” Klee famously insisted, but instead it “makes visible” a deeper, hidden reality known, unconsciously perhaps, only to the heart and soul of man. This “deeper” reality is a mysterious and primordial realm, often rendered by Klee as a magical landscape full of ambiguous symbols, pictorial metaphors and archetypes reminiscent in some respects of the domain of the “collective unconscious” imagined and championed by his contemporary, and fellow Swiss-German, the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. Both Klee and Jung (who was himself an artist) saw the process of creation as a psychological journey. For Klee, who often described drawing as “taking a line for a walk,” the creation of a work of art was the result of a meditative and near-mystical practice in which “our beating heart pushes down, down to the primitive depths [until] what is produced by this movement could...be called a dream, or idea, or fantasy [where] certain curious things become a reality, the reality of art, which widens life more than seems possible…[by ignoring] ...what we see more or less with our senses, but [making] visible the things we watch in secret” (Paul Klee, from a lecture given in Jena in 1924, cited in Hans Jaffe, Paul Klee, London, 1971, p. 28). Ultimately, the “ur-reality” that such a process revealed was one that, in the hands of an artist of Klee’s extraordinarily fecund imagination and genius, had the ability to resonate with such power that it instilled in the viewer a profoundly poetic and often deeply moving sense of universal truth and ancient wisdom.

“I am, after all, a poet” Klee once noted in this regard and, as many of his works in The David M. Solinger Collection demonstrate, the unique pictorial vocabulary that this most literary of artists devised was one that often actively attempted to fuse the worlds of the visible and the legible into a revelatory new pictographic language. Executed either between 1918 and 1919 or between 1929 and 1931, the five outstanding works from David Solinger’s collection are ones that effectively bracket the twelve years that Klee spent teaching at the Bauhaus. Klee’s Bauhaus years (1920-31) were ones in which his art often reacted to and occasionally ironized the increasingly Constructivist principles advocated by the school. In contrast, the five very diverse paintings in this sale are each prominent examples from some of the most lyrically inventive and more poetic periods in the artist’s career, made during periods when Klee was freer to pursue what he once described as his own “poetic-personal idea of landscape.”

August Macke and Paul Klee in front of a mosque in Tunisia, 1914. Collection of Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Photo Credit: HIP / Art Resource, NY

Each work, executed in a range of differing styles and media over an always carefully prepared ground, is a testament to the extraordinary versatility of the artist and to the depth of variation that runs throughout his oeuvre. Klee was an artist who could apply his vision to almost any pictorial style and his art is virtually unique in the history of early Twentieth Century modernism in that he is probably the only leading avant-garde figure to have allowed his work to roam freely between the organic and the geometric, the constructive and the intuitive, the figurative and the abstract and, as in a work such as Reste eiener Burg for example, between the purely linear and the completely chromatic. It is also for this reason that Klee’s work was to prove such a major influence upon a whole range of different and often diametrically opposed art movements, back in a time when art had movements. Expressionists, Dadaists, Constructivists, pioneers of abstraction, Surrealists and the emerging Abstract Expressionists of the New York School all either claimed Klee as one of their own or acknowledged the importance of his example.

Outside of the faculty of the Bauhaus, Klee tended to avoid belonging to any group aesthetic or movement. Yet, alongside his friends Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, Klee had been a member of Der Blaue Reiter in Munich before the war. Among the first from outside this elite circle of pioneers to claim him as a master were the Zurich Dadaists. “In his beautiful work,” one of them wrote, “we saw the reflection of all our efforts to interpret the soul of primitive man, to plunge into the unconscious and the instinctive power of creation” (Marcel Janco “Creative Dada” in Willy Verkauf, ed., Dada: Monograph of a Movement, New York, 1957, p. 40). Other Dadaists, such as Max Ernst and André Masson, who were soon afterwards to associate themselves with the Surrealist movement, learned to develop from Klee’s example a more spontaneous form of automatism that would go on to underpin much Surrealist art, but to which Klee himself never subscribed. Most significantly perhaps, the innately poetic, broken-form, sign-language art of fragmentation that Klee developed between 1916 and 1920 proved a decisive influence upon the direction that Joan Miró’s work would take throughout the 1920s.

Klee’s own artistic epiphany had come about in the years just before the First World War on his first encounter with the colorful prismatic cubism of Robert Delaunay and this was augmented soon afterwards by a trip he took to Tunisia with his friend August Macke. These decisive encounters ultimately led to Klee discovering his own cubist-influenced form of fragmentation—one in which he effectively began to dismantle the cohesive pictorial language of the German Romantic tradition and then whimsically reassemble it into new, illogical, anti-rational but surprisingly evocative, constellations of poetic form.

In an age in which philosophical figures like Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein were beginning to dismantle language in their own search for meaning, Klee too, was, in his own way, breaking down the structures of pictorial language into its constituent parts and then throwing their syntax into the air in order to create a spectacular, new and mysterious visual repertoire of signs, cyphers and symbols. All this was done on Klee’s part in the hope of reinvoking the more primal relationship that had once existed between word and image. He had been inspired in this attempt at establishing a primordial unity between writing and drawing by the example of the Chinese pictograms he had discovered in Hans Heilmann’s 1905 anthology of Chinese poetry and also, in a more lyrical form, by the writings of the German poet Christian Morgenstern whose Galgenlieder for example, may well have inspired Klee’s great 1919 oil in this collection Landschaft mit Galgen

Left A selection of catalogues and books about Paul Klee from David M. Solinger’s collection. Photo: Visko Hatfield

Above Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood 1809-10. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

VISIT SOTHEBYS.COM/THEDAVIDMSOLINGERCOLLECTION

It was “out of” the pictorial fusing of such “abstract” constituent parts and “elements,” Klee wrote in his Creative Credo of 1920, that “a formal cosmos is ultimately created independent of their groupings as concrete objects or abstract things such as numbers or letters [and] which we discover to be so closely similar to the Creation that a breath is sufficient to turn an expression of religious feelings, or religion, into reality” (Paul Klee, Creative Credo, 1920).

The three paintings from 1918 and 1919 in the Solinger Collection are all differently arrivedat executions of this same principle in which words and images, signs and symbols are whimsically intertwined with one another to create a sequence of holistic mental landscapes in which poetic images and forms fuse into one another in a manner that appears to visually echo and articulate the random process of thought.

In Ruinen mit Styliten for example, with its rather comic group of pillar-saints proudly holding their crucifixes and standing, like acrobats, atop an undulating sequence of columns, this desert landscape is punctuated by a sequence of rising and falling forms and a seemingly random series of numbers and letters that float through and between them.

Left The Bauhaus at Dessau, designed by architect Walter Gropius in 1926, pictured in 1930. Photo © Getty Images.

Above Paul Klee, Hauptweg und Nebenwege 1929. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Image: Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne / Sabrina Walz / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn

Here, the watery, rising forms of the saints’ ionic columns appear to echo those of desert palms or sprouting founts of water and even the body of a giant naked woman who also appears, for no apparent reason, at the righthand side of the painting. With the jumble of large printer’s-block-type black letters visibly disrupting the rhythm and lyricism of this flow of loosely similar forms, a disjunctive sense of rational thought—of words, numbering systems and even sound, (in the form of language) is introduced into the picture. Such honoring of the reasoning power of letters, numbers and perhaps also the printed word, is also elevated into what can only be thought of as a humorous extreme of “cool Romanticism” in Klee’s other 1918 painting from this collection; the equally enigmatic Gedenkenstein für N. In this red watercolor executed on a chalk ground bordered with strips of silver paper tape, Klee literally unveils a Caspar David Friedrich-like scene of twilight centred around a memorial stele dedicated to the mysterious letter “N”.

As Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy has written of such pictures, in these “fairy-tale paintings, Klee referenced, or perhaps satirized, the Romantic envisaging of the landscape as a ‘devotional image’ in which nature is felt as a mysterious presence, wrought with wonder and magic” (Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, “Paul Klee, Paths in the Image: Constructions of Time” Paul Klee: Construction of Mystery Munich, 2018, p. 89). Nowhere is this aspect of Klee’s art more apparent than in his spectacular Landschaft mit Galgen of 1919—a work that, in recent years has become one of the most “written-about” of all Klee’s early paintings.1 This landscape, comprised of fragments of words and imagery seen wandering through and then becoming a part of the scenery it punctuates, is itself a kind of fragment, having been executed on a partial strip of canvas that Klee had evidently managed to salvage from somewhere during the austere years at the end of the First World War. Sometimes these strips had been torn from the wings of crashed airplanes in the Gersthofen airfield where Klee had been stationed between 1917 and 1918.

In such paintings as this, with its central, L-shaped sign standing in for “gallows” of its title, Klee has, as Michel Foucault has pointed out, effectively uncovered a new pictorial dimension. Through Klee’s fusion of writing and pictorial language, the “established ‘sovereignty’ of an established hierarchy in art” has, Foucault argued, been “abolished.”

When “boats, houses, persons are at the same time recognizable figures and elements of writing... [and] are placed and travel upon roads or canals that are also lines to be read …the intersection, within the same medium, or representation by resemblance and of representation by signs…presupposes that they meet in quite another space than that of a painting” (Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe Berkeley, 2008, p. 33).

A lengthy discussion of this painting opens Annie Bourneuf’s Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible Chicago, 2015, pp. 1-6 and Kathryn Porter Aichele has also written extensively about the picture, drawing a close parallel between it and Christian Morgenstern’s poem Der Mond from his Galgenlieder. (Gallows Songs) See: Kathryn Porter Aichele Paul Klee Painter/Poet Rochester N.Y., 2006, pp. 96-100

VISIT

Klee’s poetically transformative use of such fragmentation and the fragmented image during this period was to continue to develop throughout his years at the Bauhaus. From the creation of fantastical abstract architectures to a series of “magic-square” paintings, line and form roamed ever-more freely. Signs, symbols and ciphers, for example, were increasingly abstracted and interspersed with geometric forms such as circles and triangles that emulated the “romantic” presence of moons, stars and arrows indicative of movement or direction in a “poetic-pictorial” dimension in which all the building blocks of image-making were given their own autonomy.

In 1929, towards the end of his time at the Bauhaus and after a Christmas journey to Cairo and Upper Egypt, Klee embarked upon the creation of a new series of works executed in another style thought to have been inspired by aerial views he witnessed of the irrigated fields of the Nile delta. In these works, of which Die Farbige of 1929 is a shining example, a sequence of horizontal compartments of color generate the spatial field of the picture while a series of simple borderlines disrupt its patterning in such a way that they outline the vision-like image of a woman emerging from its color. This style, which would culminate in Klee’s large-scale oil painting Hauptweg und Nebenwege of 1929, played an intricate game with the relationship between line and form that Klee was soon afterwards to break down even further into what he described as “polyphonic” fields of color in a series of mosaic-like pictures that he made immediately after leaving the Bauhaus.

In 1931, Klee took up a professorial position at the Dusseldorf Academy. He spent much of this year living between his family, still residing in Dessau, and at the Academy in Dusseldorf, working on a different series of paintings in each city. In Dessau, according to his son Felix, Klee’s work maintained a “more severe constructive style,” while in Dusseldorf he embarked upon a more lyrical and playful, but also extremely time-consuming, series of new, “Pointillist” pictures of which Reste Einer Berg is a classic example.

These “Pointillist” pictures, which Klee sometimes referred to as “Divisionist” works in order to distinguish them from the Neo-Impressionist “pointillism” of Seurat, are ones that to some extent mark the furthest point to which Klee’s fragmentary aesthetic would travel. A picture such as Reste Einer Berg, for example encompasses and articulates many of the recurrent themes in Klee’s work from the time of the First World War onwards. Now making use of an almost digitalized, near-binary technique, the picture is a lyrical composite of isolated fragments of broken line and individual dots that together combine into a shimmering, fairytale-like image of the ruins of a castle set into a radiant and pulsating landscape that is alive with color. Both magical and yet also somewhat banal, this “crop of dots,” as Klee sometimes referred to such works, is an eloquent testament to the creative power of the artist to breathe life into even the simplest of forms and motifs. With its imagery of ruins coming to life it is also a magnificent articulation of Klee’s belief that “all art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.”

PAUL KLEE

Reste einer Burg (Remains of a Castle)

signed Klee (upper left); titled, dated 1931 and numbered W 15.15 (on the artist’s mount)

watercolor on gouache ground paper laid down on the artist’s mount image: 13 by 8 ⅛ in. 33 by 20.8 cm. mount: 19 ⅝ by 12 ⅞ in. 50 by 32.8 cm. Executed in 1931.

$ 700,000-1,000,000

PROVENANCE

Lily Klee, Bern (acquired by descent from the artist in 1940)

Klee-Gesellschaft, Bern (acquired from the above in 1946)

Curt Valentin Gallery/Buchholz Gallery, New York and Berlin (on commission 1948-53)

Acquired from the above in 1953 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Bern, Kunsthalle, Paul Klee, 1935, no. 129

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger 1956, no. 3 (titled Remnants of a Castle)

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of TwentiethCentury Art, 2002-03, p. 92, illustrated

LITERATURE

Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, eds., Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné vol. VI, London and New York, 2002, no. 5660, p. 149, illustrated

Painted in 1931, Reste einer Burg is a remarkable example of Klee’s characteristically playful treatment of the strict rules of compositional construction. The heightened chromatic relationships at work in this almost iridescent watercolor speak to Klee’s ability to strike a delicate balance between formalism and imagination. The resulting work, at once structural and dematerialized, intuitive and imaginative, speaks to a unique moment in Klee’s career—a moment in which he reconciled the influence of the Bauhaus ethos with his aspirations towards his own distinct artistic style.

Following the architect Walter Gropius’s invitation to teach at the Bauhaus, Klee moved to Weimar, and the subsequent years, from 1921 to 1931, were to be the most innovative and productive of his career. Inspired by the Bauhaus belief in constructivist art, Klee’s work became increasingly abstract and geometricized. “When

I became a teacher,” Klee wrote, “I had to account explicitly for what I had been used to doing unconsciously” (the artist cited in Carola GiedionWelcker, Paul Klee, New York, 1952, p. 50). In his post as the Formmeister, Klee was responsible for teaching courses on “Handling Methods of Form’’ and on the fundamental mechanics of art. In his book, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch which documents the lectures he gave over his 10 year tenure at the school, Klee contends that “the truly essential can be identified and represented in ever-new variations and combinations by means of the basic elements of line, plane, and color” (ibid. p. 62). Regarding the line, Klee writes of its expressive potential and its capacity to communicate both spatial and psychological movement. The present composition oscillates between ascent and descent, allowing for the central structure, deconstructed as it might appear, to bear the potential of being whole again.

Above

Paul Klee, Kreuze und Säulen (Crosses and Columns), 1931. Image: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich / Sybille Forster / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Opposite

Mesopotamian tablet inscribed in Sumerian, ancient Babylon. Image: Raphaël Chipault / Musée du Louvre, Paris / Art Resource, NY

The viewer can imagine the fragmented lines extending into the space between the blocks of color to form the castle that once stood where its remnants now appear. This notion, of collapsing the distance between past, present and future, was central to Klee’s oeuvre.

Architecture had been an important source of inspiration for the artist since the early days of his career and long served as a vehicle for his exploration into the relationship between the ephemeral and the physical. “Everywhere I see only architecture, linear rhythms, planar rhythms,”

he wrote in his diary as early as 1902 (the artist quoted in Jürg Spiller ed., Paul Klee. Notebooks. The Thinking Eye, vol. I, London, 1961, p. 234). This sense of rhythm is beautifully rendered in the present work. While Klee based the composition on a vertical and horizontal grid, his careful grouping of color defies the constraints of that underlying organization, creating a sense of excited vibration that flows through the structure of the castle at the center. He manages to maintain some suggestion of the realistic motif in which the scene is rooted while also achieving a complete dematerialization of the physical world.

As Carola Giedion-Welcker explains, for Klee, “the theory of art is the outgrowth of the practice, not the other way around” (Giedion-Welcker, ibid., p. 50) Experimentation was integral to his process of understanding the mechanics of art and the basis on which his ideations were formulated. His Pointillist phase, of which the present work is an exquisite example, was one such period of experimentation. During this time, from 1930 to 1932, Klee explored what it meant to reconceptualize a scene in terms of color structure. With works like the present, Klee had discovered a new visual language, one whose letters, the delicate blocks of color, could be arranged into infinite sentences. In his own words, he managed “to achieve the greatest possible movement with the least possible means” (quoted in Jürg Spiller (ed.), Paul Klee. Notebooks. The Thinking Eye, London, 1961, vol. I, p. 234). In these mosaic-like compositions, Klee offers a view of the world that is at once kaleidoscopic and vigorously structured, as if seen through the fog of a dream.

“The truly essential can be identified and represented in ever-new variations and combinations by means of the basic elements of line, plane, and color.”

PAUL KLEE CITED IN CAROLA GIEDION-WELCKER, PAUL KLEE, NEW YORK, 1952, P. 62

Klee’s time at the Bauhaus in many ways freed him from the notion that to work with the mechanics of art meant to work within the laws of the physical world. Klee came to understand the tools of representation as being truly separate from that which was being represented. As he wrote in a Bauhaus prospectus, “construction is not totality [for] intuition still remains an important element” (the artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Madrid, Fundación Juan March, Paul Klee: Bauhaus Master, 2013, p. 84). The present work is a wonderful example of Klee’s ability to strike a balance between the two— between “construction” and “intuition.” Central is an undeniable sense of playfulness—one which cuts through the historicism of the subject matter and the formula of the composition.

Between 1929 and 1931, within the first two years of the Museum of Modern Art’s opening, Alfred H. Barr, the museum’s legendary director at the time, held two solo exhibitions of Klee’s works, introducing his idiosyncratic style to the American public. While his works proved too radical for contemporary critics, Klee’s oeuvre excited something untapped in its audience of American artists. Coupled with his writings, whose English editions were concurrently circulated, Klee’s works offered a theoretical underpinning for the wave of abstraction beginning to take root in New York. Klee did for these American artists what he did for his students back at the Bauhaus: he gave them a framework, a theory on composition, structure and form, which they could apply to their own devices.

Paul Signac, The Ruins at Grimaud, Saint-Tropez, 1899. Private Collection. Image: Bridgeman Images

PAUL KLEE

1879 - 1940

Die Farbige (The Colorful Woman)

signed Klee (lower right); titled, dated 1929 and numbered n.9 (on the artist’s mount)

watercolor and pencil on paper laid down on the artist’s mount

image: 12 ½ by 5 ½ in. 31.9 by 14.9 cm. mount: 18 ⅞ by 12 ½ in. 48 by 31.9 cm. Executed in 1929.

$ 400,000-600,000

PROVENANCE

Lily Klee, Bern (acquired by descent from the artist in 1940)

Klee-Gesellschaft, Bern (acquired from the above in 1946)

J. B. Neumann, New York (acquired from the above in 1951)

Acquired from the above in 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Basel, Galerie Bettie Thommen, Ausstellung Paul Klee, 1942 New York, J. B. Neumann and New Art Circle, Paul Klee, 1952, no. 17 (titled Colorful Girl)

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger 1956, no. 2 (titled The Colorful Girl)

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, no. 46, p. 91, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, eds., Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné vol. V, London and New York, 2001, no. 4805, p. 284, illustrated

Exh. Cat., Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus; Bern, Kunstmuseum; Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle and Hamburger Kunsthalle, Paul Klee 1933, 2003-04, p. 299

German artist Paul Klee’s painterly philosophy is epitomized in the exquisite watercolor Die Farbige (The Colorful Woman) Executed in 1929, Klee drew inspiration for the present work from a critical month-long trip to Egypt beginning in December 1928. Fulfilling a great desire to see the monuments of the pharaohs, Klee visited Cairo, Luxor, and Aswâr to see the pyramids, temples, and great Sphinx at Giza. Inspired by the distinctive patterning of the cultivated fields along the Nile, he absorbed the structural principle of cardinal progression and reinterpreted it in geometric compositions of horizontal stripes and lines, as in the present example. Klee’s visits to North Africa radically expanded the artist’s understanding of color as a medium, and evidence of the artist’s enriching expedition can be found in the present work’s warm, earthy tones reminiscent of a desert sunset. A prime example of the profound influence these Egyptian travels had on the artist, Die Farbige is an elegant and evocative rendering of the aesthetic principles to which Klee would repeatedly return throughout the rest of his career.

Deeply moved by nature and music, Klee was primarily concerned with the abstract representation of natural forms and emotions. Although Klee was influenced by his Expressionist peers Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Lionel Feininger, the artist’s style stands apart in its idiosyncratic mastery of line, form and color. In the present composition, the form of a woman is reduced to an interplay between geometric shapes and a palette that evokes the balmy, luminous shades of the African sun and sky. The alternating bars of complementary hues emphasize its compositional structure, as the abstracted elements together form the titular female figure. The visual delicacy lent by the watercolor medium allows the quadrilateral forms a freedom of movement; they do not appear bound to the paper, but hover like a mirage. This airiness affords a tranquil energy to the present work, which is characteristic of Klee’s oeuvre. Klee was deeply concerned with the rhythm of his pieces, a fascination at the heart of his first love: music.

Above, left  Piet Mondrian, Composition 1914. Image: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth / Bridgeman Images. Art © 2022 Mondrian / Holtzman Trust

Above, right  Sonia Delaunay, Simultaneous Dresses (Three Women, Forms, Colours) 1925. Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid. Image: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza / Art Resource, NY

Klee’s father, Hans Klee, was a musician and music teacher while Klee himself played in the municipal orchestra in Bern as a student. Die Farbige is imbued with a unique rhythmic pattern reminiscent of the harmonies and syncopations of his musical education. The imperfect rectangles abutted by curves and bisectors afford the present composition an irregular meter that calls attention to the lateral movement of the geometric forms.

Klee’s preoccupation with abstract material inspired by, but not deeply rooted in, reality sets him apart from the other artists of his generation. Klee sought to convey the exquisite mysteries of the soul rather than overt pictorial narratives. As the artist himself describes: “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible. Formerly we used to represent the visible on earth, things we either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe, and that there are many more, other, latent realities” (the artist quoted in Will Grohmann, Paul Klee , New York, 1990, p. 21). Thus Klee identifies his urgent mission to express the essential character of subject

matter. In the present work, he captures the ineffable nature of a woman through the warm, fertile palette and balance of sensuous curved lines with sharp angular ones.

Klee refined his approach to color theory while teaching at the Bauhaus. Invited to join the teaching staff in October 1920 by the founder of the prestigious school, Walter Gropius, Klee taught classes such as “Contributions to the Theory of Form.” Enric Jardi elaborates on Klee’s teaching style: “He explained to his students that the mission of a painter consists in elaborating an expressive world parallel to that perceived by the eye, although both are interrelated since they are united in the Cosmos. Above all, in fulfilling his mission the artist must always act with absolute purity. Frequently Klee would give his classes in front of the blackboard, drawing with both hands (it is said that he played violin with his right and painted with his left), explaining how to create the third dimension starting from a flat surface and showing how it was possible to graduate color without recourse to material density” (Enric Jardi, Paul Klee London, 1955, p. 17). Klee’s role as a professor allowed him the space to absorb the expertise of fellow students and teachers, solidifying his status as a true master of painting, quintessentially demonstrated by Die Farbige.

PAUL KLEE

Gedenkstein für N. (Memorial for N.)

titled, dated 1918 and numbered 80 (on the artist’s mount) watercolor on chalk ground paper bordered with strips of silver paper tape laid down on the artist’s mount image: 6 ⅞ by 10 ⅛ in. 17.5 by 25.7 cm. mount: 7 ⅛ by 10 ½ in. 18.1 by 26.7 cm. Executed in 1918. $ 500,000-700,000

PROVENANCE

Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Munich (acquired from the artist in 1919 and until at least 1920)

Collection Thorn

Kunstkabinett, Stuttgart, 27 April 1951, lot 1916 (consigned by the above)

Galerie d’Art Moderne Marie-Suzanne Feigel, Basel (acquired at the above sale)

Kunstkabinett, Stuttgart, 29 May 1952, lot 1996 (consigned by the above)

Collection Klitzke (acquired at the above sale) Berggruen & Cie, Paris

Theodore Schempp, Paris and New York (acquired from the above in 1953)

Acquired from the above in 1954 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Berlin, Galerie Der Sturm, Paul Klee, Johannes Molzahn, Kurt Schwitters, 1919, no. 16

Munich, Galeriestrasse 26, Münchener Neue-Secession. V., 1919, no. 83

Wiesbaden, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Neues Museum, Neue Kunst Hans Goltz München: Kollektionen Hans Völcker, Otto Ritschl, 1920, no. 70

Paris, Berggruen & Cie, Paul Klee: Aquarelles et Dessins, 1953, n.p., illustrated in color

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 85, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Marcel Brion, Paul Klee, Paris, 1955, no. 12, illustrated (titled Pierre Commémorative pour N.)

Carola Müller, Das Zeichen in Bild und Theorie bei Paul Klee, Ph.D. dissertation, Technische Universität München, Munich, 1979, p. 48

Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, Paul Klee Stuttgart, 1995, fig. 15, p. 62, illustrated

Jenny Anger, Modernism and the Gendering of Paul Klee, Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, Providence, 1997, p. 109 (titled Memorial to N)

Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, eds., Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London and New York, 2000, no. 1927, p. 485, illustrated; p. 472, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Kyoto, National Museum of Modern Art and Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Paul Klee: Art in the Making 1883-1940, 2011, p. 86, illustrated

Brigitte Uhde-Stahl, Paul Klees geheime Symbolik Berlin, 2018, pp. 196, 219, 283, 294; p. 244, illustrated in color

Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Image Archive

Below

Paul Klee, With the Eagle, 1918. Image: Kunstmuseum, Bern / Art Resource, NY.

Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn

Paul Klee’s cover illustration for Novalis’ The Novices of Sais, (Italian ed.), first published 1949.

Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG BildKunst, Bonn

his close friends and fellow artists August Macke and Franz Marc. The “N” rendered clearly on the tombstone and mentioned in the title could well be in reference to another deceased friend of Klee’s, lost to the violence of war.

Art historian Wolfgang Kersten, in his seminal work on Klee, references this sense of mourning in Klee’s work, alluding to an ironic commentary from Klee on the nature of war. Kersten cites a letter Paul Klee sent to his wife Lily in June of 1918, in which Klee writes: “Yesterday—good on the train as I am—I painted some watercolors in red,” a possible reference to Gedenkstein für N. (Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, Paul Klee: Im Zeichen der Teilung Stuttgart, 1995, p. 61).

Kersten considers these red watercolors in depth, and postulates that “the motifs of some of the red fairytale-like landscape pictures in a seemingly childish style are to be understood as ironic parodies of the official commemorative pages for ‘war dead’” (ibid.). Klee’s use of bright colors and playfully rendered figures in the foreground of this work can therefore be read as a subversion of any honorable or grandiose representation of war.

Dr. Florence Rougerie posits an alternative interpretation entirely, suggesting that the “N” is referring to the German poet Novalis (1772-1801).

Rougerie believes Novalis’ work was likely a source of inspiration to Klee, with this painting capturing the multiplicity of perceived or imaginable forms. Rougerie writes: “The mixture of terrestrial and cosmic forces of the romantic landscape of Stele commemorative pour N. (Gedenkstein fur N.) (1918, 80) could very well represent the setting of Diciples in Sais; its elements gravitating around an “N” in capital of printing, one could read there a cryptic homage to the poet” (Florence Rougerie, “Écriture et peinture chez Paul Klee: l’image écrite ou le mot à l’œuvre,” Histoire de l’art, no. 71, Paris, December 2012, p. 85). Much like what we see in Gedenkstein für N., Novalis’s work contemplates on the oscillatory nature of the figurative world. In his collection The Disciples in Sais (1802), Novalis writes: “Sometimes the stars seemed to him to be men, sometimes the opposite, the stones seemed like animals, the clouds like plants… As a result, nature is seen as a huge text to decipher” (quoted in ibid., p. 85).

Paul Klee’s Gedenkstein für N. of 1918 exhibits the artist’s masterful use of color and shape to render a delicate yet compositionally rich scene of remembrance. The present work reflects an intermediality characteristic to the artist’s oeuvre, oscillating between written and visual forms, and figurative and abstract representations. Executed in his final year of service in the German military, Gedenkstein für N. captures the looming sense of disorientation to the death and violence that prevailed throughout Europe at the time. The present work was executed towards the end of Klee’s military service in World War I, and is among a small cannon of pieces that Klee produced under a title of remembrance or memorial, including Remembrance Sheet

(Gedenkblatt) (1918) and Remembrance J.R. (Gedenkblatt J.R.) (1917). A large tombstone rises from a sea of pink and red hues, marked boldly with a thick capital “N,” while surrounding trees, plants, and structures look on with a charred, ghostly quality. The grave marker draws the viewer’s eye upward through the scene, connecting the lower and upper landscape into a balanced composition. Along the left and right sides of the composition, Klee frames the scene with sweeping black angular shapes that resemble that of an opened curtain—possibly a commentary on the performative quality of war. The blood red of the canvas, combined with the fragile topographical symbolism evokes a sense of loss, anger and destruction—likely inspired by Klee’s own traumatic losses during the war, including

Opposite Paul Klee in his Weimar Bauhaus studio, 1924. Photo © KleeNachlassverwaltung, Hinterkappelen. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

PAUL KLEE 1879 - 1940

Landschaft mit dem Galgen (Landscape with Gallows)

signed Klee, dated 1919 and numbered 115 (lower left) oil and pen and ink on primed grounded gauze on board 14 ½ by 18 ⅛ in. 36.3 by 46 cm. Executed in 1919.

1,500,000-2,000,000

PROVENANCE

Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz, Munich (on commission from the artist circa 1919-20)

Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf, Berlin (acquired by 1932)

Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Cologne (acquired by 1946 and until at least 1950)

New Art Circle, J.B. Neumann, New York (acquired by 1952)

Acquired from the above in 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Copenhagen, Den Frie Udstilling, Nyere tysk kunst. Maleri og skulptur, 1932, no. 96

Munich, Haus der Kunst and Dusseldorf, Kunstmuseum, Die Maler am Bauhaus, 1950, no. 127 New York, J. B. Neumann and New Art Circle, Paul Klee, 1952, no. 5, n.p., illustrated (titled Landscape with Signs)

New York, Perls Galleries, The Educated Eye: Paintings and Sculpture from Collections of Dalton School Families for the Benefit of The Dalton School and its Scholarship Program, 1964, no. 19, illustrated

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 89, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Jürg Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Das Bildnerische Denken, Form-une Gestaltungs-Jehre Basel and Stuttgart, 1956, p. 77, illustrated

Jürg Spiller, ed., Paul Klee: Notebooks, The Thinking Eye vol. I, New York, 1973, p. 77, illustrated (titled Landscape with gallows and listed as oil on cardboard)

Max Huggler, Paul Klee: Die Malerei als Blick in den Kosmos, Frauenfeld and Stuttgart, 1969, p. 53

Annegret Janda, “Paul Klee und Nationalgalerie, 19191937 ” Paul Klee. Vortrage der wissenschaftlichen Konferenz in Dresden, 19. und 90. Dezember 1984, Dresden, 1986, p. 49 (titled Traumlandschaft mit Galgen and dated 1921)

Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, London and New York, 1999, no. 2178, p. 98, illustrated

Kathryn Porter Aichele, Paul Klee, Poet/Painter Rochester, 2006, fig. 25, pp. 96-100, 112, 159, 170, illustrated

Maike Steinkamp and Ute Haug, eds., Werke und Werte. Über das Handeln und Sammeln von Kunst im Nationalsozialismus, Berlin 2010, p. 72

Annie Bourneuf, Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible, Chicago, 2015, n.p., illustrated in color

Anna Casellato. Rilke in München: der Weg zur Abstraktion, Ph.D. dissertation Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia Università di Trento, 2021, p. 62

A seminal painting in Paul Klee’s legendary oeuvre, Landschaft mit dem Galgen (Landscape with Gallows) of 1919 sees the Modernist master’s early abstract exploration into the reciprocity between writing and images. Gracefully heralding his new tendency towards graphic abstraction, Klee reduces the hefty structure of the gallows into a thick and inverted “L” shape centered at the top, while indexing trees and roads below as hieroglyphic symbols that intersperse across the spatial landscape like letters on a page. Klee executed the present work at a pivotal moment in his career, the same year he secured a three-year contract with dealer Hans Goltz, whose influential Munich Gallery would promote his art alongside other Modern avant-garde artists. As Klee distills the vast dimensionality of a natural landscape into a flattened composition, Landschaft mit dem Galgen presents his early intervention into the fundamental framework of the pictorial plane: here,

the Modernist virtuoso destabilizes the distinct formal structures of writing and drawing before harmonizing them as one in the present painting.

Landschaft mit dem Galgen reifies Klee’s philosophy on the radically illusory qualities of graphic forms that he explored in his essay

Creative Confession begun in 1918 and published in 1920, one year following the present work’s execution. Here, light and color shift across subtle tonalities ranging from verdant greens to apricot ochres, from which a flattened fantastical landscape emerges in lyrical rhythm. Like caesuras in a poem, white elliptical paths separate colors to suggest the inward recessions between hills, while thin black lines punctuate the terrain to demarcate its topographical contours. A painted symbol in the shape of a crescent moon rests atop the right corner, suggesting a seamless union between land and sky in the present composition, as if aerial perspective has dissolved altogether in the absence of a discrete horizon line.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Magpie on the Gallows 1568. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. Image: Bridgeman Images

“Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible. The very nature of graphic art lures us to abstraction... It gives the schematic fairytale quality of the imaginary and expresses it with great precision”

Klee himself had catalogued the present painting as “Oil on stretched canvas primed with gesso and Krems white,” but art historian Annie Bourneuf has noted that “the discontinuity between the linear black signs and letters...and the colorful field they inscribe...is so emphatic that one might prefer to call it a drawing on a painted ground” (Annie Bourneuf, Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible Chicago, 2015, p. 3). Before the present work, the viewer indeed seems to hover over a painterly field of variegated pastel reds, yellows, and blues and, with optical omniscience, overlook the fantastical reverie that Klee has both transcribed and constructed here.

Subverting recognizable representation with his signature mode of playful abstraction, Klee’s Landschaft mit dem Galgen can be said to present a Modernist revision of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s

Northern Renaissance painting The Magpie on the Gallows from 1568, the most prominent precedent in art history of a landscape with gallows. While Bruegel’s vista unfurls into the panoramic distance beyond the earthy mound on which the gallows stand, Klee’s composition flattens the landscape completely while grounding the abstracted gallows atop, encouraging one to survey the overall canvas from top to bottom as one might read the written pages of a book.

Provoking this reading-like mode of viewing, the present work perfectly realizes the classical Renaissance doctrine “ut pictura poesis,” or “as is painting so is poetry.” At the same time, it epitomizes the Modernist avant-garde and theoretical complexity of Paul Klee’s paintings, in which Michel Foucault observes, “Boats, houses, persons are at the same time recognizable figures

Opposite

Dominus Julius’ Estate, mosaic from Carthage, Tunisia. Roman civilisation, 4th-5th century AD. Musée National Du Bardo, Tunis.

Image: NPL - DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman

Images

Above Joan Miró, Vines and Olive Trees, Tarragona 1919.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource, NY. Art ©

and elements of writing. They are placed and traveled upon roads or canals that are also lines to be read...The gaze encounters words as if they had strayed to the heart of things, words indicating the way to go and naming the landscape being crossed” (Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, Los Angeles, 1982, p. 33).

Wonderfully mythic, scenic, and cryptic at once, Klee’s Landschaft mit dem Galgen comes alive in the soft cadence between its iconographic markings, delicate symbols of spatial perception and experience. The present painting exemplifies the legendary style of graphic abstraction that Klee would continue in later works, which together establish his profound legacy in art history for probing into the domains of phenomenology and semiotics via the bare mechanisms of line, form, and

color. Speaking to Klee’s profound creative output during the year he executed the present work, Will Grohmann writes, “Klee’s attitude is existentialist in that he repeatedly faces the void, re-creates the universe, and accepts fate. All the paintings of 1919 are stigmatized by fate, represented by houses, windows, trees and stars, rarely by animals or human beings... Klee’s whole universe is indeed embraced by form, but it is a form filled by the universe, and from this balance springs the fullness and precision of his pictures” (Will Grohmann, Paul Klee , London, 1954, pp. 152, 159). Mapping a dreamlike landscape onto canvas like words on a poem, Landschaft mit dem Galgen presents a whimsical visual scripture that escapes any attempt at formal exegesis and delights in the abstract realm of the cosmic imaginary instead.

THE ARTIST QUOTED IN “CONFESSION CRÉATRICE,” TRIBUNE DER KUNST UND ZEIT, 1920, N. P.

Joan Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

PAUL KLEE

- 1940

Ruinen mit Styliten (Ruins with Stylites)

titled (on the artist’s mount) watercolor and pen and ink on paper laid down on the artist’s mount

image: 7 by 9 ¼ in. 18 by 23.5 cm. mount: 9 ⅞ by 12 ⅜ in. 25 by 31.3 cm. Executed in 1918.

$ 500,000-700,000

PROVENANCE

Hans Koch, Dusseldorf and Gottmadingen (acquired circa 1920)

Maria Koch, Dusseldorf (acquired by descent from the above in 1952)

Berggruen & Cie, Paris (acquired by 1953)

Theodore Schempp, Paris and New York (acquired from the above by 1954)

Acquired from the above in 1954 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Dusseldorf, Galerie Alex Vömel, Paul Klee, August Macke, 1952, no. 12

Paris, Berggruen & Cie, Paul Klee: Aquarelles et Dessins 1953, n.p., illustrated in color

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 87, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Marcel Brion, Paul Klee, Paris, 1955, no. 10, illustrated (titled Ruines avec Stylites)

Exh. Cat., Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfallen, Paul Klee. Im Zeichen der Teilung, 1995, p. 78, note 84

Josef Helfenstein and Christian Rümelin, eds., Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, London and New York, 2000, no. 1935, p. 476, illustrated in color; p. 488, illustrated

Averitable feast for the imagination, Paul Klee’s Ruinen mit Styliten encapsulates the artist’s finest skills, bringing together his mastery of color and delicacy of line with his uniquely personal symbology. In 1914, Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moilliet traveled together to the then-French protectorate of Tunisia. As Morocco was for Matisse just two years earlier, Tunisia proved a powerfully enlightening environment for Klee. Mesmerized by the foreign landscape and the exquisite North African light, Klee reached an artistic turning point after which color would become his main priority. In his journal from April 1914, Klee writes, “Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Bern, Zentrum Paul Klee, Paul Klee, August Macke, Louis Moilliet: The Journey to Tunisia , 2014, p. 109).

Of this critical period in Klee’s development, Michael Baumgartner writes, “The brief twoweek journey to Tunisia…is enveloped by an aura of the foreign and exotic, the glow of light and colors, and the fascination of artistic inspiration and self-realization. This is especially true of Klee, whose artistic work in Tunisia is still regarded to this day as a turning point in his career and a breakthrough in terms of color” (Michael Baumgartner, ibid.). Though brief, Klee’s Tunisian travels would continue to impact his work for years to follow. As evinced by the colorful and symbol-laden works from 1918 like Salon Tunisien and especially Ruinen mit Styliten the artist’s previously muted and weighty tones were transformed into the crystalline panes of light and dulcet, gem-like hues as seen in the

present work. The influences of Klee’s visits to the cities of Kairouan, Sidi Bou Said, Hammamet and Carthage are felt in the omnipresence of architecture and ruins in such compositions, the crescent moon and domed shapes of Salon Tunisien reminiscent of the Great Mosque and the pillars of Ruinen mit Styliten echoing the remnants of successive Carthaginian civilizations. Perched atop the colorful pillars in the present work are Klee’s whimsical personifications of stylites—or Christian ascetics who lived atop pillars. Notable among history’s devout figures is the fifth century’s Saint Simeon, or Simeon Stylites the Elder, who in an attempt to shield himself from his distracting followers, found a surviving pillar amid the ruins of Telanissa

Left  August Macke, photograph of Paul Klee in Tunisia, 1914.

© LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster / Repro: Sabine AhlbrandDornseif

Right Greek, Saint Simeon Stylites the Younger tempera on wood, Wellcome Collection

(Byzantine Syria) and decided to live atop it. The monk formed a platform at the top of the pillar and lived out the rest of his days with the help of local villagers. His actions later inspired other Christian ascetics throughout the Levant to follow similar paths, resulting in a wealth of related iconography in subsequent centuries.

Whether Klee saw such depictions in Tunisia in 1914 or in the museums of Munich, Cologne or Brussels during his military service in the years leading up to Ruinen mit Styliten, the legend played a critical role in the artist’s visual lexicon. Renowned for his inscrutable imagery and multivalent works, Klee also frequently took inspiration from a variety of poetic sources, including those of Chinese poet Wang Seng Yu and the eighteenth-century German poet Novalis. Thus, it may have been the nineteenth-century

British poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson who inspired the present work with his 1833 “St Simeon Stylites,” a sympathetic and darkly humorous interpretation of the Saint’s life. In Klee’s interpretation, however, the ascetics are rather jauntily rendered, some in vignettes which transgress the very nature of the religious lore. While each figure bears a cross in some manner, the figure toward the lower center smokes a long pipe, while the smallest figure at upper left stands stridently above a large nude female figure, herself perhaps a version of a caryatid. Such humorous and light-hearted characterizations subvert the traditional view of saintly stylites who strove for heavenly perfection by detaching themselves from earthy pleasures.

Interspersed among the pillars in Ruinen mit Styliten are hints of the natural world, from the

Above

Saint Simeon Stylites, Byzantine, 5th or 6th CE, Syria. Image: Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Berlin /Jürgen Liepe / Art Resource, NY

Right

Paul Klee, Black Columns in a Landscape 1919.

Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

occasional bird to the bright cerulean trees which echo the forms yet contrast the colors of the handling of the crosses. Grey washes seemingly delineate the letters ‘R,’ ‘I,’ ‘J,’ and ‘A’ situated between as the roman numerals ‘V’ and ‘IV.’ It’s possible that these letters refer to Oued Bou Rija, a wadi—or valley which is dry except in the rainy season—located in Kairouan. During their 1914 trip, it was Kairouan which perhaps most impressed upon Klee and his companions the truest sense of Arabic culture, as the old

walled city retained much more of the traditional trappings and architecture than the country’s more European-influenced cities like Tunis.

Awash in brilliant jewel-colored tones, the present work shows the undeniable influence of the artist’s earlier travels in both theme and palette. Though Klee would continue to develop structure within his compositions throughout his career, his playful wit and crucial emphasis on color, as exemplified by his masterful Ruinen mit Styliten, would remain central to his work.

“Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter”

QUOTED IN EXH. CAT., BERN, ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE, PAUL KLEE, AUGUST MACKE, LOUIS MOILLIET: THE JOURNEY TO TUNISIA, 2014, P. 109

PABLO PICASSO

Femme dans un fauteuil

signed Picasso and dated 27 (upper left); dated janv. 1927 (on the reverse)

51 ⅜ by 38 ¼ in. 130.5 by 97.2 cm. Executed in January 1927. $ 15,000,000-20,000,000

PROVENANCE

The artist (until at least 1955)

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris

Acquired from the above through Kootz Gallery in March 1958 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, 1939, no. 208, p. 133, illustrated

Sao Paolo, Museu de Arte Moderna, Exposição Picasso: II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1953-54, no. 20, n.p., illustrated

Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Picasso: Peintures 1900-1955, 1955, no. 69, illustrated

New York, Kootz Gallery, Picasso: Five Master Works, 1958, no. 1

New York, Acquavella Galleries, Picasso: A Loan Exhibition for the Benefit of Cancer Care, Inc., The National Cancer Foundation, 1975, n.p., illustrated

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, 1980, p. 263, illustrated

London, Tate Modern; Paris, Grand Palais and New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Matisse-Picasso, 2002-03, no. 112, p. 226, illustrated in color

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 129, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Alfred H. Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, New York, 1946, p. 147, illustrated

Christian Zervos, Pablo Picasso: Oeuvres de 1926 à 1932, vol. VII, Paris, 1955, no. 79, pl. 34, illustrated (before the artist’s signature)

Pierre Daix, Picasso New York, 1965, p. 136, illustrated

“The Wrench of Stress and Violence,” LIFE, vol. 65, no. 26, New York, 27 December 1968, p. 22, illustrated

Timothy Hilton, Picasso, London, 1975, fig. 115, n.p., illustrated

Exh. Cat., Bielefeld, Kunsthalle, Picasso Surrealismus: Werke 1925-1937, 1991, no. 8, fig. 8a, p. 305, illustrated (titled Frau im Sessel)

Pierre Daix, Picasso: Life and Art New York, 1993, pp. 206-07

Brigitte Léal, Christine Piot and Marie-Laure Bernadac The Ultimate Picasso New York, 2000, no. 568, p. 237, illustrated

John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Volume III: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 New York, 2007, p. 331, illustrated (titled Marie-Thérèse Asleep in a Patterned Armchair)

Josep Palau Fabre, Picasso: From the Minotaur to Guernica (1927-1939), Barcelona, 2011, fig. 28, p. 28, illustrated

Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée Picasso, Picasso Tableaux Magiques 2019-20, p. 52, illustrated in color

There perhaps could be no truer words spoken of Picasso’s work, certainly of that from the defining period of the late 1920s and early 1930s after Marie-Thérèse Walter entered the artist’s world. Painted in January 1927, the same month Picasso first encountered his newest muse, Femme dans un fauteuil captures the defining motifs of both his wife and his soon-to-be lover in this pivotal moment amid the Surrealist zeitgeist.

Picasso and Marie-Thérèse’s fortuitous meeting outside Paris’ Galeries Lafayette on 8 January 1927 would forever alter the artist’s life— which is to say, his work. Immediately taken with

this young woman’s soft features, fair skin and voluptuous body, Picasso invited Marie-Thérèse to his studio. The love affair that quickly ensued would change the course of his artistry, reviving his work in the years following his post-Cubist and Neo-Classical periods.

Nearly thirty years his junior, Marie-Thérèse brought a sense of youthful exuberance and naïveté into Picasso’s life, a stark contrast to his family life and declining marriage with dancer Olga Khohklova, whom he’d wed a decade prior. Picasso and Marie-Thérèse’s furtive affair and time apart fueled the artist’s intense ardor and translated into a seemingly inexhaustible period of creativity in the years leading up to the Second World War. Shortly after their meeting, Picasso’s works began to revolve around his ‘Golden Muse,’ her coded initials ‘MT’ and profile appearing in abstracted works from 1927 onward.

As his portrayals of Olga grew increasingly fearsome, angular and distorted, the soon-to-

“The work that one does is a way of keeping a diary.”

PABLO PICASSO QUOTED IN TERIADE, “EN CAUSANT AVEC PICASSO,” L’INTRANSIGEANT, 15 JUNE 1932, P. 1

Henri Matisse, Decorative figure on ornamental ground 1925-26. Image: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris / Art Resource, NY © 2022 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

VISIT

be-signature curves of Marie-Thérèse began to dominate his work during this period, the two figures often competing within the same composition as both women demanded his attention in real life. Far from the placid NeoClassical compositions of his wife like Olga Pensive, later works like Les Trois danseuses— undoubtedly inspired in part by his dancer wife and connections to Diaghilev’s ballet—bear the Surrealist hallmarks of death, masks and femmes fatales, especially in the left-most figure. Such sideways teeth-bearing visages would come to symbolize Olga in the ensuing years, as seen in the Musée Picasso’s Femme dans un fauteuil of 1927 and subsequent works like Grand nu au fauteuil rouge and Buste de femme et autoportrait of 1929. Conveying Picasso’s growing hostility toward his wife, these figures’ jagged and frequently open mouths attest to their marital spats and her apparent rages. In the present work, a similar face appears, mouth agape and eyes closed; however, this painting also marks one of the first examples of the rounded, biomorphic bodies that would come to represent Marie-Thérèse in his work. John Richardson goes even further, suggesting that the present work is fully devoted to Marie-Thérèse, “sprawled naked in the embrace of a patterned armchair […her] splayed body [seen] from the viewpoint of a sexual partner” (John Richardson, A Life of Picasso. Volume III: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, New York, 2007, p. 330).

Whereas Richardson posits Picasso’s nude as a somnolent and peaceful Marie-Thérèse, Elizabeth Cowling’s reading of the work is far more fearsome and powerful within the context of the monumental 2002 exhibition Matisse-Picasso In the catalogue Cowling writes, “At one level Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair of January 1927 was an act of pure travesty: a monstrous female of indeterminate, primeval species in place of the iconic beautiful female nude. That Matisse’s odalisques were in Picasso’s sights implied by the decorative fabric of the chair, which is strikingly similar to the material draped over the armchair in the lithographs of Henriette” (Exh. Cat., London, Tate; Paris, Les Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Matisse-Picasso, 2002-03, p. 223). In contrast to the luxurious settings of his artistic rival Matisse as seen in masterworks like Figure decorative sur fond ornamental, Picasso’s seated figure in Femme dans un fauteuil exists within

Top  Marie-Thérèse Walter at Juan-les-Pins, July 1932. Photograph by Picasso.

© 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Middle

Pablo Picasso, DessinCarnet Dinard, Page 1 (Baigneuse. Projet pour un monument) pen and ink on paper, 1928. Sold Sotheby’s London, February 3, 2014. © 2022

Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bottom

Pablo Picasso, Métamorhhose I Bronze, 1928, Musée Picasso, Paris © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

a brooding and threatening environment. “The austere grisaille of the chair, in alliance with the dark blood-red ‘shadows’, creates an ominous mood… Instead of the sunlight intensifying the colours and expanding the space in Matisse’s Nice interiors, the walls of the room [in Picasso’s work] press sharply inwards and even the patches of harsh white light cast over the body suggest a sudden, potentially hostile intrusion… Indeed, the entire set-up of the painting is like a satire on Matisse’s ‘dream’ of producing ‘a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue’” (ibid.).

Whether a direct rebuttal of Matisse’s odalisques, an embattled portrayal of his wife or redolent depiction of his latest muse, such surreal depictions would come to dominate Picasso’s output in the ensuing years, most significantly with the embodiments of Marie-Thérèse. In the summer of 1928, the beach at Dinard would become inextricably linked with the illicit eroticism of his new affair. While on holiday with Olga in the seaside town, Picasso arranged for his mistress to stay at nearby lodgings, allowing

ample opportunity for liaisons in the cabanas which populated the shoreline (unbeknownst to Olga). Of this period in the late 1920s, Richardson writes, “Picasso soon found himself leading two separate lives: as an overtly respectable père de famille—weekends at smart Normandy resorts— and as a secluded Bohemian with a mistress…This pattern would be reflected in Picasso’s imagery. Marie-Thérèse’s images would be suffused with errant sexuality; whereas those of Olga…would be suffused with fear, anger, and despair—the consequences of Picasso’s shamanic effort to exorcise her psychological as well as physical maladies” (ibid., p. 334).

Accordingly, Picasso’s sketchbooks and paintings from this summer reveal a wealth of beach cabins and bathers sexualized by the entendre of the lock and key motif and the exaggerated body parts borrowed largely from the present work. Rooted in Femme dans un fauteuil, such bulbous, almost boomerang-shaped odes to Marie-Thérèse would evolve and proliferate over the next few years and result in some of Picasso’s greatest sculptural works ever created as well as groundbreaking Surrealist nudes like Femme nue couchée

Right

Pablo Picasso, Guitar 1927. Image: Musée national Picasso, Paris / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

At the same time Marie-Thérèse entered his life, Picasso was working to create a monument for the tomb of his dear friend and champion of Modernism, Guillaume Apollinaire, who had died of Spanish Influenza in 1918. The artist’s first forays in the project were born out of Femme dans un fauteuil. For the great critic and incomparable voice of the avant-garde, Picasso could think of no better tribute than a daring sculpture inspired by a voracious sense of virility and the muse who elicited it. With the present composition as a starting point, Picasso diligently filled pages of his Cannes and Dinard sketchbooks over the following summers. In 1928, these drawings were translated into the three-dimensional form of

Métamorphose I. From the protruding shoulders and breasts to the alternately thick and thin legs and arabesque arms, this sculpture reiterates the undulations and recesses of the figure in the present work. Aptly named, the bronze captures an exceptional metamorphosis, not just of a woman into a sexualized abstraction and Surrealist object of desire, but also of one muse into the next.

Though Marie-Thérèse would quickly eclipse Olga in his work—and in fact inspire one of the most rhapsodic, sensual and successful periods of his career—it would be years before Picasso’s wife discovered the affair. By the late 1930s, however, Dora Maar entered the artist’s life and began to crowd the space once reserved for his young lover.

Just as Marie-Thérèse’s presence had pervaded and ultimately consumed his work, so too did the visage of Dora Maar. The photographer’s dark hair, intense eyes and rouged lips would start to compete with the fairer features of Picasso’s Golden Muse, Marie-Thérèse’s signature beret giving way to a more ornate, feathered embellishment à la Maar. As the artist cycled through subsequent lovers, each woman attained her trademark accessory or color in Picasso’s work, with one through line amid them all.

As Steven A. Nash observed in relation to the artist’s wartime still lifes, “The one theme from these years that outweighs in importance and repetition even Picasso’s still lifes is that of the

Seated Woman. This motif defines more than any other the intensity of work from the war years. Beginning, as we have seen, in the Royan period and continuing throughout his time in occupied Paris, Picasso returned to the compositional idea of the Seated Woman again and again, wringing from it varied expressive effects and psychological nuances. For Picasso the theme developed into a kind of looking glass that reflected his own internal reactions to people and events around him, whether it be happiness with a lover or anguish and fear about the war.

From his ‘portraits’ of others, an extensive self-portrait of the artist emerged” (Steven A. Nash in Exh. Cat., Fine Arts Museums of

The present work installed in the exhibition Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1980. Art © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Picasso, being the great master he was, made this picture by taking parts of the human body and placing them where they were pictorially right, not right in the sense of duplicating the human form, but right in the sense of making a good picture.

It’s a very Spanish kind of picture with contrasting light and dark forms, light coming through here and dark here. No foot, of course, ever looked like this. No hand ever looked like this. But you know damn well what they are if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.”

San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Picasso and the War Years 1937-1945 1998-99, pp. 32-33).

It is almost impossible to escape the presence of the seated female figure in Picasso’s works from his earliest lovers like Fernande Olivier to his final muse and second wife, Jacqueline Roque, each woman taking her rightful if momentary place on the throne. The most iconic seated portraits of Picasso’s oeuvre date from this period in the late 1920s and into the early 1940s where Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar assiduously vie for primacy of place in the artist’s life. “The most common motif,” continues Nash, “is a half-length figure seated in a chair, reminiscent in format of so many portraits of seated popes and cardinals from past centuries.

Although amply represented in Picasso’s earlier work, the motif took on special meaning for the artist during the war, seemingly because it was a reliable template of psychological investigation….

Indeed, the range of emotion portrayed in these expressive women runs from humor and joy to utter abjection” (ibid., p. 33)

Though each portrait varies in style, depicting different women in precise moments in Picasso’s life, these seated, attentive figures acted as an ideal audience for the artist and served as a vehicle for expressing the alternately palpable and dwindling sexual tension between the painter and his model. From the fragmented Fernandes of his Cubist years, to the harpy-like depictions of Olga and the surreal, sensual curves of Marie-Thérèse, Picasso’s seated women each have a monumental, edifying presence and are invariably depicted with a powerful sense of psychological drama.

A pivotal work of Picasso’s career and masterful embodiment of Surrealist desire and form, Femme dans un fauteuil was exhibited at many of the artist’s most important museum shows from The Museum of Modern Art’s 1939 retrospective of the artist (in which Guernica was first debuted in the United States) as well as its monumental retrospective decades later in 1980, to the Sao Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna’s second biennial in 1953 (when Picasso’s special exhibition caused massive crowds outside the venue’s doors), and the Modernist showcase Matisse-Picasso organized by the Tate in 2002.

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, 1989, 9-474

Pablo Picasso in his studio, 1923. Photo: Man Ray / Hulton Archive / Getty Images. © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2022

FERNAND LÉGER

1881 - 1955

Jeune fille au corsage jaune

signed F. LEGER and dated 51 (lower right); signed, dated and titled (on the reverse) oil on canvas

25 ⅝ by 18 ⅛ in. 65 by 46.2 cm. Executed in 1951.

$ 1,500,000-2,000,000

PROVENANCE

Kootz Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1955 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art, 2002-03, p. 104, illustrated

LITERATURE

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, 1949-1951, Paris, 2003, no. 1422, p. 182, illustrated in color

Boldly and elegantly modeled, Jeune fille au corsage jeune is a striking example of Léger’s firm commitment to figuration and his fascination with the expressive potential of color—the two defining stylistic factors of his artistic output during the final years of his life. Rendered on an intimate scale, the young girl of Jeune fille au corsage jeune nonetheless achieves a monumental presence. Attaining a purity of figuration through strength of form and color, Léger here succeeds in articulating the essential spirit of his subject. Executed just four years prior to the artist’s death, the present painting undeniably stands at the apex of Léger’s prodigious and eternally authoritative output.

Executed in 1951, the present work embodies Léger’s freely composed and organic style that emerged upon his return from wartime exile in the United States to his studios on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and in Montrouge, France. Upon joining the

French Communist Party in 1945, the artist became increasingly devoted to the cause of improving living and social conditions for the working people of his country. This respect for the working classes manifests in Léger’s work through a greater humanization of the figure. Reflecting upon this stylistic transition, the artist declares, “If I was able to approach very close to a realistic figuration, it was because the violent contrast between my workmen and the metal geometry in which they are set is at its maximum.

Modern sculptures, whether social or other, are valid insofar as this law of contrasts is respected; otherwise one falls back on the classical picture of the Italian Renaissance” (the artist quoted in Werner Schmalenbach, Fernand Léger , Paris, 1977, p. 162). With eyes averting the viewer in an enigmatic, neutral gaze, the young girl imparts an abiding, serene stillness. Aligning with Léger’s other archetypal depictions of women, upon which he conferred an anonymous, universal value, the present work recalls portraiture of both the Renaissance and Neoclassical titans such as Ingres, Poussin, and David.

Jeune fille au corsage jeune fully conveys the visual hallmarks of Léger’s return to figuration following his use of an abstract pictorial language throughout the 1940s. Elements such as the lustrous uniformity of the woman’s black hair recall the stylistic hallmarks of his 1920s and 1930s portraits. As with his prior period of figuration, Léger did not view this change as a rejection of the aims of abstraction. Instead, the present work uses a new vocabulary to channel his defining artistic interest in the primacy of painting through the elements of color and form.

The present work further synthesizes compositional and formal devices established in the oeuvre of Henri Matisse, as is particularly evident in La Blouse roumaine from 1940. In parallel with Léger, Matisse increasingly emphasized a vigorously graphic style during the later years of his practice. Presaging Léger’s use of unvariegated swathes of red and white to frame his subject, Matisse anchors his female

Opposite  Pablo Picasso, Bust of a Woman 1931, Plaster, Private Collection © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso

Right

model within the pictorial space through the billowing sleeves of her ornamental Romanian blouse. Both artists also employ hands to equal effect, rupturing the strong verticality of the composition and underscoring the bold renderings of their respective sitters.

Aligning with the principles of Purism, which seeks to articulate the pure essence of objects and people, Léger renders his subject with sharp clarity. Devolved to contours of bold, black lines, the girl expresses the signature strikingly graphic style of the artist’s late work. Rendered in fully saturated swaths of primary colors, combined with black and white, the present work equally encapsulates Léger’s conviction that those colors express the reality of the medium of painting. The delineated white and red striations of the background create a flattened pictorial space against which the viewer’s attention is drawn to the strength of line and contrasting evocation of form. The areas of bright, unmodulated pigment stand in contrast to the girl and her corsage, as well as the disembodied hands that caress her face, which emphasize Leger’s use of a chiaroscuro technique adapted to Modernist sensibilities. An investigation of the interplay between depths, Jeune fille au corsage jeune conveys a substantial, dynamic visual presence. In so doing, the present work wholly embodies the governing aesthetic principles of Léger’s practice: “The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among

volumes, lines, and colors,” the artist explains, “These are the three forces that must govern works of art. If, in organizing these three essential elements harmoniously, one finds that objects, elements of reality, can enter into the composition, it may be better and may give the work more richness. But they must be subordinated to the three essential elements mentioned above” (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger , 1998, p. 247).

/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Henri Matisse, The Romanian Blouse 1940. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Image: CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Art © Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among volumes, lines, and colors. These are the three forces that must govern works of art.”

THE ARTIST QUOTED IN EXH. CAT., NEW YORK, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, FERNAND LÉGER, 1998, P. 247

“I had broken down the human body, so I set about putting it together again and rediscovering the human face… I wanted a rest, a breathing space. After the dynamism of the mechanical period, I felt a need for the staticity of large figures.”

THE ARTIST QUOTED IN EXH. CAT., NEW YORK, THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, FERNAND LÉGER, 1998, P. 188

The treatment of color and form exemplified by Jeune fille au corsage jeune produced a profound effect on a new generation of Post-War American artists, including Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, in subsequent decades. Occupying almost the entirety of the picture plane, the graphically rendered subject of Jeune fille au corsage jeune readily evokes Lichtenstein’s treatment of the female figure. Art historian Philippe Büttner affirms, “Léger’s presence in Lichtenstein’s oeuvre is indeed more than obvious. Again and again he gives places of prominence to quotations of Léger’s motifs.... Lichtenstein recognized that his own art shared many things in common with Léger’s…and emphasized that these things surely also had something fundamentally to do with Pop” (Exh. Cat., Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Fernand Léger, Paris—New York , 2008, p. 21). A bold and forward-looking composition, the present work encapsulates the signature elements of Léger’s style that have come to mark him as one of the greatest artistic innovators of the last century.

ART INFORMEL

The term Art informel was coined in 1952 by Michel Tapié (1909-1987), French art critic, saxophonist, and second cousin of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, in Un art autre [An Other Art] (Paris, Gabriel-Giraud et fils), a book/manifesto that served as the catalog for an exhibition he organized at the Studio Paul Fachetti, au 17, rue de Lille, which featured works by artists as disparate as Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Georges Mathieu, Pierre Soulages Camille Bryen, Germaine Richier, Ruth Francken, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), and Henri Michaux. Tapié’s term stuck, and over time has become virtually synonymous with Tachisme (from the French “tacher,” to stain) and Lyrical Abstraction. Other key artists eventually associated with informel include: Alberto Burri, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Antoni Tàpies and Hans Hartung (as a precursor). The commonplace English translation of the term, as “informalism,” remains inadequate. Informel connotes not so much “relaxed” or “friendly” art, nor does it posit absolute formlessness [l’informe], but rather, art created spontaneously, without assigned or predetermined forms.

Tapié’s text for the show, at times hyperbolic and quasi-mystical, is a thinly veiled rebuttal to early geometric abstractionists, and to the then fashionable “Jeunes Peintres de Tradition Française” (Young Painters of the French Tradition), who during the Nazi Occupation exhibited their retrograde, tidied-up, fauvist and cubist inspired abstractions. Countering these trends, the artists Tapié champions are those who have willfully, “left behind the forms of the past, they are artists who do not work against ideas of the past, but outside of them,” given the fact that, “life has become totally estranged from form, expressiveness is no longer compatible with it.”

Not all artists at the time appreciated being grouped together under this umbrella term. Jean Dubuffet, who had just finished his series of Corps de Dames [Ladies’ Bodies] and Mental Landscapes (of which Paysage

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jacques Germain, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Zao Wou-Ki and Pierre Loeb. © Denise Colomb. © Ministère de la Culture / Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

DR. KENT MITCHELL MINTURN

1 Michel Tapié, from An Other Art (1952), translated in Art and Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003): p. 629-631.

Title page for the exhibition catalogue School of Paris 1959 The Internationals at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

fantôme, 1952, is a prime example), wrote a letter to Tapié after he received a copy of his book: “What a funny mania prevails in our epoch to invent a slogan and a group, and a party, and then legislate it [. ] I refuse as strongly as possible to join forces with all that; I am not at all an informiste, vehemeniste, éclaboussuriste.”2 Dubuffet, however, seems to have missed the main point of Tapié’s manifesto: informel is an open-ended concept, it is not a school, movement or style, but rather, a celebration of artistic diversity, a call for the direct and immediate personal expression of each artist. In Tapié’s words, “Our interest is not in movements, but in something much rarer, authentic Individuals.”3

This authentic individualism is precisely what prevails in the informel works from The David M. Solinger Collection. Solinger, a practicing artist as well as a high-powered New York lawyer and art collector, was clearly attracted to the nuanced idiosyncrasies of each work, as expressed through each artist’s inimitable gestures, processes, and handling of the materials used to create them. These works do not share a family resemblance, far from it. Each work must be viewed on its own terms, and each calls for a new kind of somatically-engaged looking, something that Solinger obviously excelled at: “I look at pictures. I like pictures that seduce the eye. That is not to say that I don’t also like pictures that are like a blow between the eyes, that are very strong, and are very powerful, that are very moving.”4

Above Cover of Michel Tapié, Un art autre Paris 1952. First Edition

2 Jean Dubuffet, letter to Michel Tapié dated December 21, 1952, in Hubert Damisch, ed., Prospectus et tous écrits suivants vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1967): 308.

3 Michel Tapié, An Other Art (1952), p. 630.

4 Transcript of David M. Solinger’s interview with Paul Cummings on May 6, 1977 (Archives of American Art Smithsonian).

Opposite Letter to Maria Helena Vieira da Silva from David M. Solinger regarding their recent meeting and referencing Sans titre, dated 1961

Handwritten dedication from Michel Tapié to David M. Solinger, 1950

A striking example of authentic individualism is to be found in Georges Mathieu’s Camp de Carthage (1951). The large, vertically aligned picture, at once frenetic and controlled, amounts to a visual record of the immediate and spontaneous movements of the artist’s body during the act of its creation, especially the radius of the black arc which correlates with the sweeping extension of the artist’s right arm, and the bright red elements directly applied to the canvas by squeezing tubes of paint with his hand. As such, this work foreshadows Mathieu’s more theatrical painting-performances in the late 50s, and 60s, captured in the documentary film, Georges Mathieu ou la fureur d’être [Georges Mathieu, or The Fury of Being] (dir. Frédéric Rossif, 1971). In Camp de Carthage Mathieu develops a new visual language of his own, writ large, we might say. Whereas it conjures up writing, the artist never fully commits to it as such. Mathieu later explained, “I note that ‘calligraphy,’ the art of the sign par excellence has managed to liberate itself from the literal content signifier of writing, and it is henceforth only the direct power of meaning, with writing itself outstripping its own fundamental value.”5

In Hans Hartung’s T1946-32 (1946), the black lines of varying thicknesses and densities, set against a vibrant background of green, yellow, red and blue, likewise bring to mind a species of illegible calligraphy, or personal hieroglyphics, they are indeed “signs without literal content.” Simultaneously, one quickly notices that each black mark is unique and autonomous; there is no obvious pattern here. Together they float and dance across the canvas in a manner that visually equates to of an improvisational Be-Bop jazz jam session, impossible to notate or repeat.

One of the most important informel artists Solinger collected, Pierre Soulages, is still with us (age 102), and he is the only artist represented here who has been honored with a bricks and mortar one-person museum show, which opened in his hometown of Rodez, France in 2014. In Peinture 92 x 65 cm. 7 fevrier 1954 the artist reminds us, as he did throughout his career, that “black is also a color.” The troweledon anti-rectilinear verticals and horizontals set against a white background create an unstable armature akin to those found in American

Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline’s paintings from the 50s including, Chief (1950) (a sketch for which, featured here, was given to Solinger

Opposite Jean-Paul Riopelle, L’heure de souffre, 1953. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, David M. Solinger Collection, 1964. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Right Hans Hartung, T 1946-32 The David M. Solinger Collection, Sotheby’s Paris, December 2022

by the artist in 1952). However, in contrast to the flat, chalky, and charred appearance of Kline’s surfaces, Soulages’ application of paint is thick, fleshy and unctuous — reminiscent of Rembrandt’s of Flayed Ox of 1655 (Louvre) — and gives the painting a unique sheen that ceaselessly reflects light vis-à-vis the viewer’s position and proximity.

Belying its muted, black, white, and grey tones, and scabrous surface, Nicolas de Staël’s Composition 1951, contains undeniably ludic elements. The imperfect, irregular squares and rectangles created with each brushstroke play out like an impromptu game of chess which the artist plays against himself, and by his own rules. In the end it appears to be

a painting based on chance operational decisions, rather than traditional compositional ones. One move after another, until the artist decides the match is finished. The uneven surface, and the apparent weaving of one plane under another, also suggests a playful game of hide-and-seek, similar to, and in anticipation of, artist François Rouan’s famous Tressages [braidings] from the 1970s.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, an artist who is finally receiving the international attention she has always deserved, was forced to abandon her Paris studio in 1939. In face of the threat of Nazi Occupation she returned to Lisbon for a while, and then with her husband relocated to Árpád Szenes in Rio de Janeiro. In the spring of 1947, she returned to Paris and moved back into the very same studio. The space was familiar, but the world had forever changed. Sans

Georges Mathieu, Au-delà du tachisme [Beyond Tachism (Paris: Julliard,1963): 65. Robert Rosenblum, “Art at Mid-Century: The David M. Solinger Collection,” in The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University): 11-14.

Commenting on the Solinger Collection in 2001, the eminent art historian Robert Rosenblum reminded his readers that it is, “among other things, a valuable lesson in history.” “From the vantage-point of the early twenty-first century, the volcanic look of the art in the Solinger Collection now seems very much a part of museum-worthy history, in no way disruptive of traditions.” But in reality, what the collection demands from us today is the “challenging task of experiencing, perhaps for the first time, a broad international sweep of what new art looked like when David M. Solinger cut his teeth as a collector.”6 With this in mind, and with 20/20 hindsight, the last word rightly belongs to Michel Tapié, who, after all, malgré tout was correct when, in 1952, he presciently argued that these informel artists, shown here today, do not recapitulate ideas or forms of the past, but rather, through their spontaneous and highly individual creations, pave the way for a new future.7

titre (1950), with its sumptuous blues and soothing undulating lines, indeed “seduces the eye.” It seems to express a nostalgic past memory of a beautiful seascape. At the same time, it comes as “blow between the eyes,” and it is with shock that one realizes that these pleasant hues are atop a rough burlap support, which relates the harsher realities of the postwar period. Italian informel artist Alberto Burri also used burlap in his collaged Sacchi (Sacks), which he first began to make in 1949. Burlap, it has been suggested, relates directly to the bags used to deliver relief supplies in the immediate postwar period, or to gauze bandages used to cover wounds.

Michel Tapié, from An Other Art (1952), p. 631.

André Lanskoy, Bleu et intime (Modern Day Auction)

André Lanskoy, Fruits confits, The David M. Solinger Collection, Sotheby’s Paris, December 2022; Adolph Gottlieb, Figure (Modern Day Auction); and a selection of Pre-Columbian and Mezcala figures

“[T]he ossified and ossifying false order of the past gave way to a fruitful and exhilarating anarchy that, having gained momentum, is now moving toward a new order, a new system of notions commensurate with our potential.”

MICHEL TAPIÉ, UN ART AUTRE, 1952

PIERRE

PROVENANCE

Kootz Gallery, New York Acquired from the above in May 1954 by the present

EXHIBITED New York, Kootz Gallery, Soulages 1954, illustrated Arts Club of Chicago, Mathieu / Soulages, 1954, no. 7

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger, 1956, no. 13 (titled 7 Feb. 54)

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art, 2002-03, p. 136, illustrated

LITERATURE

Pierre Encrevé, Soulages: L’oeuvre complet 1946-1959,

, vol. I, 1994, no. 142, p.

“Black is never the same because light changes it. There are nuances between the blacks. I paint with black but I’m working with light. I’m really working with the light more than with the paint.”

T he dynamic composition, meditative palette, and rich texture of Peinture 92 x 65 cm, 7 février 1954 mark it as a quintessential example of Pierre Soulages’s most sought after period of creative production. Directly addressing the tensions between shape, color and light on the painted surface, the work captures the artist’s career-long commitment to the primacy of form over illusion. Drawing his brushstrokes dramatically across the canvas, Soulages fuses the luminosity of the pigment with the texture of the paint, to create a single and instantaneous impression of aesthetic structural unity that recalls the cohesive and monumental planes of the American Abstract Expressionists. By varying the thickness of the black paint and the length and width of the strokes over the sumptuous umber base, Soulages builds up a rhythmic composition that both contracts and expands across the surface, encompassing all the hallmarks of his oeuvre on an intimate scale. Dating to a seminal moment in the artist’s career, the present work was created between two major exhibitions that established the French painter as a contemporary master in the United States: Younger European Painters at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1953, and The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. Acquired by David Solinger in the year it was executed,

Peinture is a rare and remarkable example of Soulages’s unique and radiant brand of lyrical abstraction.

Fusing vigorous vertical, horizontal and diagonal movements of the brush, Soulages creates a pulsing, vital composition that is uniquely magnetic: the alternately scraped and swiped black strokes hold the surface of the work while the layered planes of umber, gold and ivory simultaneously suggest a sense of depth and imbue it with a radiant inner light. Working with oil paint that, in places, is so thick it appears to be combed onto the support, Soulages builds his canvas from linear beams of directional striation, the resulting composition resembling the layered scaffolding of a building under construction. This reference to architecture is a recurring theme in Soulages’s practice. An amateur architect himself, several of his painting tools are taken from industrial construction—he executes his epic gestures with spatulas, rakes, rollers, and other devices.

Further emphasizing the strong linear quality of these forms is the resolute blackness of his preferred hue. Known for his preeminent exaltation of the physical qualities of the color black, Soulages applies the pigment onto Peinture 92 x 65 cm, 7 février 1954 in such a way that it simultaneously exudes brilliance and sobriety, transparency and opacity, texture and form. The visual drama of light and dark recalls the

THE ARTIST QUOTED IN NINA SIEGAL, “BLACK IS STILL THE ONLY COLOR FOR PIERRE SOULAGES,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, 29 NOVEMBER 2019, ONLINE

Pierre Soulages in his Paris studio, 1954. © Denise Colomb. © Ministère de la Culture / Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMNGrand Palais / Art Resource, NY

chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, Diego Velázquez, or Francisco Goya, here achieved with a miraculous economy of means within a strictly abstract framework. Indeed, the present work evokes Leonardo da Vinci’s timeless dictum, “A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except when exposed by the light.” Here, the density of the black against the layered washes of amber instills the work with an immense visual depth and creates an incandescent vibrancy as light not only reflects off the black ridges that solidify across the surface of the canvas, but also seems to shine through the cage-like trellises of black; an orchestration of light composed through the careful control of color and form.

Constructing his paintings out of structural elements but intuitive outlines, Soulages’s work has resisted an absolute adherence to either geometric or lyrical abstraction, instead existing in the gap between the two. After World War II there quickly arose a connection between philosophical, moral and cultural despair, verbalized by Theodor Adorno in his famous

1949 proclamation that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” and an approach to painting that strove for a return to man’s primitive origins in an effort to wipe out the atrocities of the previous generation. Soulages rejected the existential negation that was intrinsic to both the paintings and the theoretical discourse of his European contemporaries, and his work instead evokes the awe-inspiring canvases and emotional intensity of the most notable American Abstract Expressionists including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. However, while the work of Rothko and others of the New York School invites the viewer to become enveloped within the canvas’s sublimity, the planar layers of Soulages’s compositions provide no psychological entry into his work, but rather block the viewer and fix them to the surface, imposing a visual investigation of tangible reality through texture and form. In his own words, “I don’t depict. I don’t narrate. I don’t represent. I paint, I present” (The artist cited in “Interview with Michel Peppiatt,” Art International November-December 1980).

Above Quotation from Su Shi in clerical script, Qing dynasty.

Freer Sackler

/ Freer Gallery of Art,

Institution / Bridgeman

drawings

France,

era.

Jean-Paul Bonnafe /

Images

Entry corridor of the Solinger apartment, New York, featuring a selection of works from The Collection

JOAN MIRÓ

1893 - 1983

Femmes et oiseau devant le soleil

signed Miró and titled (on the reverse) oil and Ripolin on canvas 15 ⅞ by 47 ½ in. 40.3 by 120.6 cm. Executed in 1945.

$ 1,500,000-2,000,000

PROVENANCE

Galerie Pierre, Paris

Galerie Maeght, Paris

Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Joan Miró 1948, no. 65 (with incorrect dimensions)

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger 1956, no. 20 (titled Woman and Birds Facing the Sun)

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 118, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Jacques Dupin, Miró, Life and Work New York, 1962, no. 665, p. 551, illustrated (titled Woman and Bird in front of the Sun)

Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Catalogue Raisonne, Paintings, vol. III, Paris, 2001, no. 774, p. 93, illustrated

Pull-out Joan Miró in his Barcelona studio, 1944. Photo © Hereus de Joaquim Gomis / Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2022. Art ©

2022 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, Barcelona.

Opposite The present work installed in Miró’s studio, 1945. Courtesy Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, Barcelona. Photo ©

Hereus de Joaquim Gomis / Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2022.

Art © 2022 Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Above Alexander Calder, Untitled 1939. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Art Resource, NY.

Art © 2022 The Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A fantastical abstract dreamscape, Joan Miró’s Femmes et oiseau devant le soleil of 1945 is an exquisite exploration of the female form. Executed at the conclusion of the Second World War, the present work emerges from a period of enormous fatigue, both in the life of the artist himself and on an international socio-political scale. While the war took an enormous toll on the Catalonian artist, the years immediately leading up to and following the end of the conflict would prove incredibly fruitful for him; some of his most profound and successful works were produced in the early to mid-1940s. Most notably, this period in Miró’s oeuvre is marked by the exploration of female figures and birds, rendered in abstract, twisted, continuously moving forms within a blurred atmosphere.

Femmes et oiseau devant le soleil is further distinguished amongst this remarkable group for its inclusion of Ripolin, a commercial, readymixed enamel paint; Miró’s experimental use of this industrial medium positions him alongside other early adopters like Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock. The present work is thus a quintessential example of Miró’s radical oeuvre and stands out as a dynamic expression of his symbolic and painterly mastery.

Two women emerge from a sea of light blue and pale green, each rendered in a shadowy black silhouette. Both figures give the illusion of a dance: the woman at left sways and bends at the waist, bowing with her head to the ground, while

the figure at the right lays horizontal, her feet kicked out and neck craning up to the sky. Miró places a bird centrally between the two female figures in his signature simplified rendering, with a triangular body and long thin wings extended around a bulbous head. In the present work, the bird is oriented vertically, flying straight up toward the glowing red sun at the top edge of the canvas. The figures and symbols bleed slightly into the washed quality of the background, giving the painting a harmonic tone, with the soft hues lending the surface an elegant, woven quality. Its spatial depth is rendered not through horizon lines or explicit foreground or background but through spatial cues of color and form.

Particular attention is drawn to female genitalia, as the figure on the right-hand side of the picture plane lays horizontally along the foreground. Her sex is painted in a red as bright as the sun itself and is rendered almost as large as the central bird figure, pulling focus from the scene. A familiar motif from this period in Miró oeuvre, the sex is rendered in an ovoid shape, split into two different colored halves, in this case red and black, with individual hairs branching out like the legs of an insect. A white pigment surrounds the sex organ like a halo and allows for the deep red and black to stand out further, becoming a visual focal point of the scene.

Jacques Dupin, the close friend and author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work, describes, “Areas of pure color set off certain details or

“It’s an interesting thing how subconsciously Calder and Miró find themselves in the same room... There’s a playfulness which is so much a part of Miró’s character.”

DAVID M. SOLINGER: ORAL HISTORY, 1989, 9-502

VISIT

parts—legs, arms, or bust, but more often certain chosen elements by this means take on the value of signs—the eye, the female sexual organ, the foot. These canvases [from 1945] are thus fertile in ambiguity, for they may be read in two different ways. We may isolate figures and define them by their contours, their black or colored portions, their amplified details, in a space populated by signs and stars; but we may also read the painting in an over-all sense, grasping it as a rhythmic, chromatic ensemble in which all the accentuated elements—signs, stars, or attributes of figures— call to and answer one another. Actually, we read these works in both senses simultaneously” (Jacques Dupin, Joan Miró: Life and Work, New York, 1961, pp. 378-79). In this way, the symbolic nature of this imagery expresses a profound mysticism that ties together the ethereal, fluid nature of the visual language of the work.

The spatial syntax of Femmes et oiseau devant le soleil can be read as a continuation of Miró’s well-known Constellation Series, executed in 194041. Art historian and former Guggenheim curator Magrit Rowell writes of Miró’s development of a more personal, stylized visual language that emerged from this series: “Although they include his familiar lexicon— emblematic, silhouettes representing women, birds, insects, snakes and the like, abbreviated signs for the sun, moon and stars,

and sexual symbols for male and female genitals— what is particularly striking in these works is the singular structure or spatial configuration that is common to them all” (Exh. Cat., New York, Acquavella Galleries, Miró Constellations, 2017, p. 18). The present work employs the symbolic vocabulary developed in his Constellation Series, moving from the geometric interlocking of stars and figures into a dream-like, ethereal vision.

As Dupin summarizes, the theme of the woman, bird and stars provides “one of the keys to Miró’s cosmic imagination: it expounds the conflict between the earthly and aerial elements and, in the dialogue between the woman and the bird, renders the precariousness of the balance achieved between them... Nothing is heavy or stabilized in this poetic stylisation of woman in the process of metamorphosis between fixity and volatility. The analogy between the two creatures, and the interlacing of their lines are sometimes so strong that it is hard to say where the woman ends and the bird begins, whether they do not after all form one marvelous hybrid creature... This suspended union...takes place in the privileged space of carnal night, in an intimacy of nature, which Miró has never departed from.

Reality is revealed as a sort of break in the smooth flowing of time” (Jacques Dupin, Miró, Life and Work, New York, 1962, p. 485).

Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure circa 1942. Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

FERNAND LÉGER

1881 - 1955

Composition au tronc d’arbre

signed F. LÉGER and dated 32 (lower right); signed, dated and titled (on the reverse) oil on canvas

25 ¾ by 36 ⅜ in. 65.3 by 92.4 cm. Executed in 1932.

$ 1,800,000-2,500,000

PROVENANCE

Gallery Louis Carré, Paris

Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Contemporary Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David M. Solinger, 1956, no. 14 (titled Tree Trunk Composition)

Paris, Musée des Art Decoratifs, Fernand Léger, 18811955, 1956

Kunsthaus, Zurich, Fernand Léger, 1957, no. 86

New York, M. Knoedler & Co, Lawyers Collect: An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture Selected from the Private Collections of Members of the New York Bar, 1965, no. 31

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson

Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art, 2002-03, p. 101, illustrated

LITERATURE

Georges Bauquier, Fernand Léger: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, 1929-1931 1995, no. 790, p. 309, illustrated

Composition au tronc d’arbre is a remarkable example of Fernand Léger’s work from the 1930s and a watershed example of the transition in style and subject matter that characterized the artist’s output from this period. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the consequential onset of the Great Depression prompted French modernists, Léger included, to reevaluate the foundations of their aesthetic project. Emerging from a decade dedicated to the exploration of the relationship between man, art and the machine, it was Léger’s belief that “artists, swept away by their enthusiasm for the machine, had failed to exert the precision, clarity, and equilibrium necessary to art” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger 1998, p. 131). It was with this realization that Léger shifted the focus of his work from the industrial to the more natural subject matter central to the present composition. He and the like-minded Le Corbusier would comb the beaches of the Atlantic Coast in search of organic and manmade objects, whose forms had been shaped by the ebb and flow of the ocean, to serve as inspiration for his ensuing works. In these found objects they came to see “the great events of nature, the true laws, variety, unlimited invention, possessing powers of extraordinary plasticity, revealing the specific qualities of matter” (Le Corbusier, “Lyrisme des objets naturels,” La Bête noire, Paris, no. 5, 1 October 1935, n.p.).

Composition au tronc d’arbre exemplifies that epiphany. Gone were the scenes of industry and mechanization that dominated his canvases from

the preceding two decades, replaced instead, as in the present work, with a fluidity between the manmade and the natural world.

There is a remarkable depth to the present work that gives it a more natural sense of perspective than the planar canvases from the artist’s earlier Purist works. In Composition au tronc d’arbre, Leger achieves a trompe l’oeil of sorts, imbuing each object with an apparent sense of three-dimensionality derived from highlights and shadows. The characteristic vinyl sheen of the paint application in the present work further evokes Léger’s Tubist style from the period between 1909-1919. His idiosyncratic style of Cubism accentuated the curvature of the shapes he depicted, imbuing them with an almost metallic quality. But this style, previously used to describe industrial forms, here collapses the visual dissonance between the mechanical and the natural. The visual vocabulary used to depict the leaf, paper scroll, and tree branch is the same as that used to describe the keys or the metallic tool at the center of the composition. Of this period

Matthew Affron writes: “In these pictures, faith in the earth modulates the cult of the machine.

Léger’s writings of the period are similarly suffused with an idealization of the landscape and a call for a new harmony between nature and industry” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Fernand Léger, 1998, p. 133).

Keys figured as a central motif in many of Léger’s compositions from the 1930s, the most important being La Joconde aux clés painted in 1930 (Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot). In

Opposite Fernand Léger with a similar work, 1931. Photo © Estate of Albert Gallatin

Art © 2022 Fernand Léger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Above Joan Miró, Painting 1933.

Image: The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022

Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

VISIT

describing the incorporation of this image into his compositions Léger explained, “One day I had painted a bunch of keys on a canvas. They were my own. I had no idea what I was going to place next to them. I needed something absolutely different from the keys. When I had finished working I went out. I had hardly gone a few steps when what did I see in a shop window? A postcard of the Mona Lisa! I understood at once. What could provide a greater contrast to the keys? I achieved the most risky painting in this way from the point of view of contrasted objects” (the artist quoted in Pierre De Francia, Fernand Léger New Haven, 1983, p. 111). What persists across La Joconde aux clés and the present work is the use of keys as the marker of a juxtaposition between industrial and human forms, or as in this case, between industrial and natural ones. The key serves as a grounding figurative object, giving the viewer something familiar and quotidian to grasp and in turn highlighting the comparison.

The unexpected cohesion of Léger’s present composition evokes the organized chaos of Dada and later Pop photomontage. As in the collages of Hannah Höch and Richard Hamilton, there is an unexpected sense of unity, rather than dissonance, created in the amalgamation of the seemingly unrelated images that make up Composition au tronc d’arbre. The dreamlike quality of these objects as they appear to float across the undulating yellow background exemplifies the powerful influence of Surrealism on the artist’s aesthetic around this time. Though he never formally aligned with

the Surrealist group, the present composition exemplifies how Léger incorporated the fantastical quality of their work into his aesthetic practices.

The present work exemplifies the way in which Léger reconciles these juxtapositions through his mastery of compositional arrangement. His sensitivity to the relationship between objects in space stems from his experience with film and set design. Around the same time the present work was made, Léger began creating murals and designing sets for theatrical productions. In doing so, he had to work on a much larger scale and consider the individual element as a contributing factor to the overall effect of a three-dimensional scene. In the present work, that same sensitivity allows for the leaves, branches and keys to exist within the composition at once independent from and connected to one another. As Yvonne Brunhammer writes, “The stage had given Léger the opportunity to deal with the plastic problem of movement and the contrast between moving pieces of color—the dancers—and the inertia of the sets” (Yvonne Brunhammer, Fernand Léger: The Monumental Art, Milan, 2005, p. 53). In looking at his preparatory sketches for his set designs, like that for Act I of David Triomphant (1936, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), it becomes clear how Leger visualized his various balusters and props existing on stage as objects to be interacted with and around. One can begin to imagine his paintings as having the same depth and spatial potentiality as is conveyed in this drawing.

Léger saw in these murals the same opportunity to realize the social potential of modern art that he saw in his paintings from the 1930s onwards. The dynamic yet legible mode of expression characteristic of his oeuvre and on display in the present work are emblematic of his artistic project. In painting a set of keys alongside these natural forms in a nondescript biomorphic setting, Léger calls on the viewer to see the uncanny relationship between things we know but otherwise passively observe.

As was common to his practice, Léger realized multiple related versions of Composition au tronc d’arbre in the course of his thematic exploration. As the last of three compositions featuring the combined elements of the keys, paintbrush and surrounding leaf and tree, the present work can be seen as a culmination and final resolution of the motifs explored in the earlier works from 1931, Composition à la feuille and Composition (Les Clés).

Fernand Léger, Still Life (The Keys) 1927.

Sprengal Museum, Hannover. Art ©

2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

MODERN DAY AUCTION

AUCTION

@SOTHEBYS #SOTHEBYSSOLINGER

ABOUT

Letter from John Marin, Jr., to David M. Solinger, 1968

Postcard from Philippe Hosiasson to David Solinger, dated 1965

Title page of Yaacov Agam by Jasia Reichardt, featuring a hand-drawn dedication to David Solinger from the artist, 1967

This selection of works from The David M. Solinger Collection encapsulates the same key themes and narratives that inspired The Collection as a whole. David Solinger’s deep and abiding interest in the art of his generation is evinced by those artists whose work he collected in depth, from Pablo Picasso to Jean Dubuffet, and Joan Miró to Jean Arp. His appreciation for the schools of both New York and Paris is further emphasized here, as works by Fritz Bultman, Lee Gatch and Jack Tworkov are seen alongside pieces by Philippe Hosiasson, André Lanskoy, and Henri Laurens. Forming lasting relationships with the most influential dealers and gallerists of the day, including Edith Halpert of Downtown Gallery, Aimé Maeght, and Samuel Kootz, Solinger sought out great works by established masters as well as the very best of the avant-garde generation.

His collection also includes works by those he considered friends. An early pioneer in the field of art and copyright law, Solinger represented many artists as clients, with whom he shared a mutual respect and admiration. These include John Marin, whose abstracted landscapes on paper are included here; as well as Louise Nevelson, who gifted Solinger a gold assemblage, Dawn and Summer, in exchange for his legal advice; and Hans Hofmann, from whom Solinger also took painting classes for a time at Provincetown. Franz Kline, another client and friend, was so grateful to Solinger for purchasing his masterpiece Chief on behalf of The Museum of Modern Art, that he gifted Solinger a study for that painting, featured here.

Solinger often stated that he only bought art he truly loved to look at and live with, rarely ever parting with works once he acquired them. Still, he was always generous in lending works to museums for exhibitions, as evinced by the remarkable histories of many of these examples. Kline’s Cage I was included in a landmark 1979 travelling exhibition of the artist’s color abstractions; Lanskoy’s Chuchotemont featured in The Walker Art Center’s seminal 1959 School of Paris exhibition; and both Randall Morgan paintings appeared in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at The Museum of Modern Art in 1951.

Taken together, the works in this grouping underline David Solinger’s singular vision of a transformative moment within the history of art. His exceptional intelligence, vitality, and passion for art are keenly felt in these artworks he loved and lived with for decades.

Left

Cover of the exhibition catalogue, Henri Laurens

Curt Valentin Gallery, New York, 1952; and a letter from David Solinger noting which works from the exhibition he would like to purchase

Opposite Letter from Hans Hofmann to David Solinger regarding Orchestral Dominance dated 1955

ARTHUR GARFIELD DOVE

Dove (lower center)

gouache and pencil on paper

by 7 in. 12.7 by 17.8 cm.

in

PROVENANCE

The Downtown Gallery, New York

from the above in 1951 by the present

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 42, illustrated

Known for his distinctly modern approach to the world around him, Arthur Dove expressed himself through nonobjective shapes and carefully applied color even as early as 1910. Although Dove is widely considered the first abstract American artist, it was only after developing an illness in the 1940s that he began to work with “renewed intensity” (William C. Agee, “New Directions: The Late Work, 19381946,” in Arthur Dove: A Retrospective edited by Debra Bricker Balken, Andover, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 133). Conceived in 1940, Nuns showcases the artist’s smallscale yet masterful treatment of form and color from this distinctive and highly productive period.

With Dove primarily drawn to nature and the local landscape–weather patterns, the moon, and waves–Nuns offers a rare example of the artist’s engagement with an animate subject. From his cottage in Centerport on the North Shore of Long Island, Dove had a view of a monastery inhabited by Franciscan Brothers. From

1939 to 1942, concurrent with the creation of Nuns, Dove completed ten watercolor sketches entitled The Brothers in relation to his observations of the monastery. True to Dove’s abstract language, though, his concentration on nonrepresentational geometric forms and lines is as much the focal point of this work as his perceived subject. Ultimately, it is Dove’s freedom of line and thoughtful differentiation between areas of cool and warm tones that creates such a thought-provoking composition captured within the small confines of a gem-like sheet.

Arthur Dove, Study for The Brothers 1942. McNay Art Museum. Art © 2022 Estate of Arthur Dove

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB

24⅛ by 20⅛ in.

Executed in

$ 120,000-180,000

PROVENANCE

Kootz Gallery, New York

by 51.1

Acquired from the above in April 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Adolph Gottlieb, 1968, no. 40, p. 58 illustrated in color

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 69, illustrated in color

A captivating example from Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictograph series, Figure, executed in 1950, reflects a masterful culmination of the artist’s decadelong exploration of this distinctive visual idiom. Conceived initially as repositories for cultural, sociological and personal themes, Gottlieb’s Pictographs were at the time a radical divergence from the traditional Western models of art history. Seeking to communicate his experience of the rapidly changing modern world, Gottlieb rejected figuration, instead drawing from the visual presentation of images from diverse sources including Native American, Oceanic and African Cultures. The Pictographs also represented Gottlieb’s distinctive solution for the most rudimentary goal of Abstract Expressionism: to instill a universal significance to paintings beyond the confines of culture, time or place.

In Figure, Gottlieb has replicated this thematic exploration in an intimate scale. Here, the heavily worked surface, with layers of burnt orange, dark rose and oscillating shades of grays overlapping and blending together, achieves an uncanny compositional harmony as the geometric rigidity of the structured grid is counterbalanced by the biomorphic lyricism

of oval outlines and curvilinear ideographs.

The artist also further emphasizes the nonWestern inspiration by using colors derived from cave painting and Native American art such as slate gray, tan, black and clay. In pairing an ordered space with a subjective and fluid content, Gottlieb grapples with the contemporary world by creating a new visual vocabulary and placing abstraction within a stable pictorial framework.

David M. Solinger pictured with the present work in his home, circa 1960s.

© 2022 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation /

Rights Society (ARS), New York

Figure installed in the exhibition Adolph Gottlieb at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1968

FRANZ KLINE

Study For Chief oil on newsprint

8 ¾ by 10 ¾ in. 22.2 by 27.3 cm. Executed circa 1950. $ 100,000-150,000

PROVENANCE

Acquired as a gift from the artist in 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 95, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Franz Kline, Harry F. Gaugh and the Phillips Collection, Franz Kline: The Color Abstractions, Washington, D.C., 1979, p. 17 (text)

Franz Kline’s Study for Chief represents a quintessential embodiment of the commanding abstraction and richly profound connotations which define and distinguish the artist’s inimitable painterly oeuvre. Executed circa 1950, at the inception of Kline’s signature style, the present work brilliantly demonstrates his sophisticated brand of Action Painting, evoking the compositional equilibrium that has become an indelibly significant aspect of his artistic legacy. Through the boldly graphic swathes of crisp monochromes that delineate its surface, Study for Chief distills all the explosive force of Kline’s famed canvases into a gem-like scale. Indeed, the present work is a study for what is perhaps Kline’s most famous composition of all: Chief of 1950, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That canvas was admired by Alfred H. Barr, then-director of MoMA, and Dorothy Miller, senior curator of paintings, when it was exhibited at Kline’s first solo exhibition at the Egan Gallery in New York; as it was unlikely that the museum would be able to raise the funds, David M. Solinger interceded on the museum’s behalf, acquiring Chief and then donating it to MoMA in 1952. As thanks, Kline himself gifted the present study to Solinger, in whose collection it has remained ever since.

Kline’s signature expressive brushstrokes and vigorous slashes often imply spontaneous, impulsive gestures,

yet that was very seldom the case, as the consummate draftsman preferred to work from drawings and preparatory studies, like the present example. The titular subject of the present work, “Chief,” was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered passing through his childhood hometown in Pennsylvania. In keeping with his newly developed style, the composition is entirely nonfigurative, and yet the pulsing forms imply speed and strength as they rush off the edge of the page, swelling tautly into loops and curves as they go. At once rigorously architectural and unrestrainedly dynamic, Study for Chief invokes images of roaring automotive forces that, while resolutely abstract, articulate the artist’s fascination with the revolutionary industrial and urban forms of the modern age.

Franz Kline, Chief 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of David M. Solinger. Art © 2022 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

HENRI LAURENS

1885 - 1954

L’Espagnole

inscribed with the monogram and numbered 3/6; and with foundry mark C. Valsuani Cire Perdue bronze height: 16 in. 40.6 cm

Conceived in 1937; this example executed in 1939.

$ 100,000-150,000

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist in September 1953 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 98, illustrated

I

ncluded in The David M. Solinger Collection are two sculptures in bronze by Henri Laurens. Le Repose, acquired by Solinger in 1952 from Galerie Maeght, was the first of the two to enter his collection.

Solinger was drawn to Laurens’ newfound expression, which expanded upon his earlier Cubism style. This juncture, combining inspiration from Cubism and later reinventions of Classical forms, reflected the conflicting cultural zeitgeist of the mid-century that particularly moved Solinger. This acquisition spurred the collector to expand his collection of works by Laurens and in the following year, Solinger purchased L’Espagnole directly from the artist.

Laurens’ mature forms, as evidenced by the present works, adopted a more poetic style that featured a unique vocabulary of curved and volumetric forms. Werner Hofmann has described the formal necessities that preoccupied Laurens during the 1930s as “opening up the volume and creating a flowing interpenetration

of torso and limbs” (Werner Hofmann, The Sculptures of Henri Laurens New York, 1970, p. 42). The result is a more tangible and dynamic sense of the threedimensional evident in the present work.

Laurens’ work from this period was influential on his contemporary Alberto Giacometti, who wrote in admiration, “I always see Laurens’s sculpture as a luminous sphere that delights me” (Alberto Giacometti, “Henri Laurens: un sculpteur vu par un sculpteur,” Labyrinth 4 Geneva, 1945, n.p.).

At once robust and seemingly weightless, L’Espagnole produces a space of unconscious and instinctual desire. The figure’s limbs are both volumetric and slim – combining ample and organic with energetic angles and curves. Laurens articulated the concept that underpinned his distinctive aesthetic: “I aspire to ripeness of form. I should like to succeed in making it so full, so juicy, that nothing could be added” (“Une declaration de Henri Laurens,” Amis de l’Art 1, Paris, June 26, 1951).

HENRI LAURENS

1885 - 1954

Le Repose

inscribed with artist’s monogram and numbered 4/6; stamped with foundry mark C. Valsuani Cire Perdue bronze length: 9 ⅜ in. 23.8 cm. Conceived in 1949.

PROVENANCE

Galerie Maeght, Paris Acquired from the above in 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 99, illustrated $ 40,000-60,000

A selection of works, including the present Laurens and Franz Kline, Study for Chief pictured in the Solinger apartment, New York

Downtown New York, Stock Exchange

signed Marin and dated 24 (lower right) watercolor and charcoal on paper 22 by 18 ¾ in. 55.9 by 47.6 cm. Executed in 1924.

80,000-120,000

PROVENANCE

The Downtown Gallery, New York Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, American Academy of Arts and Letters, John Marin, 1954, no. 80

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Art Alliance, John Marin: Watercolors 1954, no. 11

Los Angeles, University of California; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; Washington, D.C., Phillips Gallery; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art; Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art; Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Palm Beach, Society of the Fine Arts; Athens, University of Georgia; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, John Marin Memorial Exhibition, 1955-56, no. 25, n.p., illustrated

London, Arts Council Gallery, John Marin: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, and Etching, 1956, no. 55

New York, American Federation of Art World House Galleries, Trustee’s Choice 1959

New York, American Federation of Art (and travelling), 17 American Collectors, 1959-60

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 108, illustrated

LITERATURE

Dorothy Norman, College Art Journal XIV, no. 4, 1955, p. 320, illustrated

William Carlos Williams, Duncan Phillips and Dorothy Norman, John Marin Los Angeles, 1956, no. 25, n.p., illustrated

Sheldon Reich, John Marin: Catalogue Raisonné vol. II, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, no. 24.21, p. 536, illustrated

The success in John Marin’s versatile body of work lies in his ability to treat the Maine shoreline with as much skill as he does the New York city skyline. The David M. Solinger Collection features impressive examples of both categories of Marin’s practice; Downtown New York, Stock Exchange celebrates the artist’s fascination with the bustling spirit of city life, while Deer Isle Thoroughfare and Blue Grey Sea, Cape Split show his engagement with quieter Maine scenes. Solinger worked as Marin’s legal representative and supported his career by collecting both from The Downtown Gallery, who began representing Marin in 1950, and directly from the artist’s estate in the wake of his passing. In a letter dated 17 January 1968, the artist’s son John Marin Jr. gifted Deer Isle Thoroughfare to Solinger. He wrote, “I’m very happy for you to have this Marin and hope you’ll enjoy it for many many years to come,” which speaks to the prolonged relationship between Solinger and the Marin family.

Executed in 1921, Deer Isle Thoroughfare was completed on a small isolated island located off the mainland of Maine. The vibrant blue in the center of the work is offset by the sharp diagonals and rough edges used to denote

the rocky shoreline. A few years later in 1933, Marin and his family bought a house in Cape Split with unobstructed views of the ocean. Blue, Grey Sea, Cape Split completed in 1939, concentrates on the rhythm and depth of the ocean juxtaposed against the foggy sky. From flat color planes to sharp angular lines traced in charcoal, Marin’s fragmentation of the picture contributes to the feeling of energetic waves slamming against the shore.

The geometric stylization and liveliness of Marin’s Maine watercolors translated to his illustrations of city life as well. In Downtown New York, Stock Exchange Marin succeeds in creating a rapport between the city’s moving figures and the surrounding architecture. The orientation of the sheet complements the verticality of the façade’s Corinthian columns, allowing Marin to emphasize the building’s grandeur and underscore this feeling of a living, breathing city. These three drawings each signify a different chapter in Marin’s life and show the evolution of his style and technique as a modernist artist. Solinger’s collection of numerous Marin works on paper is a testament to his unwavering support of the artist – both during and after Marin’s lifetime.

JOHN MARIN

1872 - 1953

Blue, Grey Sea, Cape Split

signed Marin and dated 39 (lower right) watercolor and pencil on paper 16 by 21 in. 40.6 by 53.3 cm. Executed in 1939.

PROVENANCE

The Downtown Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 110, illustrated

LITERATURE

Sheldon Reich, John Marin: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, no. 39.5, p. 696, illustrated

$ 30,000-50,000

JOHN MARIN

1872 - 1953

Deer Isle Thoroughfare

signed Marin and dated 21 (lower right) watercolor and pencil on paper 13 ½ by 17 in. 34.3 by 43.2 cm. Executed in 1921.

PROVENANCE

The Estate of the artist Acquired from the above in 1968 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Museum of Modern Art, John Marin: A Retrospective Exhibition 1936, no. 42

Coral Gables, Florida, University of Miami, John Marin, 1951, no. 11

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection:

Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 107, illustrated

LITERATURE

Sheldon Reich, John Marin: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, no. 21.17, p. 484

$ 20,000-30,000

John Marin painting outdoors, circa 1950. Miscellaneous photographs collection, circa 1845-1980.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Art © 2022 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

LOUISE NEVELSON

1899 - 1988

Dawn and Summer

incised NEVELSON and dated 1962 (on the underside)

wood painted gold 31 by 12 by 6 ⅜ in. 78.7 by 30.5 by 16.2 cm. Executed in 1962.

$ 50,000-70,000

PROVENANCE

Acquired as a gift from the artist in January 1964 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 125, illustrated in color

D awn and Summer from 1962 is an ethereal and intimately scaled example of an iconic and limited period in Louise Nevelson’s career. Acquired directly from the artist as a gift, Dawn and Summer came to The David M. Solinger Collection in recognition of Nevelson’s gratitude for his assistance in a legal trial. While the artist had initially asked for his representation, he instead insisted he would be a greater asset as an expert witness, ultimately helping her win the trial. Finding gold to be both spiritual and timeless, Louise Nevelson began experimenting with gold paint in the early 1960s, two decades following the advent of her iconic, monochromatic assemblages. She had worked only with black and white paint until that point but had always been drawn to gold, seeing within its complexity a return to the core elements of her practice, and of the earth, as the color reminded her of the sun. As the title suggests, Nevelson took inspiration from her natural environment in creating these works that encapsulates both the architectural configurations and conceptual genius for which she is most known. Several of Nevelson’s gold assemblages were used to create an immersive environment in her 1962 Venice Biennale pavilion, a landmark exhibition for the artist, which truly concretized her

position as a leading sculptor of her time. The present work is a significant example of this singular period in the artist’s body of work; a rectangular open-faced wooden box filled with a mélange of wooden objects bears witness to Nevelson’s unique ability to transform quotidian objects to the realm of abstracted sculpture and high art. Considered to be the height of Nevelson’s creative output, the present work captures the most intriguing qualities of the artist’s practice, bringing forth ideas of depth and recession of form, in an intimate and approachable scale.

Louise Nevelson, 1965. © Archivio Ugo Mulas.

YAACOV AGAM

b. 1928

Never Too Late

signed Y Agam dated 1966 and stampnumbered 2/20 (on the reverse)

nine moving steel pins on steel plate mounted to wood

10 ⅝ by 10 ⅝ in. 27 by 27 cm. Executed in 1966; this work is number 2 from the edition of 20.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

$ 4,000 - 6,000

YAACOV AGAM

b. 1928

To Friendship

signed, titled, dated 1967 and inscribed To David Solinger with thanks (on the underside of the base)

stainless steel on painted wood base 10 ½ by 7 by 4 ¾ in. 26.7 by 17.8 by 12.1 cm. Executed in 1967.

PROVENANCE

Acquired as a gift from the artist in 1967 by the present owner

$ 5,000-7,000

YAACOV AGAM b. 1928

Tactile Painting

signed YAACOV AGAM and Y. Agam, titled, dated 1964 PARIS and inscribed FOR DAVID SOLINGER WITH THANKS and “TOUCH ME AND SEE” (on the reverse)

oil on board with springs and painted metal disks 20 ½ by 25 ½ by 3 ⅜ in. 52.1 by 64.8 by 8.6 cm.

Executed in 1964.

$ 10,000-15,000

JEAN ARP

1886 - 1966

Constellation paper collage on paper 10 by 8 ¾ in. 25.4 by 22.2 cm. Executed in 1961.

PROVENANCE Edouard Loeb, New York Acquired from the above in 1961 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 21, illustrated

$ 25,000-35,000

JEAN ARP

1886 - 1966

Masque Oiseau

stamp-signed ARP and stamp-numbered 132/300 (on the reverse)

gold and nickel plated brass multiple with acryl ic stand

7 ¼ by 10 ¼ in. 18.5 by 26 cm.

Executed in 1968; this work is number 132 from the edition of 300.

PROVENANCE

Neil Cooper, New York

Acquired from the above in 1968 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger

Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 20, illustrated

$ 1,000 - 1,500

FRITZ

BULTMAN

1919 - 1985

The Seed

bronze with painted wood base 19 ¼ by 10 by 8 in. 48.9 by 25.4 by 20.3 cm. Executed in 1958.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist in 1961 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger

Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 24, illustrated in color

$ 2,000-3,000

FRITZ BULTMAN

1919 - 1985

Via Porta Romana I

signed with the initials FB (lower left); signed FRITZ BULTMAN, titled and dated Nov 1951 (on the reverse); titled and dated Nov 1951 (on the reverse of the frame)

ink and gouache on canvasboard 18 by 14 in. 45.7 by 35.6 cm.

Executed in 1951.

PROVENANCE

Kootz Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above circa 1952 by the present owner

EXHIBITED New York, Kootz Gallery, Fritz Bultman, 1952

$ 2,000-3,000

TONY DELAP

1927 - 2019

Pocus

aluminum with aluminum base 9 ¼ by 9 ⅛ in. 23.5 by 23.2 cm.

Executed in 1968.

PROVENANCE

Robert Elkon Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

$ 2,000-3,000

JEAN DUBUFFET

1901 - 1985

Prompt Messager

signed J. Dubuffet and dated 54 (upper right); signed again, titled, and dated Février 54 (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

32 by 39 ¼ in. 81.3 by 99.7 cm. Executed in 1954.

PROVENANCE

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in December 1954 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, J. Dubuffet: Recent Paintings, Collages and Drawings 1954, no. 6

New York, Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Work of Jean Dubuffet, 1962, no. 104, p. 86, illustrated

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 54, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Max Loreau, Catalogue des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, fascicule IX: Assemblages d’empreintes (1953-1954) Lausanne, 1968, no. 129, p. 94, illustrated

Jean Dubuffet and Hubert Damisch, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, tome II, Paris, 1967, p. 423 (text)

Max Loreau, Jean Dubuffet: Délits, déportements, lieux de haut jeu, Lausanne, 1971, p. 174, illustrated

$ 600,000-800,000

J EAN DUBUFFET

1901 - 1985

Chameau Et Chamelier

signed J. Dubuffet and dated 48 (upper right) crayon on paper

10 ⅛ by 13 ½ in. 25.7 by 34.3 cm.

Executed in 1948.

PROVENANCE

Galerie de Neufville, Paris

Acquired from the above in 1964 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 50, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Max Loreau, Catalogue des Travaux de Jean Dubuffet, Fascicule IV, Roses d’Allah, Clowns du Désert (1947-1949) Lausanne, 1967, no. 171, p. 97, illustrated

$ 20,000-30,000

EDMUND DULAC

1882 - 1953

“New lamps for old!” Aladdin and the wonderful lamp

signed Edmund Dulac (lower left) gouache and graphite on paper laid down on board

sheet: 15 ⅞ by 15 in. 40.3 by 38.1 cm. image: 13 ¾ by 11 ½ in. 34.9 by 29.2 cm. Execute in 1925.

PROVENANCE

Private Collection

Acquired from the above by the present owner

LITERATURE

The American Weekly, The Los Angeles Examiner 24 May 1925, illustrated in color (on the cover)

$ 10,000-15,000

NATALIA DUMITRESCO

1915 - 1997

Untitled signed N. Dumitresco (on the base) oil and plaster on wood 58 ⅞ by 23 by 11 ⅝ in. 149.5 by 58.4 by 29.5 cm. Executed circa 1963.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

$ 3,000-5,000

FRIEDEL DZUBAS

1915 - 1994

Bornholm signed Dzubas and dated 58 (lower left) oil and ink on unstretched canvas

5 ¼ by 12 ⅞ in. 13.3 by 32.7 cm. Executed in 1958.

PROVENANCE

Acquired as a gift from the artist in 1958 by the present owner

$ 5,000-7,000

A selection of works pictured in the Solinger apartment, New York

LEE GATCH

1902 - 1968

The Tower And The Teapot

signed Gatch (lower right) oil on canvas 19 by 44 in. 48.3 by 111.7 cm. Executed in 1951.

PROVENANCE

J.B. Neumann Gallery, New York Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Grace Borgenicht Gallery, A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Lee Gatch 1954, no. 18, n.p.

Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Lee Gatch, 19021968, 1971, no. 17

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth Century Art 2002-03, p. 59, illustrated

$ 4,000-6,000

ROBERT GOODNOUGH

1860 - 1960

Untitled

signed goodnough (lower right) oil and canvas collage on canvas 12 ⅛ by 12 ⅛ in. 30.8 by 30.8 cm. Executed circa 1960.

PROVENANCE

Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 66, illustrated in color

$ 2,000-3,000

HANS HOFMANN

1880 - 1966

Untitled

signed Hans Hofmann and dated 56 (lower right)

watercolor on paper 10 ¾ by 8 ¼ in. 27.3 by 21 cm. Executed in 1956.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 75, illustrated in color

$ 8,000-12,000

PHILIPPE HOSIASSON

1898 - 1978

Untitled

signed Hosiasson and dated 60 (lower right) oil on canvas 36 ¼ by 29 in. 92.1 by 74 cm. Executed in 1960.

PROVENANCE

Galerie Karl Flinker, Paris Acquired from the above in June 1961 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 79, illustrated in color

$ 1,000-1,500

ALEXANDER ISTRATI

1915 - 1991

Untitled

signed A. Istrati (lower right); signed again and dated 1981 (on the reverse) oil on canvas

57 ½ by 45 in. 146.1 by 114.3 cm. Executed in 1981.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

$ 5,000-7,000

ALEXANDER

ISTRATI

1915 - 1991

Untitled

signed A. Istrati (lower right); signed again and dated 1982 (on the reverse) oil on canvas

21 ⅝ by 18 ⅛ in. 55 by 46 cm.

Executed in 1982.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

$ 1,000-2,000

FRANZ KLINE

1910 - 1962

Cage I

signed KLINE (lower left)

oil on paper mounted on board 10 ⅝ by 7 in. 27 by 17.8 cm. Executed in 1959.

PROVENANCE

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in March 1960 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, Franz Kline: New Paintings, 1960, no. 22, n.p., illustrated

Washington, D.C., The Philips Collection; Houston, The Institute for the Arts, Rice University; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Franz Kline: The Color Abstractions, 1979, no. 23, pp. 22-23, illustrated

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 96, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Gaston Diehl, The Moderns: A Treasury of Painting Throughout the World, New York, 1978, p. 174, illustrated in color

Budd Hopkins, “Franz Kline’s Color Abstractions: Remembering and Looking Afresh,” Artforum vol. 17, no. 19, Summer 1979, p. 39 (text)

$ 60,000-80,000

ANDRÉ

LANSKOY

1902 - 1976

Chuchotemont

signed LANSKOY (lower right) oil on canvas

23 ½ by 28 ⅝ in. 60 by 72.7 cm.

Executed in 1954.

PROVENANCE

Fine Arts Associates, New York

Acquired from the above in April 1956 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Fine Arts Associates, Lanskoy: Recent Paintings, 1956, no. 3, n.p. illustrated

New York, The American Federation of Arts, Executive View, Art in the Office, 1957-1958

Minneapolis, The Walker Art Center, School of Paris 1959: The Internationals 1959

$ 25,000-35,000

ANDRÉ LANSKOY

1902 - 1976

Bleu Et Intime

signed LANSKOY (upper left); titled and dated 55 (on the reverse)

oil on canvas

23 ⅞ by 28 ⅞ in. 60.6 by 73.3 cm.

Executed in 1955.

PROVENANCE

Fine Arts Associates, New York

Acquired from the above in April 1956 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Fine Arts Associates, Lanskoy: Recent Paintings 1956, no. 19, n.p. illustrated

$ 20,000-30,000

MARTHA MCKAY

1924 –1983

Untitled

signed McKay (lower right); dated 1957 (lower left)

oil on paper mounted on Masonite 9 ½ by 13 ½ in. 24.1 by 34.3 cm.

Executed in 1957.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

$ 800-1,200

MARTHA MCKAY

1924 –1983

Untitled

signed M. McKay (lower right)

oil on paper mounted on Masonite 13 ⅞ by 10 in. 35.2 by 25.4 cm.

Executed in 1957.

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

$ 800-1,200

GEORGE J. MCNEIL

1909 - 1995

Desultory Disco

signed McNeil and dated ‘83 (lower right); signed again, titled and dated ‘83 (on the overlap); signed again, titled and dated 1983 (on the reverse)

oil, canvas and string collage on canvas 56 by 68 in. 142.2 by 172.7 cm.

Executed in 1983.

PROVENANCE

Gruenebaum Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in December 1984 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 113, illustrated in color

$ 5,000-7,000

JOAN MIRÓ

1893 - 1983

Série V: One Plate

signed in pencil Miró. and dated 1953 (lower right); numbered 5/13 (lower left) etching printed in colors on Arches wove paper plate: 5 ⅞ by 4 ⅞ in. 15 by 12.5 cm. Executed in 1952-53; this impression is number 5 from the edition of 13.

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 119, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

Jacques Dupin, Miró Engraver, Vol I. 19281960 New York, 1989, no. 97, another example illustrated in color

$ 4,000 - 6,000

RANDALL MORGAN

1920 - 1994

Mediterranean Night

oil on Masonite 10 by 15 in. 25.4 by 38.1 cm.

Executed in 1949.

PROVENANCE

J.B. Neumann Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1951, no. 68, p. 101, illustrated

$ 800-1,200

RANDALL MORGAN

1920 - 1994

Cliff City

signed Morgan (lower right) oil on Masonite 10 by 15 in. 25.4 by 38.1 cm. Executed in 1950.

PROVENANCE

J.B, Neumann Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1951 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1951, no. 69

$ 800-1,200

LOUISE NEVELSON

1899 - 1988

Diminishing Reflection XXVIII

wood painted black in Plexiglas box 20 ½ by 30 ⅛ by 4 ½ in. 52.1 by 76.5 by 11.4 cm.

Executed in 1965.

PROVENANCE

Pace Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in January 1968 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 126, illustrated in color

$ 40,000-60,000

LOUISE NEVELSON

PROVENANCE

EDUARDO PAOLOZZI

PABLO PICASSO

1881 - 1973

Hibou Marron Noir

inscribed Editions Picasso, Madoura and stamped Edition Picasso and Madoura (on the underside) terre de faïence vase, painted in colors and partially glazed height: 11 ¾ in. 30 cm.

Executed in 1951; this work is from the edition of 300.

LITERATURE

Alain Ramié, Picasso: Catalogue de l’œuvre céramique édité 1947-1971 Paris, 1988, no. 123, another example illustrated in color

$ 7,000-10,000

PABLO PICASSO

1881 - 1973

Hibou

inscribed Editions Picasso, Madoura and stamped Edition Picasso and Madoura (on the underside)

terre de faïence pitcher, painted in colors and glazed height: 9 ¼ in. 23.5 cm.

Executed in 1954; this work is from the edition of 500.

LITERATURE

Alain Ramié, Picasso: Catalogue de l’œuvre céramique édité 1947-1971 Paris, 1988, no. 253, another example illustrated in color

$ 5,000-7,000

PABLO PICASSO

1881 - 1973

Têtes

inscribed Editions Picasso Madoura and stamped Edition Picasso and Madoura (on the underside) terre de faïence pitcher, painted and partially glazed height: 5 ¼ in. 13.5 cm.

Executed in 1956; this work is from the edition of 500.

LITERATURE

Alain Ramié, Picasso: Catalogue de l’œuvre céramique édité 1947-1971 Paris, 1988, no. 368, another example illustrated in color

$ 3,000-5,000

PABLO PICASSO

1881 - 1973

Visage Dans Un Ovale

numbered 69/100 and stamped Madoura and Empreinte Originale Picasso (on the underside) terre de faïence plate, painted in colors and glazed overall: 12 ¾ by 15 ½ in. 32.5 by 39.5 cm.

Executed in 1955; this work is number 69 from the edition of 100.

LITERATURE

Alain Ramié, Picasso: Catalogue de l’œuvre céramique édité 1947-1971 Paris, 1988, no. 274, another example illustrated in color

$ 10,000-15,000

PABLO PICASSO

1881 - 1973

Pichet Gravé Gris

inscribed Edition Picasso, Madoura and stamped Edition Picasso and Madoura (on the underside)

terre de faïence pitcher, painted and partially glazed height: 11 ⅝ in. 29.6 cm.

Executed in 1954; this work is from the edition of 500.

LITERATURE

Alain Ramié, Picasso: Catalogue de l’œuvre céramique édité 1947-1971, Paris, 1988, no. 246, another example illustrated in color

$ 10,000-15,000

REUBEN TAM

1916 - 1991

Blue Breaker

signed Tam © and dated Tam 50-51 (lower right) oil on board

20 by 24 in. 50.8 by 61 cm. Executed circa 1950-51.

PROVENANCE

The Downtown Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above circa 1951 by the present owner

$ 2,500-3,500

REUBEN TAM

1916 - 1991

Untitled

signed Tam and dated ‘50 (lower right) oil on paper 2 ½ by 3 ½ in. 6.4 by 8.9 cm. Executed circa 1950-51.

PROVENANCE

The Downtown Gallery, New York Acquired from the above circa 1951 by the present owner

$ 500-700

ERNEST TINO TROVA

1927 - 2009

Study, Falling Man: 4-Sided Intaglio

numbered 1/6 (at bottom)

silver-plated bronze height: 14 ¼ in 36.1 cm

Executed in 1967; this example is number 1 from the edition of 6.

PROVENANCE

Pace Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1968 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 142, illustrated in color

$ 5,000 - 7,000

ERNEST TINO TROVA

1927 - 2009

Manscape

numbered 17/50 (along upper edge) silver diameter: 4 in. 10.1 cm

Executed in 1967; this example is number 17 from the edition of 50.

PROVENANCE

The International Collector’s Society

Acquired from the above in 1968 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art 2002-03, p. 143, illustrated in color

$ 1,000 - 1,500

ERNEST TINO TROVA

1927 - 2009

Manscape

numbered 25/75 (along upper edge) gold-plated bronze diameter: 4 in. 10.1 cm

Executed in 1967; this example is numbered 25 from the edition of 75.

PROVENANCE

The International Collector’s Society Acquired from the above in 1968 by the present owner

$ 1,000 - 1,500

JACK TWORKOV

1900 - 1982

Seated Female Figure

signed with the initials JT and dated 58 (lower right) graphite on paper 12 by 8 ⅞ in. 30.5 by 22.5 cm. Executed in 1958.

PROVENANCE

Stubb Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1959 by the present owner

EXHIBITED

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; The Washington Gallery of Modern Art; The Pasadena Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Art; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center and Waltham, Brandeis University, The Poses Institute of Fine Arts, Jack Tworkov, 1964-65, no. 76, p. 15, illustrated

Ithaca, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The David M. Solinger Collection: Masterworks of Twentieth-Century Art, 2002-03, p. 145, illustrated in color

LITERATURE

April Kingsley, “Jack Tworkov” Art International, No. 18, March 20, 1974, p. 25, illustrated

Jason Andrew, ed., Jack Tworkov (1900-1982): Catalogue of Unique Works, New York, ongoing, no. 483, illustrated (online)

$ 1,000-2,000

Ernest Tino Trova pictured with a similar work, circa 1960s. Photo: Nate Silverstein

ART OF AFRICA, OCEANIA, AND THE AMERICAS

AUCTION IN NEW YORK 22 NOVEMBER 2022 1334 York Avenue New York, NY 10021 +1 212 606 7000 sothebys.com

FOLLOW US @SOTHEBYS #SOTHEBYSSOLINGER

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE PROPERTY IN THIS SALE, PLEASE VISIT SOTHEBYS.COM/ N11080

From top left Sidney Janis Gallery invoice for a pair of Tarascan figures, 1955

Kende Galleries invoice for several Mexican and Pre-Columbian figures, 1951

Letter to David Solinger from Alfred Stendhal regarding his Nayarit figures, 1953

Cover of the exhibition catalogue, Mezcala: Ancient Mexican Sculptures, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1956

Andre Emmerich invoice for a Tarascan figure, 1955

SOURCE AND ACCOMPANIMENT ANCIENT MESOAMERICAN ART IN THE DAVID M. SOLINGER COLLECTION

The David M. Solinger Collection reads as a primer on the canons of modernism and abstraction, a lesson in the development of aesthetic ideas which, at mid-century, were fresh, exciting, and still controversial. He fearlessly sought out the explosive and unusual, transcending the pre-judgments of the uninitiated, and embraced the primordial, the expressive, and the essential. It is therefore not surprising to find that David Solinger, like the artists he championed, sought also to connect to those universal qualities in art found in what were then unexpected sources: art forms created thousands of years earlier, in cultures far from his own in time and space. The connection is both an art historical episode and pure aesthetic affinity. Ancient Mesoamerican sculpture had provided inspiration to the modernists, including Dubuffet and Gottlieb, along with the arts of classical cultures of Africa, the Pacific, and North America. Beyond this direct connection is of course the aesthetic affirmation one sees in the dialogue between Mezcala and Miro, Colima and Dubuffet, Nayarit and Arp; these pairings harmonize beautifully in the Solinger Collection, making seemingly unlikely aesthetic networks across history clear and undeniable.

While the story of African Art and its relationship to the early 20th century modernists has been well-told, the Solinger Collection points us to another fertile dialogue, celebrating the aesthetics of Pre-Columbian art which, like those seen in the western art at the heart of the Solinger Collection, range from rigorous geometry to wild expressionism. It is notable that while Solinger was intimately familiar with the early 20th century avantgarde, and their love affair with African sculptural aesthetics, his collecting of premodern objects focused on the ancient Americas, which he discovered through some of the same American tastemaker-dealers from whom he was acquiring paintings: Pierre Matisse, Andre Emmerich, Sidney Janis, and Earl Stendal. The Solinger Collection presents a distinctively American interpretation of the concept of “Primitivism”, celebrating the ancient cultures of this continent which were in fact anything but primitive.

The two magnificent stone figures which David Solinger acquired from Andre Emmerich in 1958 are among the finest representatives known of the famously abstract Mezcala style. This mysterious tradition, believed to have emerged in the third century BCE, long pre-dates the Aztecs, the Maya and developed before that of Teotihuacan. Pure sculptural geometry reduces the human form to its basic architecture, while showcasing the permanence and materiality of the fine colored stone medium, which is patiently made perfectly smooth in large planes. While the exact use of the figures is not known, the variety of human figures produced speaks to the ancient artists’ need to celebrate the human form. The Solinger Collection figures represent two of the important styles within the Mezcala repertoire.

At the other end of the spectrum are the rounded fleshy forms and exaggerated features of ancient West Mexican terracotta sculpture. Solinger was here again drawn to an aesthetic dialogue with his modern art. Beautifully-painted clothing on the Nayarit figures, and the stylized proportions of the Guerrero and Jalisco figures resonate with the abstract paintings in the rooms brimming with masterpieces of the 20th century, as they were displayed in the Solinger Collection.

MEZCALA STONE STANDING FIGURE, TYPE M-10

Late Preclassic, circa 300-100 B.C.

Height 14 in (35.5 cm)

PROVENANCE

Andre Emmerich, New York (inv. no. G354)

Acquired from the above on May 9, 1958

$ 80,000-120,000

NAYARIT KNEELING FEMALE

Protoclassic, circa 100 B.C. - A.D. 250

Height 17 ½ in (44.5 cm)

PROVENANCE

Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles

Acquired from the above in 1952

$ 10,000-15,000

MEZCALA STONE STANDING STONE FIGURE, TYPE M-14

Late Preclassic, circa 300-100 B.C.

Height 9 ½ in. (24.1 cm)

PROVENANCE

Andre Emmerich, New York (inv. no. G327)

Acquired from the above on May 9, 1958

PUBLISHED

Carlo Gay, Frances Pratt, Mezcala: Ancient Stone Sculpture from Guerrero, Mexico, 1992, p. 67, pl. 53.

$ 50,000-70,000

NAYARIT SEATED COUPLE, IXTLÁN DEL RIO STYLE

Protoclassic, circa 100 B.C. - A.D. 250 Heights 13 in and 14 ½ in. (33 cm and 36.7 cm)

PROVENANCE

Sidney Janus Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1955

$ 8,000-12,000

OBSIDIAN FIGURE, PROBABLY GUERRERO

Circa 300-100 B.C. Height: 7 in. (17.8 cm)

PROVENANCE

Kende Gallery, New York, 1951

$ 2,500-4,500

JALISCO PRECLASSIC FIGURE WITH CHILD, CHAPALA STYLE

Late Preclassic, circa 300-100 B.C. Heights 11 ¾ in and 4 ½ in ( 29.8 cm and 11.5 cm)

PROVENANCE

Sidney Janis Gallery, New York Acquired from the above in 1954

$ 2,500-4,000

TWO COLIMA PRECLASSIC FIGURES

Late Preclassic, circa 300-100 B.C. Heights: 7 1/2 in and 5 in. (19 cm and 12.7 cm)

PROVENANCE

Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles Acquired from the above in 1952

$ 1,000-1,500

A LEGACY OF PHILANTHROPY:

Lobby

Herbert

A SELECTION OF WORKS FROM THE DAVID M. SOLINGER COLLECTION GIFTED TO MUSEUMS AND INSTITUTIONS

THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

FRIEDEL DZUBAS

WILLIAM BAZIOTES

HANS HOFMANN

WILLEM DE KOONING

JACOB LAWRENCE

Willem de Kooning with Yellow River at Sidney Janis Gallery, 1959.

Arnold Newman Properties / Getty Images. Art © 2022

Willem de Kooning Foundation /

Rights Society (ARS), New York

Letter from James Thrall Soby to David Solinger thanking him for the gift of Giacometti’s Monumental Head 1964

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK

ALBERTO GIACOMETTI Monumental Head 1960

Gifted in 1964

Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

FERNAND LÉGER

Landscape with Yellow Hat 1952

Gifted in 1958

Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

FRANZ KLINE Chief 1950

Gifted in 1952

Art © 2022 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

HERBERT F. JOHNSON MUSEUM OF ART, CORNELL UNIVERSITY ITHACA

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

Blue Air 1946

Gifted in 2022

Art © 2022 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JEAN DUBUFFET

Vue de Paris, la vie de plaisir 1944

Gifted in 2022

Art © 2022 Fondation Dubuffet, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

WASSILY KANDINSKY

Study for the Last Judgment / Resurrection

1912

Gifted in 2022

Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

JOSEPH CORNELL

Trade Winds circa 1956-58

Gifted in 2022

Art © 2022 The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memori al Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ALEXANDER CALDER

Multi-Red 1962

Gifted in 2022

Art © 2022 The Calder Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

JEAN DUBUFFET

La Bouche en croissant 1948

Gifted in 1955

Art © 2022 Fondation Dubuffet, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

HANS HOFMANN Mirage

1946

Gifted in 1969

Art © 2022 Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

HANS HOFMANN

The Ravine 1956

Gifted in 2022

Art © 2022 Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

BROWSE

BID

CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS FOR BUYERS FOR NEW YORK SALES (formerly referred to as “Conditions of Sale”)

1. INTRODUCTION

In these Conditions of Business for Buyers, “we”, “us” and “our” refers to Sotheby’s, Inc. and “you” and “your” refer to Bidders and Buyers. For New York Wine & Spirits auctions, “we”, “us” and “our” refers to both Sotheby’s, Inc. and Sotheby’s Wine.

If you are an agent acting on behalf of a principal, “you” and “your” refer to both principal and agent. Capitalized terms will have the meaning set out in Condition 2.

These Conditions of Business for Buyers are the terms and conditions applicable to Bidders and Buyers in our New York auctions (both live and timed auctions). The Conditions of Business for Buyers include the Authenticity Guarantee and any other additional conditions that are expressly stated as applicable to a sale, and they may be amended by any oral or written announcement or notice prior to or during the sale. Our and the Seller’s relationship with Buyers and any Bidders in relation to the Lots offered in a sale is governed by these Conditions of Business for Buyers and the express representations and warranties and indemnity given by the Seller. In relation to a sale, where applicable, any reference by us to “Conditions of Sale” or “Terms of Guarantee,” should be understood to mean these Conditions of Business for Buyers and the Authenticity Guarantee, respectively. We act as agent for the Seller, unless the Catalogue indicates otherwise, and a sale contract is made directly between the Seller and the Buyer. For New York Wine & Spirits auctions, Sotheby’s Wine acts as agent for the Seller, unless the Catalogue indicates otherwise, and Sotheby’s Inc. conducts the auction. In some cases, which will be indicated in the Catalogue, a Sotheby’s Group Company may own a Lot and/or may have a legal, beneficial or financial interest in a Lot as a secured creditor or otherwise.

By registering for an auction, including through our Online Platforms, you agree to be bound by these Conditions of Business for Buyers.

We may change these Conditions of Business for Buyers from time to time in our sole discretion, without notice to you or to the Seller, by posting such changes on the Sotheby’s website at www.sothebys.com It is your and the Seller’s responsibility to periodically check the Conditions of Business for Buyers for changes by clicking the link “Conditions of Business.” You will know if these Conditions of Business for Buyers have been revised since your last review by referring to the “Last Modified” date at the bottom of this page. If you do not agree to the current Conditions of Business for Buyers, you should refrain from registering to bid in an auction.

2. DEFINED TERMS

Authenticity Guarantee: the guarantee we provide as principal to the Buyer in relation to a purchased Lot, as set out in Condition 15. In relation to a sale, where applicable, any reference by us to the “Terms of Guarantee” should be understood to mean the Authenticity Guarantee.

Bidder: any person or entity registered to bid in a sale.

Buyer: the buyer of record of a Lot.

Buyer’s Expenses: any costs or expenses, plus any applicable VAT, due to us from the Buyer in respect of the purchase of a Lot.

Buyer’s Premium: the commission the Buyer must pay to us as part of the Purchase Price for auction Lots. The Buyer’s Premium rate is subject to change at any time. The current Buyer’s Premium rate for all auctions except Wine & Spirits is 25% of the Hammer Price for a Hammer Price up to and including $1,000,000, 20% of any amount of the Hammer Price in excess of $1,000,000 up to and including $4,500,000, and 13.9% of any amount of the Hammer Price in excess of $4,500,000. For Wine & Spirits auctions, the Buyer’s Premium rate is 24% of the Hammer Price for all Lots. Buyer’s Premium is subject to any applicable VAT and/ or sales or use tax.

Catalogue: the list of Lots offered in a sale and associated information, available on our website, any Sotheby’s Group application and, in some cases, in printed form.

Hammer Price: for each auction Lot sold, the last price accepted for the Lot by the auctioneer or acknowledged by the Sotheby’s online bidding system, or in the case of a postauction sale, the agreed sale price.

Lot: an item (or more than one item grouped as one) of property offered for sale. In some cases, a Lot may be, or may be accompanied by, an experience (an “Experience”).

A Lot may be or include an NFT (or more than one NFT), and the term “NFT” may be used to refer to any such Lot.

NFT: a non-fungible token established on a blockchain.

Online Platforms: our websites, any Sotheby’s Group application, and any other online means through which we enable Bidders to bid on Lots in our sales.

Overhead Premium: the fee the Buyer must pay to us as part of the Purchase Price for auction Lots, as an allocation of overhead costs relating to our facilities, property handling and other administrative expenses. The Overhead Premium rate is subject to change at any time. The current Overhead Premium rate is 1% of the Hammer Price. Overhead Premium is subject to any applicable VAT and/or sales or use tax.

Parcel: a group of Lots of the same type and quantity of wine. There may be some discrepancies between the different Lots in a Parcel with respect to level, condition or otherwise, as set out in the catalogue descriptions for each Lot.

Purchase Price: for auction Lots, the Hammer Price plus the Buyer’s Premium, Overhead Premium, any applicable VAT and/or sales or use tax, and any applicable artist resale right royalty payable by the Buyer on a qualifying Lot.

Referenced Content: with respect to an NFT, the metadata (excluding any legal terms and conditions embedded or referenced therein), content, digital asset and/or physical item, if any, to which the NFT relates.

Reserve: the confidential minimum Hammer Price at which an auction Lot can be sold.

Seller: the person(s) or entity(ies) on whose behalf we are offering a Lot for sale. Where a Sotheby’s Group Company owns a Lot, Sotheby’s acts in a principal capacity as Seller.

Sotheby’s, Inc.: the company incorporated in New York, with its headquarters at 1334 York Street, New York, NY 10021.

Sotheby’s Group: the Delaware corporation Sotheby’s, Sotheby’s Financial Services, Inc., and any entities in which either of them hold, from time to time, directly or indirectly, more than 50% of the issued share capital; and each, a Sotheby’s Group Company.”

Sotheby’s Wine: the company incorporated as 72nd and York Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sotheby’s, Inc., d.b.a. Sotheby’s Wine.

VAT: any applicable Value Added Tax or goods and services tax, or an amount in lieu of Value Added Tax or goods and services tax, as the case may be, at the prevailing rate.

3. THE LOTS

(a) All Lots are offered for sale in the condition they are in at the time of the sale. You acknowledge that many Lots are of an age and type such that they are not in perfect condition. Catalogue descriptions and condition reports may refer to imperfections of a Lot or Referenced Content, but Lots or Referenced Content may have other faults not expressly referred to in the Catalogue or condition report. Illustrations are for identification purposes only and may not convey full information as to the actual condition of a Lot or Referenced Content.

(b) You accept responsibility for carrying out your own inspections and investigations of Lots in which you may be interested. You should inspect a Lot before bidding to determine and to satisfy yourself as to its condition, size, description and whether it has been repaired or restored, as applicable, and we accept bids on Lots solely on this basis. Condition reports may be available to assist when inspecting Lots. Lots may be available for viewing in person at our premises or another location and viewing information will be available on our website. For any NFT Lot, in addition to the foregoing, you are solely responsible for reviewing and inspecting the smart contract, if available, prior to your purchase.

(c) You acknowledge that our knowledge of each Lot is partially dependent on information provided by the Seller, and we are not able to and do not carry out exhaustive due diligence on each Lot. Information provided to you regarding any Lot, including any estimates, information in the Catalogue, condition reports, or information in respect of the age of hand-coloring in maps, atlases or books, is a matter of opinion only and not a representation of fact. This information is dependent upon, among other things, the condition of the Lot, the degree of research, examination or

testing that is possible or practical in the circumstances, and the status of generally accepted expert opinion, research and scientific or technical analysis at the time of cataloguing. Any estimates should not be relied upon as a prediction of the selling price or value of a Lot and may be revised from time to time in our absolute discretion.

(d) If the Lot is an NFT, you acknowledge and agree that our staff are not information technology or data experts, and that by bidding in the auction of the NFT, or otherwise purchasing or acquiring the NFT, you accept that NFTs are subject to inherent technological risks which may affect their performance now or in the future. You further acknowledge and agree that the characterization and regulatory scheme governing NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology is uncertain and undetermined, that your purchase and/or receipt of the NFT complies with applicable laws and regulations in your jurisdiction, and that new regulations or policies may materially adversely affect the sale or resale of the NFT.

(e) If the Lot is an NFT, you acknowledge and agree that the NFT may be subject to resale royalties, including to a Sotheby’s Group Company, through application of the smart contract or other technical solution on any subsequent resales of the NFT. On any such resale by you, you may be obligated to collect and remit to the appropriate party resale royalties as applicable, and you are responsible for any network fees and/or gas fees that may apply to such payments as well as any transaction duties imposed by law.

(f) We reserve the right to withdraw any Lot from an auction or to cancel an auction, whether prior to or during the auction, and we will not be liable to you for any claims, causes of action, liabilities, damages, losses, or expenses in connection with such withdrawal or cancellation.

(g) Unless otherwise specified, all auction Lots are offered subject to a Reserve. The Reserve for a Lot cannot exceed the Lot’s low estimate. In a timed auction, you acknowledge that we may reduce the Reserve for any Lot at any time during the auction, provided it has been agreed with the Seller prior to any such reduction.

(h) Each Lot offered will be referenced by its Lot number assigned in the Catalogue. Unless we specify otherwise, bids must be on a per-Lot basis.

(i) Experiences will be fulfilled by the relevant entity or entities specified in its description in the Catalogue. We do not plan, host, operate, fulfill, endorse, verify, vouch for, investigate or vet any Experience. For each Experience, any incidental costs and expenses such as fees for travel, food or lodging are the sole responsibility of the Buyer unless otherwise expressly stated in the Experience description.

(j) The Buyer is solely responsible for identifying and obtaining any necessary export, import, firearm, endangered species or other permit for a purchased Lot. Any symbols or notices in the Catalogue reflect our reasonable opinion at the time of cataloguing and are included for informational purposes only. Without prejudice to Condition 3(k), neither we nor the Seller make any representations or warranties as to whether any Lot is subject to export or import restrictions or any embargoes. The denial of any permit or license will not justify cancellation or rescission of the sale or excuse any delay in payment. We will not deliver a firearm to a Buyer unless the Buyer has first supplied evidence to our satisfaction of compliance with this Condition.

k) DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES:

(i) All Lots are offered for sale “AS IS,” without any guarantee, representations or warranties by us or the Seller, except for the express representations and warranties given by the Seller and the Authenticity Guarantee, which we, as principal, provide to the Buyer. We and the Seller disclaim all implied warranties, including but not limited to merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, except in so far as such obligations cannot be excluded by law. Neither we nor the Seller give you any guarantee, representation or warranty as to the correctness of the Catalogue or other images or descriptions of the condition, completeness, size, quality, rarity, value, importance, medium, frame, provenance, exhibition history, or literary or historical relevance of any Lot, and no statement anywhere, whether oral or written, will be deemed such a warranty, representation or assumption of liability. Except as expressly set forth elsewhere in these Conditions of Business for Buyers, neither we nor the Seller make any representations or warranties as to whether any Lot is subject to copyright or whether the Buyer acquires any copyrights, including but not limited to, any reproduction rights in any Lot.

(ii) In the case of NFTs, in addition to the above and except for the express representations and warranties given by the Seller and the Authenticity Guarantee, which we, as principal, provide to the Buyer, neither we nor the Seller make any representations or warranties as to the following: (1) whether the NFT or any Referenced Content is subject to copyright; (2) the nature, character, contents, condition, behavior, operation, performance, security, integrity, metadata, persistence, quality, technical details or terms of the smart contract, NFT or the Referenced Content, including without limitation any further iterations of the same; (3) that the smart contract, NFT or Referenced Content or the delivery mechanism for the NFT does not contain vulnerabilities, viruses or malware or other harmful components, or that either will function as any bidder or Buyer expects or without error or mistake; (4) the uniqueness of the Referenced Content; (5) that the NFT is reliable, correctly programmed, compatible with your or others’ computer systems, upto-date, error-free, compatible with your digital wallet or meeting your requirements, or that defects in the NFT can or will be corrected; or (6) the accuracy or reliability of any simulation or videos depicting the intended performance of the NFT or the Referenced Content, whether displayed on our websites or on any other platform.

4. BUYER REPRESENTATIONS AND WARRANTIES

(a) You represent and warrant to us and the Seller that at all relevant times:

(i) your bids on any Lot are genuine and are not the product of any collusive or other anti-competitive agreement and are otherwise consistent with any applicable antitrust laws;

(ii) your performance under these Conditions of Business for Buyers has not and will not violate any applicable law, regulation or code in any jurisdiction;

(iii) regarding any Lots containing alcoholic beverages, where required by applicable law, you are properly licensed, permitted or otherwise authorized to purchase, receive, possess and/or cause to transport alcoholic beverages;

(iv) your purchase of a Lot and, if you are acting as an agent on behalf of a principal, the arrangement between you and your principal, will not facilitate tax crimes;

(v) you have no knowledge or reason to suspect that (1) the funds used to purchase a Lot are connected with the proceeds of criminal activity, or (2) you or your principal, if applicable (or, if you are an entity, any person(s) or entity(ies) with a beneficial or ownership interest in you), are under investigation, charged with, or convicted of any substantive or predicate money laundering or economic sanctions crime, terrorist activity, tax evasion or act in violation of any antibribery or anti-corruption laws or regulations;

(vi) you (and your principal, if applicable) are not, nor are you (or your principal, if applicable) owned (in whole or in part), controlled, or acting on behalf of, an entity or individual that is: (1) the subject of economic sanctions, embargoes or other trade restrictions in any jurisdiction, including those administered and enforced by the United States, European Union or any of its member states, United Kingdom, United Nations Security Council, or other applicable sanctions authority (collectively, “Sanctions”), or (2) located, organized, or resident in a country or territory that is the subject of Sanctions (including Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Russian Federation and Belarus) (collectively, “Sanctioned Jurisdictions”);

(vii) you (and your principal, if applicable) are currently in compliance, and for the past five years have complied, with applicable Sanctions, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and anti-bribery or anti-corruption laws;

(viii) the Purchase Price will not be funded directly or indirectly by or from anyone that is the subject of Sanctions or located, organized, or resident in a Sanctioned Jurisdiction;

(ix) no party directly or indirectly involved in the transaction is the subject of Sanctions or is owned (in whole or in part) or controlled by any individual or entity that is the subject of Sanctions or otherwise located, organized, or resident in a Sanctioned Jurisdiction, except as expressly authorized in writing by the government authority having jurisdiction over the purchase and with our prior express written consent;

(x) if you are acting as agent on behalf of a principal, you have taken steps reasonably designed to ensure compliance with Sanctions, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and anti-bribery or anti-corruption laws, including but not limited to, conducting appropriate due diligence on your principal

and screening source of funds. You will retain and make available upon request the documentation evidencing such due diligence for at least five years after the purchase, and all commissions payable to you for this consignment have been authorized by your principal;

(xi) your purchase will not cause (or otherwise result in) us, Sellers, or anyone else to violate any Sanctions, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, or anti-bribery or anti-corruption laws; and

(xii) you have full legal authority without any further action or other party’s consent to enter into and perform under these Conditions of Business for Buyers and to give these representations and warranties; if you are an entity, the individual bidding on your behalf is authorized to do so and the entity is duly incorporated or formed, validly existing and in good standing in the jurisdiction where it is incorporated or formed.

(b) We may, in our sole discretion, rescind the sale of a Lot if we reasonably determine that (i) any of the Buyer’s representations or warranties is inaccurate, incomplete or breached; (ii) any of the Seller’s representations or warranties is inaccurate, incomplete or breached; or (iii) the sale has subjected or might subject us or the Seller to liability.

5. INDEMNITY

You shall indemnify and hold us, each Sotheby’s Group Company, our and their respective officers and employees, and the Seller harmless against any and all claims, causes of action, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including but not limited to reasonable attorneys’ fees), arising out of or in connection with any inaccuracy, incompleteness or breach of any of your representations or warranties or breach of your obligations under these Conditions of Business for Buyers to the fullest extent permitted by law.

6. BIDDING

(a) You must create an account and provide the requested information in order to bid. We may require financial references, guarantees, deposits or other security, as we determine necessary or appropriate.

(b) To bid on a Lot containing an NFT, you must have a digital wallet capable of supporting and accepting the NFT.

(c) To bid on any auction Lot designated as a “Premium Lot,” you must complete the required Premium Lot preregistration application. We must receive your application at least 3 business days prior to the commencement of the auction, and our decision whether to accept your application will be final. Online bidding may not be available for Premium Lots.

(d) We advise Bidders to place their bids directly, either in person at the auction (where available) or through our Online Platforms. If you elect to bid or to participate in an auction held through an Online Platform, you are responsible for making yourself aware of all salesroom notices and announcements, which will be available on the Online Platforms.

(e) We also accept written bids and telephone bids, by arrangement with the Bids Department. A written bid, also known as an absentee bid, is where a Bidder submits a maximum bid ahead of a live auction, which will be executed on the Bidder’s behalf by the auctioneer at the lowest price possible and never for more than the maximum amount the Bidder indicates. Written bids and telephone bids are offered as a courtesy for no additional charge, at the Bidder’s risk and subject to our other commitments at the time of the auction. We will seek to carry out written bids, endeavoring to ensure that the first received of identical written bids has priority. We will not accept liability for failure to place written or telephone bids.

(f) For certain sales, Bidders are permitted to submit via the Online Platform a maximum bid before the start of a live auction (an “Advance Bid”). Advance Bids will be executed on your behalf automatically up to your predefined maximum value in response to other bids placed on the Lot, including bids placed by us on behalf of the Seller, up to the amount of the Reserve (if applicable). The current leading bid will be visible to all Bidders; the value and status of your Advance Bid will be visible only to you, unless it is the leading bid. Once the live auction begins, the auctioneer will open bidding at the current leading bid. The system will continue to bid on your behalf up to your predetermined maximum bid, or you may continue to bid via the Online Platforms during the live auction at the next increment.

(g) All bidding will be in the currency of the sale location. As a courtesy to Bidders, a currency board is operated in many salerooms for live auctions for informational purposes only. Online Bidders will not be able to see any such currency conversion board that may be displayed in the auction room.

(h) We reserve the right to refuse or revoke permission to bid before or during a sale for any reason. For live auctions with bidding in person, we may refuse admission to the auction. For timed auctions, we also reserve the right to deactivate your account at any time prior to, during, or after an auction.

(i) For timed auctions, live auctions with Advance Bidding, and online sales, you may cancel a bid after you place it only if (i) the description of or the condition report for the Lot has been materially revised after the bid was placed; or (ii) a notice regarding the Lot has been posted on our website after the bid was placed. Other than in the foregoing limited circumstances, you agree that any bid you place, regardless of the means by which you have done so, is final and you will not be permitted to amend or retract it. For all auctions and sales, should your bid be successful, you irrevocably agree to pay the full Purchase Price and any applicable Buyer’s Expenses. We are not responsible for any errors that you make or that are made through your Sotheby’s account in placing a bid on a Lot.

7. CONDUCT OF AN AUCTION

(a) An auction is by its nature fast-moving and bidding may progress very quickly. In a live auction, the auctioneer will commence and advance the bidding at levels and in increments the auctioneer considers appropriate (including by reference to any advance bids made). The auctioneer has discretion to vary bid increments in the auction room and on the telephone but Bidders using Online Platforms may not be able to place a bid that is less than a whole bidding increment above the previous bid.

(b) In a timed auction, bidding opens at an amount that is at or below the low estimate for the Lot and escalates in bid increments that we determine. We may vary the amount of the bid increments during a timed auction. Lots will be closed sequentially, either by the online system or, in some cases, by a live auctioneer. If closed by the online system, Lots will close sequentially in one-minute intervals unless a bid is placed within one minute of a Lot’s scheduled closing time, in which case we will extend the sale of that Lot by two minutes from the time of the last bid and such extensions may be repeated for a maximum period of two hours. The extension of any Lot’s closing time does not affect any other Lot’s closing time; therefore, it is possible that Lots will close out of numerical Lot order.

(c) With respect to Parcels, at the auctioneer’s discretion, the successful Bidder of the first Lot in a Parcel will have the option, but not the obligation, to purchase in consecutive order one or more of the remaining Lots in the Parcel, each at the same successful bid price as the first Lot. If any Lots in the Parcel are not purchased, the auctioneer will open the bidding on the next unsold Lot in the Parcel, and the successful Bidder of that Lot will have the option, but not the obligation, to purchase in consecutive order one or more, if any, of the remaining Lots in the Parcel, each at the newlyestablished successful bid price.

(d) The auctioneer (or, in a timed auction, the online system) may open bidding on any Lot by placing a bid on behalf of the Seller below the Reserve. The auctioneer may further bid on behalf of the Seller, up to but not at the Reserve, by placing successive or consecutive bids for a Lot, or by placing bids in response to other Bidders; in a timed auction, such bids will be counted toward the total bid count displayed on the Online Platform.

(e) The auctioneer (or, in a timed auction, the online system) may refuse or reject any bid, including bids that have previously been accepted, withdraw any Lot, or reopen or continue the bidding (including after the fall of the hammer or, in a timed auction, the close of a Lot). If the Reserve for a Lot is not met, the auctioneer may withdraw the Lot from sale, and the auctioneer or online system will announce that the withdrawn Lot has been “passed”, “withdrawn”, “returned to owner,” “unsold,” “bought-in” or the equivalent.

(f) In the case of error or dispute with respect to bidding, either during or after the auction, we in our sole discretion may refuse any bid, withdraw a Lot, determine who the Buyer is, continue or re-open the bidding, cancel the sale of a Lot, or re-offer and re-sell a Lot (including after the fall of the hammer or, in a timed auction, the close of a Lot), and take such other action as we reasonably deem appropriate. In the

case of any dispute, our sale record will be absolute and final. In the event of any discrepancy between any online records or messages provided to you and our sale record, our sale record will prevail. Where we decide to cancel the sale of a Lot or to re-offer and sell a Lot following an error or dispute with respect to bidding, we will notify the Buyer of such decision as soon as reasonably practicable.

(g) Subject to Condition 7(e), the Buyer will be: in a live auction, the highest Bidder accepted for a Lot at the fall of the hammer; in a timed auction, the highest Bidder accepted for a Lot on the close of the Lot; in the case of a Bidder bidding as agent, such Bidder’s principal will be the Buyer. This means that, subject to Condition 7(e), the sale contract between the Buyer and the Seller is concluded on the striking of the auctioneer’s hammer in a live auction, or on the close of a Lot in a timed auction, whereupon the Buyer becomes liable to pay the full Purchase Price and any applicable Buyer’s Expenses. The sale contract between the Seller and the Buyer of a Lot will be final at the end of the auction session.

(h) Any post-auction sale of Lots will be made pursuant to these Conditions of Business for Buyers.

8. PAYMENT

(a) Generally.

(i) Buyers will be invoiced after the sale. For online Bidders, the purchase information shown in the “My Bids” section of the Sotheby’s App and in the “Account Activity” section of “My Account” on our website is provided for your convenience only. In the event of any discrepancy between the online purchase information and the invoice we send you following the sale, the invoice will prevail. We may process payments through third-party service providers, which may post operating rules related to payment on their respective websites and change such rules from time to time. For credit card payments, you authorize us, and our third-party service providers, to immediately charge your selected payment method for all amounts presented to you in the checkout and purchase process.

(ii) For auction Lots, the Buyer’s Premium and Overhead Premium will be added to the Hammer Price on a per-Lot basis and are payable by the Buyer as part of the Purchase Price.

(iii) The Buyer also must pay as part of the Purchase Price any applicable sales tax, compensating use tax, VAT, consumption tax, goods or services tax or other indirect taxes, luxury tax, excise tax, and duties or tariffs (collectively, “Taxes”), as well as any applicable artist resale right royalty, on the purchase of a Lot where and as required by applicable law. We will collect any applicable Taxes and artist resale right royalty on the purchase of a Lot where and as required by applicable law. The Buyer shall pay the Purchase Price in full without any deduction for taxes of any kind, unless such deduction is required by law. In any such case, the amount due to us from the Buyer will be increased to an amount that after deduction for any such taxes leaves an amount equal to the Purchase Price.

(iv) Payment of the Purchase Price for a Lot and any Buyer’s Expenses is due from the Buyer in the currency of the relevant sale (except to the extent permitted in Condition 8(b)) immediately upon conclusion of the auction, notwithstanding any requirements for export, import or other permit. The Buyer’s obligation to pay the full Purchase Price and any applicable Buyer’s Expenses is absolute and unconditional and is not subject to any defenses, setoffs or counterclaims of any kind whatsoever.

(v) We will not accept payment from a source other than the Buyer. If you are registered to bid as a company, your company will need to pay for any purchases in the name of the company via an accepted payment method. Partial payment for a Lot is not permitted.

(vi) Title in a purchased Lot will not pass to the Buyer until we have received the full Purchase Price in cleared funds. We will release a Lot to the Buyer or Buyer’s agent after we have received from the Buyer the full Purchase Price and any applicable Buyer’s Expenses in cleared funds and appropriate identification of the Buyer and Buyer’s agent (if any), unless we are prevented from doing so by an event beyond our control. Any earlier release does not affect the passing of title or the Buyer’s unconditional obligation to pay the full Purchase Price and any applicable Buyer’s Expenses.

(b) Payment in cryptocurrency for Lots eligible for payment in cryptocurrencies, payments made in cryptocurrency shall be subject to the terms in this Condition 8(b) in addition to the terms set forth in Condition 8(a) above.

(i) We will accept payment in cryptocurrency only for Lots designated as eligible for such in the Catalogue or by any oral or written announcement or notice prior to or during the sale, and only in the following cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and USD Coin (USDC).

(ii) The amount due will be the cryptocurrency equivalent at the time payment is made of the amount invoiced, and Buyer will be responsible for applicable network fees required to successfully conduct the transaction on the blockchain.

(iii) Any payment in cryptocurrency must be made within ten (10) business days of your receipt of the invoice from us, and payment must be made between the hours of 9:00am and 12:00pm Eastern Time, Monday through Friday (and not on a U.S. public holiday).

(iv) Payment must be made from an account or digital wallet in your name maintained with one of the following platforms: (1) Coinbase Custody Trust; (2) Coinbase, Inc. (including Coinbase, Coinbase Pro and Coinbase Prime accounts); (3) Fidelity Digital Assets Services, LLC; (4) Gemini Trust Company, LLC; or (5) Paxos Trust Company, LLC. Partial payments from multiple digital wallets will not be accepted, and we may require you to provide documentation to confirm that you own the wallet used to make payment.

(v) Payments in cryptocurrency will not be accepted other than in accordance with this Condition 8(b). If you make payment in cryptocurrency other than in accordance with Condition 8(b), including where we determine or reasonably believe, in our sole discretion, that any of your representations and warranties are inaccurate, incomplete or breached, we may, in our sole discretion, return those funds to you, hold you responsible for all third-party fees (including, without limitation, network fees, taxes, transfer fees, etc.), and require you to pay in the fiat currency of the sale. In addition, in the event we make any refund of Taxes to you and you paid such Taxes using cryptocurrency, you understand and agree that we may, at our sole discretion, refund you (1) the same amount(s) of the same cryptocurrency that you paid to us for such Taxes; (2) the amount(s) in fiat currency that we invoiced to you for such Taxes; or (3) the fiat currency equivalent at the time the refund is made of the amount(s) of cryptocurrency that you paid for such Taxes. In no circumstance will you be entitled to receive any appreciation on the value of the cryptocurrency that you provided to us as payment in connection with a refund.

(vi) Once you initiate a cryptocurrency transaction, the transaction cannot be reversed; this is inherent in the nature of cryptocurrencies and not a policy set by us. You are responsible for verifying that you have sent the correct amount to the correct digital wallet address.

(vii) If you make payment in cryptocurrency from a digital wallet or account, you represent and warrant the following: (1) you own the digital wallet and the cryptocurrency used to make payment; (2) the digital wallet or account is not directly or indirectly hosted, operated, or otherwise controlled by anyone that is the subject of Sanctions or located, resident, or organized in a Sanctioned Jurisdiction; (3) the cryptocurrency or any other assets in the digital wallet or account used for the bid or purchase were not sourced from anyone that is the subject of Sanctions or located, resident, or organized in a Sanctioned Jurisdiction; and (4) your payment in cryptocurrency will not cause (or otherwise result in) us, Sellers, or anyone else to violate any Sanctions, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, anti-bribery or anticorruption laws, or any other applicable laws. We may, in our sole discretion, refuse payment in cryptocurrency from any Buyer if we reasonably determine any of the Buyer’s representations or warranties are, or would be as a result of such payment, inaccurate, incomplete or breached.

(viii) We shall have no liability for any payment made by you in cryptocurrency that is not received by us for whatever reason.

(ix) You acknowledge the risks inherent to the use of cryptocurrency, including without limitation the risk of faulty or insufficient hardware, software, and internet connections; the risk of introduction or intrusion of malicious code or software; the risk of hacking or unauthorized access to your digital wallet or information stored therein, or of theft or diversion of funds therefrom; volatility and unstable or unfavorable exchange rates; and the risk of unfavorable regulatory intervention and/or tax treatment in relation to transaction in such currency. We will have no liability for any of the foregoing.

9. Consequences of Late- or Non-payment

(a) The Buyer is required to pay the full Purchase Price for a Lot and any applicable Buyer’s Expenses in cleared funds within five days of the auction. If the Buyer fails to do so without our prior agreement, the Buyer will be in default. In such case, without prejudice to any rights or remedies the Seller may have, we may in our sole discretion exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies in respect of each Lot for which the Buyer has failed to pay in full, to the fullest extent permitted by law, in addition to any and all other rights or remedies available to us or the Seller by law or in equity:

(i) store the Lot at our premises or, if the Lot is an NFT, in our or the Seller’s digital wallet, or elsewhere at the Buyer’s sole risk and expense;

(ii) cancel the sale of the Lot;

(iii) set off any amounts owed to the Buyer by a Sotheby’s Group Company against any amounts outstanding from the Buyer in respect of the Lot;

(iv) apply any payments made to us by the Buyer as part of the Purchase Price and Buyer’s Expenses towards such Lot or any other Lot purchased by the Buyer, or to any shortfall on the resale of any Lot pursuant to paragraph (viii) below, or to any damages suffered by us as a result of breach of contract by the Buyer;

(v) reject future bids from the Buyer or render such bids subject to payment of a deposit;

(vi) charge interest at the annual percentage rate of 6% above the prime rate, but in no event greater than the maximum rate permitted by law, from the date on which payment is due to the date the Purchase Price and relevant Buyer’s Expenses are received in cleared funds (both before and after judgement);

(vii) retain or exercise a lien over any of the Buyer’s property that is in the possession of a Sotheby’s Group Company, in which case we will inform the Buyer, and we may thereafter arrange the sale of such property and apply the proceeds to the amount outstanding;

(viii) resell the Lot at the Buyer’s expense either at auction or by private sale, with estimates and reserves set at our discretion, and in the event such resale is for less than the sum of the Purchase Price and applicable Buyer’s Expenses for that Lot, the Buyer will remain liable for the shortfall together with all costs incurred in such resale;

(ix) commence legal proceedings to recover the Purchase Price and Buyer’s Expenses for that Lot, or to claim damages for the Buyer’s breach of contract, together with interest and the costs of such proceedings on a full indemnity basis; and (x) release the name and address of the Buyer to the Seller to enable the Seller to commence legal proceedings to recover the amounts due and legal costs, and in such case, we will take reasonable steps to notify the Buyer prior to releasing such details to the Seller.

(b) In the event the Buyer fails to pay any or all of the Purchase Price for a Lot and we elect to pay the Seller any portion or all of the sale proceeds, the Buyer acknowledges that we will have all of the rights that the Seller would otherwise have against the Buyer for any such amount, whether at law, in equity, or under these Conditions of Business for Buyers.

(c) A defaulting Buyer will be deemed to have granted and assigned to us and each other Sotheby’s Group Company a continuing security interest of first priority in any property or money of or owing to such Buyer in the possession, custody or control of us or any other Sotheby’s Group Company, in each case whether at the time of the applicable sale, the default or if acquired at any time thereafter, and we and each other Sotheby’s Group Company may retain and apply such property or money as collateral security for the obligations due to us or to any other Sotheby’s Group Company. We and each other Sotheby’s Group Company will have all of the rights accorded a secured party under the New York Uniform Commercial Code. A defaulting Buyer hereby agrees that we and each other Sotheby’s Group Company may file financing statements under the New York Uniform Commercial Code without the Buyer’s signature.

10. COLLECTION AND DELIVERY OF PURCHASES

(a) The provisions of this Condition 10(a) apply to all Lots (or portions of Lots) that are not NFTs:

(i) The Buyer is obliged to arrange collection of purchased Lots no later than 30 calendar days after the date of sale, or if applicable, within the time stipulated in the relevant sale information available on our website.

(ii) Except as set out in this Condition 10(a)(ii), all packing and handling are at the Buyer’s risk. We will not be liable for any acts or omissions of third-party packers or shippers.

For Lots from a Wine & Spirits auction where we arrange for domestic shipping at your request on your behalf, we will charge you a non-refundable fee at a rate of 1% of the Purchase Price for all domestic shipments arranged. Such fee covers property handling and administration and bearing liability for loss or damage to the Property while in our possession. We will only be liable for breakage or loss during transit. All packages must be inspected upon receipt and breakage or loss reported to us immediately upon delivery of the property. We will not refund any shipping charges, packing charges, or fees.

(iii) If you request Sotheby’s to assist with shipping purchased Lots to you, we will include a shipping quote outlining the Buyer’s shipping costs (the “Buyer’s Shipping Quote”). For international Buyers, the Buyer’s Shipping Quote will be exclusive of any taxes or duties, and it is your responsibility to ascertain and pay all international duties, custom charges, taxes, charges and tariffs owed to the appropriate government entity or that otherwise need to be paid prior to shipment and/or delivery including any third-party charges necessary to facilitate shipment. Once you have accepted the Buyer’s Shipping Quote and we have received in full the Purchase Price, applicable Buyer’s Expenses and you have paid in full the amount stated in the Buyer’s Shipping Quote by the payment deadline, we will arrange shipment of the Lot to you to the address you provided on your account following conclusion of the sale.

Purchased Lots cannot be delivered to P.O. boxes, and we are unable to arrange delivery to those locations specified as excluded zones in the shipping costs calculator that is available on the Online Platform. If you request delivery of a Lot to any such destination, we reserve the right to require you to collect the Lot from us or to arrange delivery of the Lot by a third-party carrier.

(iv) If the Buyer pays the Purchase Price and Buyer’s Expenses but fails to collect a Lot within 30 calendar days of the conclusion of the auction, we will store the Lot at the Buyer’s expense and risk at our premises or with a third party. Regarding uncollected Lots from a Wine & Spirits auction, if a purchased Lot remains uncollected after 90 days, we may send it to our wine warehouse, upon which time applicable state and local sales tax will be charged.

The Buyer hereby agrees to the Virtual Cellar Terms of Use, Storage Terms of Use and Auto-Renewal Policy with regard to the storage of such Lot(s), which can be found at https:// www.sothebyswine.com/ny/storage

(v) If a purchased Lot is not collected within six months of the auction, the Buyer authorizes us, having given notice to the Buyer, to arrange a resale of the Lot by auction or private sale, with estimates and reserves at our discretion.

Any such sale conducted by a Sotheby’s Group Company will be conducted under the standard Conditions of Business for Sellers and the Conditions of Business for Buyers, if any, applicable to the relevant sale. If the Lot sells, we will be entitled to deduct from the sale proceeds our standard seller’s commission and any other costs we incur in selling the Lot, and any excess will be remitted to the Buyer.

(b) The provisions of this Condition 10(b) apply to all Lots (or portions of Lots) that are NFTs:

(i) In order to receive an NFT, you must have a digital wallet that is capable of supporting and accepting the NFT, that you own, and to which you have access. You understand and acknowledge that not all digital wallets can support storage of a non-fungible token, and that if your wallet does not support storage of the NFT purchased by you, you may not be able to access that NFT. If you fail to provide us with an address for a digital wallet that is capable of supporting and accepting the NFT within five business days of the conclusion of the sale, we may, in our sole discretion, treat the NFT as transferred to you for purposes of Condition 11(a)(iii), treat the NFT Lot as a Lot for which the Buyer has failed to pay in full for purposes of Condition 9, and hold you responsible for all resulting third-party fees (including, without limitation, custodial fees, insurance, network fees, taxes, transfer fees, etc.).

(ii) We or the Seller will mint or transfer the NFT to the digital wallet that you have specified, after you have met the conditions in Condition 8 and subject to any additional timing or criteria included in the Catalogue or other descriptions of the Lot. We or the Seller will transfer the NFT to the wallet address specified by you and are not responsible for

confirming that you have supplied us with the correct or a valid address. We and the Seller are not responsible if the transfer of the NFT to your wallet fails, unless such failure is the result of us sending the NFT to a wallet address other than the one provided by you.

11. RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOTS

(a) Risk and responsibility for a purchased Lot will transfer to the Buyer as follows:

(i) for Lots (or portions of Lots) that are not NFTs in live auctions: on the earlier of: (1) collection of the Lot, or (2) the 31st calendar day after the sale, or if applicable, the expiry of the time specified in the special sale information available on our website, except that risk and responsibility for wine or spirits casks will transfer to the Buyer upon the fall of the hammer. For any Lots stored at a third-party location and not available for collection from our premises, your provision to us of instructions authorizing the release to you or your agent shall constitute collection by the Buyer.

(ii) for Lots (or portions of Lots) that are not NFTs in timed auctions: (1) if we dispatch the Lot to the Buyer (using the method of shipping the Buyer specified for the Lot), when the Lot comes into the physical possession of the Buyer or the Buyer’s designated agent or (2) if collection by the Buyer is available, when the Buyer or the Buyer’s designated agent collects the Lot, except that in either of the foregoing, risk and responsibility for wine or spirits casks will transfer to the Buyer upon the fall of the hammer. If you choose to exercise any right you may have to cancel the contract for the purchase of the Lot (in accordance with the procedure set out at Condition 12 below), you acknowledge that the Lot is at your risk and that you should therefore insure the Lot against loss or damage until it is returned to us.

(iii) For Lots (or portions of Lots) that are NFTs: After transfer of the NFT to the digital wallet specified by you, you are responsible for secure storage of the NFT in the wallet or other storage mechanism you use to receive and/or hold the NFT. You are solely responsible for any risks associated with the transferring, creating, holding, storing, or use of NFTs or a digital wallet, as applicable, including network failures or disruptions; corrupted wallet files; viruses, phishing, bruteforcing, hacking, security breaches, mining attacks, or other means of attack against the NFT; risk of losing access to the NFT due to loss of private key(s); custodial or buyer error; regulatory interference in one or more jurisdictions; token taxation; personal information disclosure; uninsured losses; failure to provide appropriate maintenance (including without limitation hosting); and other unanticipated risks. Neither we nor the Seller will not be responsible for any such risks or losses.

(b) Once risk passes to the Buyer, the Buyer irrevocably releases us and each other Sotheby’s Group Company, our and their respective officers and employees, agents, warehouses and the Seller, from any and all claims, causes of action, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including but not limited to reasonable attorneys’ fees) for loss of or damage to the Lot.

(c) Before risk and responsibility for a purchased Lot transfers to the Buyer in accordance with this Condition 11, we assume liability for loss or damage to a Lot, subject to the exclusions set out in paragraph (d) below. In the event of loss or damage for which we have assumed liability, we will determine the extent of depreciation to the Lot, if any, caused by the loss or damage and compensate the Buyer in respect of that loss up to the amount of the Purchase Price paid by the Buyer for the Lot.

(d) We will not be liable for any loss or damage (1) caused by any process undertaken by independent contractors engaged with your consent, including but not limited to for restoration, conservation, framing or cleaning; (2) caused to frames or to glass covering prints, paintings or other flat works; or (3) caused by changes in humidity or temperature (as long as we take reasonable care in handling the Lot), normal wear and tear, gradual deterioration or inherent vice or defect (including woodworm), war, any act or acts of terrorism (as defined by our insurers), nuclear fission, radioactive contamination, or chemical, bio-chemical or electromagnetic weapons. If the Lot is an NFT, in addition to the above, we will not be liable for any loss related to damage or corruption to the Referenced Content, failure of the NFT to reference the Referenced Content, or loss of, or other security or persistence issues related to, the Referenced Content.

(e) Upon your receipt of payment from us for any loss or damage to a Lot in accordance with this Condition 11, you, on your own behalf and on behalf of your insurer(s), irrevocably release us and each other Sotheby’s Group Company, our and their respective officers and employees, agents, warehouses and the Seller from all liability for loss of or damage to such Lot and irrevocably waive all rights and claims that you might have against us or any other Sotheby’s Group Company, our or their respective officers or employees, agents, warehouses or the Seller in connection with the same.

12. CONSUMER CANCELLATION

(a) Timed Auction Cancellation of Purchase

(i) If you are a “Consumer” (namely a person acting for purposes that are wholly or mainly outside of your trade, business, craft or profession) who habitually resides in the European Union or United Kingdom and the Seller is a Trader” (namely a Seller acting for purposes relating to their trade, business, craft or profession, whether acting personally or through another person acting in the trader’s name or on the trader’s behalf), then you have the right to cancel your online purchase of goods (except for goods that are personalized or made to the Buyer’s specifications) (the “Consumer Cancellation Right”) for any reason during the period of 14 calendar days after you or your designated agent (other than the carrier) acquires physical possession of the Lot or, if the Lot is an NFT, after the date that you have submitted payment but before we or the Seller have initiated the transfer of the NFT to the wallet specified by you (the “Consumer Cancellation Period”). Once, however, we or the Seller have initiated the transfer of the NFT to the wallet specified by you, you agree that you will no longer have the right to cancel the sale under the terms of this Condition. To exercise the Consumer Cancellation Right in relation to a Lot, the Consumer must (1) notify us of intention to cancel by a clear statement (e.g. a letter sent by post, fax or email or you may use the model cancellation form provided in Condition 12(c)) prior to the end of the Consumer Cancellation Period, and (2) for Lots that are not NFTs, return the Lot to us in the same condition as when you or your representative received it, by no later than 14 calendar days after providing notice of intent to cancel.

(ii) You shall return the Lot or deliver it to us at such address as we may specify for the purpose, without undue delay and in any event no later than 14 calendar days from the day after which you notify us of your intention to cancel your purchase of the Lot. This deadline is met if you send back the Lot before the period of 14 calendar days has expired. You must bear the direct costs of returning the Lot. If we had arranged for the Lot to be delivered to you, we estimate that the cost of returning the Lot by the same means is likely to be similar to the cost of delivery, but it is not possible for us to be more accurate as to this cost due to the many variables involved in our worldwide business model and the means by which a return might be made.

(iii) If the foregoing conditions for exercising the Consumer Cancellation Right are met, we will reimburse the Buyer for Purchase Price, if paid, plus standard delivery charges, if we are required to do so in accordance with the Consumer Cancellation Right. We will not process the reimbursement unless and until the Lot is returned to us or you have supplied us with evidence of having returned the Lot to us.

(iv) We will make the reimbursement to the Buyer using the same method of payment as the Buyer used for the initial transaction, unless expressly agreed otherwise. We will not charge the Buyer any fee in connection with processing the reimbursement.

(v) We will not reimburse the Buyer for any supplementary costs that arose if you chose a type of delivery other than the least expensive type of standard delivery offered by us or any import duties you incur as a result of you returning the Lot to us. We are entitled to deduct from the reimbursement the amount of any loss in value of the Lot that is caused as a result of unnecessary handling by you.

(vi) If you exercise a Consumer Cancellation Right pursuant to this Condition 12 and you paid any amount(s) due using cryptocurrency, we may, at our sole discretion, refund you (1) the same amount(s) of the same cryptocurrency that you paid to us; (2) the amount(s) in fiat currency that we invoiced to you; or (3) the fiat currency equivalent, based on the exchange rate quoted by a financial entity designated by us, at the time the refund is made of the amount(s) of cryptocurrency that you paid. In no circumstance will you be entitled to receive any appreciation on the value of the cryptocurrency that you provided to us as payment in connection with a refund.

(b) Cancellation of Delivery Services

(i) If you are a Consumer who habitually resides in the European Union or United Kingdom, then you have the right to cancel the contract for any delivery services in connection with your purchase of a Lot (the “Services Cancellation Right”) for any reason during the period of 14 calendar days after the conclusion of the contract for delivery services (the “Services Cancellation Period”).

(ii) If you request us to begin performance of the delivery services during the Services Cancellation Period and subsequently decide to exercise your right to cancel the provision of services during the Services Cancellation Period, you shall pay us the cost of the services that have been performed by the time you exercise your cancellation right. We will make any reimbursement due to you not later than 14 days after the date on which we are informed about your decision to cancel the services. We will make the reimbursement to you using the same method of payment as you used for the initial transaction, unless expressly agreed otherwise. We will not charge any fee in connection with processing the reimbursement.

(c) To exercise a Consumer or Services Cancellation Right, you must notify us of your intention to cancel by a clear statement (e.g. a letter sent by post, fax or email) prior to the end of the Consumer or Services Cancellation Period. Alternatively, you may use the following model cancellation form:

To: Sotheby’s [insert the name of the company within the Sotheby’s Group conducting the relevant sale]

I/We* hereby give notice that I/We* cancel [my/our online purchase of the following goods[*]][the provision of the following delivery services [*]],

Ordered on [*]/received on [*],

Name of Consumer(s):

Address of Consumer(s):

Signature of Consumer(s) [only if the notification is in hard copy]

Date: [*] Delete as appropriate

13. EXCLUSIONS AND LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY

(a) Generally

(i) Neither we nor the Seller will be liable for errors or omissions in the glossary of terms, if any, or the Catalogue or other descriptions of the Lot, though if we discover a material error or omission in such materials prior to the auction, we will endeavor to provide a correction, time permitting.

(ii) We reserve the right to withdraw any Lot before the conclusion of the sale and will have no liability to you for such withdrawal. Regarding Experiences, we reserve the right to withdraw any Experience before or after the sale, and we will have no liability to you for such withdrawal.

(iii) We offer the Online Platforms as a convenience to clients. The application that enables participation via the Online Platforms is optimized for broadband connectivity (DSL or cable modem). Broadband or other internet capacity constraints, corporate firewalls and other technical problems beyond our reasonable control may create difficulties for some users including, for example, in relation to accessing an auction via the Online Platforms and in maintaining continuity of such access. Neither we nor the Seller will be liable to you for any failure to execute bids through our Online Platforms, or errors or omissions in connection therewith, including, without limitation, errors or failures caused by (1) any loss of connection between you and our Online Platforms; (2) a breakdown on or problem with our Online Platforms or other technical services; or (3) a breakdown or problem with your internet connection, computer, mobile device or system.

(iv) We are not liable to you for any acts or omissions in connection with the conduct of the auction or for any matter relating to the sale of any Lot, other than as set out in the Authenticity Guarantee, or as may be required by applicable law.

(v) The Seller of any Lot is not liable to you for any acts or omissions in connection with any matter relating to the sale of such Lot, other than a breach of the express representations and warranties given by the Seller.

(vi) Unless we own a Lot offered for sale, we are not responsible for any breach of these Conditions of Business for Buyers by the Seller.

(vii) Neither you nor we nor the Seller will be liable for any special, consequential, indirect, incidental or punitive damages.

(viii) With respect to Experiences, no Sotheby’s Group Company, nor our and their respective officers and employees, will be liable for any negligent act or omission of any person or entity providing any goods or services arising out of or in connection with the fulfillment of an Experience or the Buyer’s participation in the Experience, or for any claims, causes of action, liabilities, damages, losses, or expenses (including but not limited to reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or in connection with the Buyer’s interaction with the Seller or any third party in connection with an Experience.

(ix) Without prejudice to Conditions 13(a)(i)-(viii), our and the Seller’s aggregate liability to you under these Conditions of Business for Buyers for any claim relating to a Lot will not exceed the amount of the Purchase Price of the Lot actually paid, except in the case of our willful misconduct or fraud, or in the case of death or personal injury caused by our negligent acts or omissions.

(b) In addition to the terms set forth in Condition 13(a) above and without limiting Condition 3(j) above in any way, NFTs shall be subject to the additional terms in this Condition 13(b).

(i) We are only selling the ownership rights to the NFT and in no way are we responsible for any resales or secondary market sales of the NFT or the Referenced Content or any iterations of the same. Any copyright(s) in and to the NFT and Referenced Content, including but not limited to, any reproduction rights in any Referenced Content, remain with the creator(s) thereof, and the purchase of the NFT does not constitute an assignment of any copyright(s) in and to the NFT or Referenced Content. If you purchase an NFT, then, including without limitation, these Conditions of Business for Buyers, and any Listing Terms, we hereby grant you a worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use, copy and display the NFT and the Referenced Content for such purchased NFT solely for the following purposes: (a) for your own personal, non-commercial use; (b) as part of a marketplace that permits the purchase and sale of your NFTs; or (c) as part of a third party website or application that permits the inclusion, involvement, or participation of your NFT. This license only lasts as long as you are the valid owner and holder of the NFT associated with the Referenced Content. If you sell or transfer the NFT to another person, this license will transfer to such other owner or holder of the NFT, and you will no longer have the benefits of such license. All rights not expressly granted herein are reserved.

(ii) You agree that you may not, nor permit any third party to do or attempt to do any of the following without our (or, as applicable, our licensors’) express prior written consent in each case: (a) modify the Referenced Content for NFTs in any way, including, without limitation, the shapes, designs, drawings, attributes, or color schemes; (b) use the Referenced Content for your NFT to advertise, market, or sell any third party product or service; (c) use the Referenced Content for your NFT for any derogatory or defamatory purpose that creates harmful associations or a risk of harm, damage or liability to any of the Sotheby’s Group Companies, e.g., in connection with images, videos, or other forms of media that depict hatred, intolerance, violence, cruelty, or anything else that could reasonably be found to constitute hate speech or otherwise infringe upon the rights of others; (d) sell, distribute for commercial gain (including, without limitation, giving away in the hopes of eventual commercial gain), or otherwise commercialize merchandise that includes, contains, or consists of the Referenced Content for your NFT; (e) attempt to trademark, copyright, or otherwise acquire additional intellectual property rights in or to the Referenced Content for your NFT; (f) create, sell or attempt to create or sell fractionalized interests in the Referenced Content or any NFT; or (g) otherwise utilize the Referenced Content for your NFT for your or any third party’s commercial benefit.

(iii) If the Referenced Content associated with your NFT contains third party copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, know-how, patent rights or any other intellectual property rights recognized in any country or jurisdiction in the world (collectively, “Third Party IP”) (e.g., licensed intellectual property from any rights holder, such as music performance

rights or publicity rights), you understand and agree as follows: (a) you will not have the right to use such Third Party IP in any way except as incorporated in the Referenced Content for your NFT, and subject to the license and restrictions contained herein; (b) depending on the nature of the license granted from the owner of the Third Party IP, we may need to (and reserve every right to) pass through additional restrictions on your ability to use the Referenced Content; (c) to the extent that we inform you of such additional restrictions, you will be responsible for complying with all such restrictions from the date that you receive the notice, and that failure to do so will be deemed a breach of the license contained herein; (d) such third party owns and retains all right, title and interest in and to such Third Party IP except as expressly licensed hereunder; and (e) the licensor of such Third Party IP shall be a third-party beneficiary of (but not a party to), and entitled to enforce, these Conditions of Business for Buyers against you with respect to such Third Party IP.

(iv) Transfer of ownership to an NFT will not guarantee that you will continue to have access to the Referenced Content to which it relates and you further acknowledge and agree to the risks associated with purchasing, using, transferring, and owning NFTs, as applicable, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, network, server, or blockchain failures, malfunctions, or disruptions; risk of losing access to the NFT due to lost or forgotten private key(s) or password(s) or corrupted wallet files; mis-typed addresses or incorrectly constructed transactions; viruses, phishing, bruteforcing, hacking, security breaches, mining attacks, or other means of cyber-security attack; custodial or buyer error; regulatory interference in one or more jurisdictions; token taxation; personal information disclosure; uninsured losses; and other unanticipated risks.

(v) Neither you nor we nor the Seller will be liable for any special, consequential, indirect, incidental or punitive damages, including, as applicable, damages relating to any of the risks or disclaimed attributes set forth in Condition 13(b)(iii). In addition to the above, we will not be liable for any loss whatsoever related to damage or corruption to the Referenced Content, failure of the NFT to reference the Referenced Content, or loss of, or other security or persistence issues related to, the Referenced Content.

(vi) You have sufficient understanding of NFTs, digital wallets and other storage mechanisms, cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and the use, characteristics, functionality, programming, and/or other material characteristics of all of the foregoing, to fully understand and agree to these Conditions of Business for Buyers and the disclaimers and risks outlined herein, or have consulted with professional advisors in relation to the foregoing such that any participation by you in the auction of any NFT constitutes an informed acceptance of such disclaimers and risks.

14. DATA PROTECTION

(a) We will hold and process your personal information and may share it with another Sotheby’s Group Company for use as described in, and in line with, our Privacy Policy published on our website https://www.sothebys.com/privacy-policy or available on request by email to enquiries@sothebys.com.

(b) We may film auctions or other activities on any Sotheby’s Group Company’s premises and such recordings may be transmitted over the internet via our website or other Online Platforms or social media. Online and telephone bids may be recorded and you agree to such recording.

15. AUTHENTICITY GUARANTEE

(a) We, as principal, provide an Authenticity Guarantee to the Buyer, subject to the following terms and conditions, that the information regarding authorship, period or origin set out in the Guarantee Line (as defined) is correct. The “Guarantee Line” for each Lot is set out on the respective Lot page in the online Catalogue on our website and, where applicable, in the Guarantee Line Schedule in the hardcopy Catalogue (if any). Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Condition 15, with respect to NFTs, unless otherwise set forth on the respective Lot page on our website, the Guarantee Line is regarding the authorship of the Referenced Content, if any. The Guarantee Line may be amended by a salesroom or website posting or announcement. Buyers should refer to the glossary of terms, if any, for an explanation of terminology used in the Guarantee Line.

(b) The Authenticity Guarantee is provided for a period of five years after the date of the auction (the “Guarantee Period”), except as otherwise provided below.

(c) The Authenticity Guarantee is provided solely for the benefit of the Buyer and cannot be transferred to any third party.

(d) To claim under the Authenticity Guarantee, the Buyer must:

(i) notify us in writing within three months of receiving any information that causes the Buyer to question the correctness of the Guarantee Line and in any event by no later than the expiry of the Guarantee Period, specifying the Lot number and the date of the sale in which it was purchased, and providing all the information in the Buyer’s possession in support of the Buyer’s claim; and (ii) return the Lot to us or, at our direction, to the Seller or another third party, in the same condition as at the date of sale to the Buyer and be able to transfer good title in the Lot, free from any third-party interest or claim(s) arising after the date of the sale.

In addition, we may also require the Buyer to obtain at the Buyer’s cost the reports of two independent and recognized experts in the field, mutually acceptable to us and the Buyer. We will not be bound by any such reports and we reserve the right to seek additional expert advice at our expense.

(e) We reserve, in our absolute discretion as principal, the right to reject a claim under the Authenticity Guarantee if:

(i) the Guarantee Line was in accordance with the opinions of scholars and experts, which are generally accepted and known or privately expressed to us, as at the date of the sale, or the Lot description indicated that there was a conflict of such opinions;

(ii) the only method of establishing that the Guarantee Line was incorrect at the date of the sale would have been by means or processes not then generally available or accepted, unreasonably expensive or impractical to use, or likely to have caused damage or loss of value to the Lot;

(iii) the manner in which the Guarantee Line is said to be incorrect is due only to damage, restoration, modification work of any kind (including repainting or over-painting) present at the time of the sale, or the inability of the manufacturer, maker or relevant archives to confirm the correctness of the Guarantee Line; or

(iv) the manner in which the Guarantee Line is incorrect does not result in a material loss in value of the Lot.

(f) Subject to the above, if we reasonably determine that the Guarantee Line in respect of a Lot is not correct, we will ensure that the sale is rescinded, and that the Buyer is refunded the Purchase Price in the currency of the sale.

(g) The Buyer acknowledges and agrees that rescission of the sale and the refund of the Purchase Price is the Buyer’s sole remedy available under the Authenticity Guarantee and is in lieu of any other remedy that might otherwise be available to the Buyer as a matter of law or in equity.

(h) Additional provisions specific to Lots in Jewelry, Wine & Spirits, Tea and Books & Manuscripts auctions:

(i) With respect to Lots containing any gemstone, jade or pearls, the Authenticity Guarantee is that the gemstone or pearls are genuine or of natural origin, and the Guarantee Period for any claim that the gemstone or pearls are not genuine or of natural origin is 21 days from the date of the sale.

(ii) With respect to Lots sold in a Wine & Spirits or Tea auction, the Authenticity Guarantee is that the producer and vintage (and for Tea, type) is as stated in the Guarantee Line, and the Guarantee Period is 21 days from the date of the auction.

(iii) With respect to Lots sold in a Books & Manuscripts auction, the Authenticity Guarantee also includes a guarantee to the Buyer for a Guarantee Period of 21 days from the date of the auction that, subject to Conditions 15(c)-(g), the Lot’s text and/or illustrations are not materially defective. Subject to the following exceptions, if we reasonably determine that the text or illustrations in a Lot are materially defective, we will ensure that the sale is rescinded, and that the Buyer is refunded the Purchase Price in the currency of the sale. We reserve the right to reject a claim under this Condition 15(h) if:

(1) the Lot comprises an atlas, an extra-illustrated book, a volume with fore-edged paintings, a periodical publication or a print or drawing;

(2) in the case of a manuscript, the Lot was not described in the Catalogue as complete;

(3) the defect complained of was mentioned in the Lot description or the item complained of was sold un-named in a Lot;

(4) the defect complained of is not a defect in text or illustration, such as without limitation, damage to bindings, stains, foxing, marginal wormholes, lack of blank leaves or half titles or other conditions not affecting the completeness of the text or illustration, lack of list of plates, inserted advertisements, cancels or any subsequently published volume, supplement, appendix or plates or error in the enumeration of the plates, or is based on the age of handcoloring in maps, atlases or books; or

(5) the manner in which the text or illustrations are defective does not result in a material loss in value of the Lot.

(i) For the avoidance of any doubt, the Authenticity Guarantee does not limit any rights or remedies that may be available to the Buyer under the applicable law and that cannot by law be excluded or limited by these Conditions of Business for Buyers.

16. MISCELLANEOUS

(a) You shall provide to us, upon our request, verification of identity and any additional information required to comply with our Know Your Client requirements, applicable law or to evidence your authority to enter into these Conditions of Business for Buyers. If you are an agent acting on behalf of a principal, you shall also disclose to us the identity of the principal and provide to us, upon our request, verification of identity and any additional information required to comply with our Know Your Client requirements, applicable law with respect to you and the principal or to evidence your authority to bid on behalf of and to bind the principal. We reserve the right to seek identification of the source of funds received. If we have not completed our enquiries in respect of Know Your Client, Sanctions, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorist financing or other checks as we consider appropriate concerning you (or your principal, if applicable) to our satisfaction or if we are not satisfied in our sole discretion with the results of such enquiries, we may, in our sole discretion, prohibit you or the principal from bidding, or not complete, cancel or rescind the sale of any Lot, including refusing or returning any payment, as appropriate, and take any further action required or permitted under applicable law without any liability to you.

(b) You are personally liable for your bid. If you are an agent acting on behalf of a principal, you and your principal are bound by the terms of these Conditions of Business for Buyers and jointly and severally assume your obligations and liabilities under them.

(c) We own the exclusive copyright to all images and written material we produce relating to each Lot. You cannot use them without our prior written permission. We may use them as we deem appropriate, to the extent permitted by law, before, during or after the sale of a Lot.

(d) The Conditions of Business for Buyers, including the Authenticity Guarantee, and the express representations and warranties and indemnity given by the Seller together are the entire agreement between us, the Seller and you with respect to the subject matter hereof and supersedes all prior or contemporaneous written, oral or implied understandings, representations or agreements relating to the subject matter of this agreement. If any part of this agreement is deemed invalid or unenforceable, such invalidity or unenforceability will not affect the remaining provisions, which will remain in full force and effect. No act, omission or delay by us shall be deemed a waiver or release of any of our rights.

(e) These Conditions of Business for Buyers are binding upon, and inures to the benefit of, you, your estate, heirs, executors, devisees, representatives, administrators, successors and permitted assigns.

(f) You may not assign or delegate your rights or obligations under these Conditions of Business without our prior written consent.

(g) Notices to us should be in writing and addressed to the department in charge of the sale, quoting the reference number specified for the auction.

17. LAW AND JURISDICTION

This agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of New York. In the event of a dispute arising from or relating to this agreement, you agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state courts of and the federal courts sitting in the State and County of New York, though we will retain the right to bring

proceedings in a court other than the state and federal courts sitting in the State and County of New York.

Last Modified August 30, 2022

BUYING AT AUCTION

The following will help in understanding the auction buying process as well as some of the terms and symbols commonly used in an auction catalogue. All bidders should read the Conditions of Business for Buyers, as well as the Glossary or any other notices. By bidding at auction, bidders are bound by the Conditions of Business for Buyers, as amended by any oral announcement or posted notices.

1. SYMBOL KEY

□  Reserves

Unless indicated by a box (□), all lots in this catalogue are offered subject to a reserve. A reserve is the confidential minimum hammer price at which a lot will be sold. The reserve is generally set at a percentage of the low estimate and will not exceed the low estimate of the lot. If any lots in the catalogue are offered without reserve, such lots will be designated by a box (□). If every lot in a catalogue is offered without a reserve, the Conditions of Business for Buyers will so state and this symbol will not be used for each lot.

○  Guaranteed Property

The seller of lots with this symbol has been guaranteed a minimum price from one auction or a series of auctions. This guarantee may be provided by Sotheby’s or jointly by Sotheby’s and a third party. Sotheby’s and any third parties providing a guarantee jointly with Sotheby’s benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful. A third party providing a guarantee jointly with Sotheby’s may provide an irrevocable bid, or otherwise bid, on the guaranteed property.

If this auction has a printed catalogue, a PDF catalogue or both and the guaranteed property symbol for a lot is not included in such catalogue or if there is no printed catalogue or PDF catalogue and the guaranteed property symbol for a lot is not included at the time the digital catalogue is initially available for viewing, then Sotheby’s will notify bidders that there is a guarantee on the lot by one or more of the following means: the lot’s specific webpage will be updated to include the guaranteed property symbol, a notice will be added to the Sotheby’s webpage for the auction, or a pre-sale or pre-lot announcement will be made indicating that there is a guarantee on the lot.

△ Property in which Sotheby’s has an Ownership Interest

Lots with this symbol indicate that Sotheby’s owns the lot in whole or in part or has an economic interest in the lot equivalent to an ownership interest.

⋑ Irrevocable Bids

Lots with this symbol indicate that a party has provided Sotheby’s with an irrevocable bid on the lot that will be executed during the sale at a value that ensures that the lot will sell. The irrevocable bidder, who may bid in excess of the irrevocable bid, may be compensated for providing the irrevocable bid by receiving a contingent fee, a fixed fee or both. From time to time, a Sotheby’s shareholder may be an irrevocable bidder. If the irrevocable bidder is the successful bidder, any contingent fee, fixed fee or both (as applicable) for providing the irrevocable bid may be netted against the irrevocable bidder’s obligation to pay the full purchase price for the lot and the purchase price reported for the lot shall be net of any such fees. From time to time, Sotheby’s may enter into irrevocable bid agreements that cover multiple lots. In such instances, the compensation Sotheby’s will pay the irrevocable bidder is allocated to the lots for which the irrevocable bidder is not the successful purchaser.

Under such circumstances, the total compensation to the irrevocable bidder will not exceed the total buyer’s premium and other amounts paid to Sotheby’s in respect of any lots for which the irrevocable bidder is not the successful bidder. If this auction has a printed catalogue, a PDF catalogue or both and the irrevocable bid is not secured until after such catalogue is finalized or if there is no printed catalogue or PDF catalogue and the irrevocable bid is not secured until after the digital catalogue is initially available for viewing, then Sotheby’s will notify bidders that there is an irrevocable

bid on the lot by one or more of the following means: the lot’s specific webpage will be updated to include the irrevocable bid symbol, a notice will be added to the Sotheby’s webpage for the auction, or a pre-sale or pre-lot announcement will be made indicating that there is an irrevocable bid on the lot.

From time to time, Sotheby’s or any affiliated company may provide the irrevocable bidder with financing related to the irrevocable bid. In addition, from time to time, an irrevocable bidder may have knowledge of the amount of a guarantee. If the irrevocable bidder is advising anyone with respect to the lot, Sotheby’s requires the irrevocable bidder to disclose his or her financial interest in the lot. If an agent is advising you or bidding on your behalf with respect to a lot identified as being subject to an irrevocable bid, you should request that the agent disclose whether or not he or she has a financial interest in the lot.

⊻ Interested Parties

Lots with this symbol indicate that parties with a direct or indirect interest in the lot may be bidding on the lot, including (i) the beneficiary of an estate selling the lot, or (ii) the joint owner of a lot. If the interested party is the successful bidder, they will be required to pay the full buyer’s premium and overhead premium. In certain instances, interested parties may have knowledge of the reserve. If this auction has a printed catalogue, a PDF catalogue or both and the interested party’s possible participation in the sale Is not known until after such catalogue is finalized or if there is no printed catalogue or PDF catalogue and the interested party’s possible participation in the sale Is not known until after the digital catalogue is initially available for viewing, then Sotheby’s will notify bidders that an interested party may bid on the lot by one or more of the following means: the lot’s specific webpage will be updated to include the interested parties symbol, a notice will be added to the Sotheby’s webpage for the auction, or a pre-sale or pre-lot announcement will be made indicating that an interested party may bid on the lot.

◉  Restricted Materials

Lots with this symbol have been identified at the time of cataloguing as containing organic material which may be subject to restrictions regarding import or export. The information is made available for the convenience of bidders and the absence of the symbol is not a warranty that there are no restrictions regarding import or export of the Lot. Please also refer to the section on Endangered Species in the information on Buying at Auction.

∏ Monumental

Lots with this symbol may, in our opinion, require special handling or shipping services due to size or other physical considerations. Bidders are advised to inspect the lot and to contact Sotheby’s prior to the sale to discuss any specific shipping requirements.

✧ Premium Lot

In order to bid on “Premium Lots” (in print catalogue or ✧ in the lot’s specific webpage) you may be required to complete a Premium Lot pre-registration application. You must arrange for Sotheby’s to receive your pre-registration application at least three working days before the sale. Please bear in mind that we are unable to obtain financial references over weekends or public holidays. Sotheby’s decision whether to accept any pre-registration application shall be final. If all lots in the catalogue are “Premium Lots”, a Special Notice will be included to this effect and this symbol will not be used.

⊖ US Import Tariff

Please note that this lot is subject to an import tariff. The amount of the import tariff due is a percentage of the value declared upon entry into the United States. The amount of the import tariff is not based on the final hammer price. The buyer should contact Sotheby’s prior to the sale to determine the amount of the import tariff. If the buyer instructs Sotheby’s to arrange shipping of the lot to a foreign address, the buyer will not be required to pay the import tariff. If the buyer instructs Sotheby’s to arrange shipping of the lot to a domestic address, or if the buyer collects the property in person, or if the buyer arranges their own shipping (whether domestically or internationally), the buyer will be required to pay the import tariff. The import tariff is

included in the purchase price and, where applicable, sales tax will be added to the purchase price as per our Sales and Use Tax section.

Cryptocurrency Payments

We will accept cryptocurrency as payment for lots with this symbol, within the parameters specified in the Conditions of Business for Buyers (or where applicable, in the Conditions of Sale and Additional Conditions of Sale for Payment by Cryptocurrency) applicable to the sale and only on the terms and conditions set out therein as of the date of the sale. Please review those terms and conditions if you are interested in paying in cryptocurrency, and contact Post Sale Services for more information.

2. BEFORE THE AUCTION

Bidding in advance of the live auction For certain sales, you may bid in advance of the live auction (“Advance Bids”) on sothebys.com or the Sotheby’s App. In order to do so, you must register an account with Sotheby’s and provide requested information. Once you have done so, navigate to your desired lot, and click the “Place Bid” button. You may bid at or above the starting bid displayed on the Online Platforms. Please note that we reserve the right to amend the starting bid prior to the start of the live auction. You may also input your maximum bid which, upon confirmation, will be executed automatically up to this predefined maximum value, in response to other bids, including bids placed by Sotheby’s on behalf of the seller up to the amount of the reserve (if applicable). The current leading bid will be visible to all bidders; the value and status of your maximum bid will be visible only to you. If the status of your bid changes, you will receive notifications via email and push (if you have enabled push notifications) leading up to the live auction. You may raise your maximum bid at any time in advance of the live auction. Please note in certain circumstances, clients who have been outbid may be reinstated as the leading bidder and will receive notification via email or push notifications (if enabled on your device).

The Catalogue  The catalogue will help familiarize you with property being offered at the designated auction. Prospective bidders should consult sothebys.com for the most up to date cataloguing of the property in this catalogue.

Estimates Each lot in the catalogue is given a low and high estimate, indicating to a prospective buyer a range in which the lot might sell at auction. When possible, the estimate is based on previous auction records of comparable pieces. The estimates are determined several months before a sale and are therefore subject to change upon further research of the property, or to reflect market conditions or currency fluctuations. Estimates should not be relied upon as a representation or prediction of actual selling prices.

Provenance In certain circumstances, Sotheby’s may include in the catalogue the history of ownership of a work of art if such information contributes to scholarship or is otherwise well known and assists in distinguishing the work of art. However, the identity of the seller or previous owners may not be disclosed for a variety of reasons. For example, such information may be excluded to accommodate a seller’s request for confidentiality or because the identity of prior owners is unknown given the age of the work of art.

Specialist Advice Prospective bidders may be interested in specific information not included in the catalogue description of a lot. For additional information, please contact either a Sotheby’s specialist in charge of the sale, or Sotheby’s Client Services Department. You may also request a condition report from the specialist in charge.

Viewing Property will be available for viewing at an exhibition of the auction property or by appointment only at our New York premises or such other location as we may indicate from time to time as indicated on the webpage for the sale.

Salesroom Notices Salesroom notices amend the catalogue description after our catalogue is available. They are announced by the auctioneer and/or posted on the sale page. Please take note of them.

Registration Sotheby’s may require such necessary financial references, guarantees, deposits and/or such other security, in its absolute discretion, as security for your bid. If you are not successful on any lot, Sotheby’s will arrange for a refund (subject to any right of set off) of the deposit amount paid by you without interest within 14 working

days of the date of the sale. Any exchange losses or fees associated with the refund shall be borne by you.

Registration to bid on Premium Lots must be done at least 3 business days prior to the sale.

3. DURING THE AUCTION

The Auction Auctions are open to the public (subject to any governmental health or safety restrictions) without any admission fee or obligation to bid. The auctioneer introduces the objects for sale — known as “lots” — in numerical order as listed in the catalogue. Unless otherwise noted in the catalogue, on the sale page or by an announcement at the auction, Sotheby’s acts as agent on behalf of the seller and does not permit the seller to bid on his or her own property. It is important for all bidders to know that the auctioneer may open the bidding on any lot by placing a bid on behalf of the seller. The auctioneer may further bid on behalf of the seller, up to the amount of the reserve, by placing responsive or consecutive bids for a lot. The auctioneer will not place consecutive bids on behalf of the seller above the reserve.

Absentee Bidding for Live Auctions If you do not wish to bid online during a live auction, you may place your bid ahead of time, either via sothebys.com or the App, or by submitting your bid in writing to the Bids Department. Once the live auction opens, when the lot that you are interested in comes up for sale, the auctioneer will execute the bid on your behalf, making every effort to purchase the item for as little as possible and never exceeding your limit. This service is free and confidential.

Advance Bidding for Live Auctions For certain live sales, where Advance Bids are accepted, if you submit an “Advance Bid” (as described above in “BEFORE THE AUCTION”), and your bid is not executed up to its maximum value before the live auction begins, your bid will continue to be executed automatically on your behalf during the live auction up to your predetermined maximum bid. You may also continue to bid via the Online Platforms at the next increment above your maximum bid. Online bidding may not be available for Premium Lots.

In Person Bidding for Live Auctions For the most up-todate information regarding in person bidding, please call Sotheby’s or visit Sothebys.com. Bidders are encouraged to submit bids online on Sothebys.com or through the Sotheby’s App.

Telephone Bidding for Live Auctions In some circumstances, we offer the ability to place bids by telephone live to a Sotheby’s representative on the auction floor. Please contact the Bid Department prior to the sale to make arrangements or to answer any questions you may have. Telephone bids are accepted only at Sotheby’s discretion and at the caller’s risk. Calls may also be recorded at Sotheby’s discretion. By bidding on the telephone, prospective buyers consent thereto.

Online Bidding  Bidders are encouraged to submit bids online on Sothebys.com or through the Sotheby’s App. For information about registering to bid on sothebys.com or through the Sotheby’s App, please see sothebys.com. Online bidding may not be available for Premium Lots.

Employee Bidding Sotheby’s employees may bid in a Sotheby’s auction only if the employee does not know the reserve and if the employee fully complies with Sotheby’s internal rules governing employee bidding.

Economic Sanctions The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union maintain economic and trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries, groups and organizations. There may be restrictions on the import into the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union of certain items originating in sanctioned countries. The purchaser’s inability to import any item into these countries or any other country as a result of these or other restrictions shall not justify cancellation or rescission of the sale or any delay in payment. Please check with the specialist department if you are uncertain as to whether a lot is subject to these import restrictions, or any other restrictions on importation or exportation.

Hammer Price and the Buyer’s Premium and the Overhead Premium  For lots which are sold, the last price for a lot as announced by the auctioneer is the hammer price. A buyer’s premium and an overhead premium will be added to the hammer price and are payable by the purchaser as part of the total purchase price. The applicable buyer’s premium and

overhead premium rates are as set forth in the Conditions of Business for Buyers.

Currency Board As a courtesy to bidders, a currency board is operated in many salesrooms. It displays the lot number and current bid in both U.S. dollars and foreign currencies. Exchange rates are approximations based on recent exchange rate information and should not be relied upon as a precise invoice amount. Sotheby’s assumes no responsibility for any error or omission in foreign or United States currency amounts shown.

Results  Sale results are available on sothebys.com and on the Sotheby’s App.

International Auctions If you need assistance placing bids, obtaining condition reports or receiving auction results for a Sotheby’s sale outside the United States, please contact our International Client Services Department.

4. AFTER THE AUCTION

Payment If your bid is successful, your invoice will be mailed to you. The final price is determined by adding the buyer’s premium, overhead premium and any other applicable charges to the hammer price on a per-lot basis. Sales tax, where applicable, will be charged on the entire amount. Payment is due in full immediately after the sale. However, under certain circumstances, Sotheby’s may, in its sole discretion, offer bidders an extended payment plan. Such a payment plan may provide an economic benefit to the bidder. Credit terms should be requested at least one business day before the sale. However, there is no assurance that an extended payment plan will be offered. Please contact Post Sale Services or the specialist in charge of the sale for information on credit arrangements for a particular lot. Please note that Sotheby’s will not accept payments for purchased lots from any party other than the purchaser, unless otherwise agreed between the purchaser and Sotheby’s prior to the sale.

Payment by Cash It is against Sotheby’s general policy to accept payments in the form of cash or cash equivalents.

Payment by Credit Cards Sotheby’s accepts payment by credit card for Visa, MasterCard, and American Express only. Credit card payments may not exceed $50,000 per sale. Payment by credit card may be made (a) online at https:// www.sothebys.com/en/invoice-payment.html, (b) through the Sotheby’s App, (c) by calling in to Post Sale Services at +1 212 606 7444, or (d) in person at Sotheby’s premises at the address noted in the catalogue (subject to any governmental health or safety restrictions). Please contact Post Sale Services for more information regarding paying in person.

Payment by Check  Please contact Post Sale Services for information regarding payment by check.

Payment by Wire Transfer To pay for a purchase by wire transfer, please refer to the payment instructions on the invoice provided by Sotheby’s or contact Post Sale Services to request instructions.

Sales and Use Tax New York sales tax is charged on the hammer price, buyer’s premium, overhead premium and any other applicable charges on any property picked up or delivered in New York State, regardless of the state or country in which the purchaser resides or does business.

Purchasers who wish to use their own shipper who is not a considered a “common carrier” by the New York Department of Taxation and Finance will be charged New York sales tax on the entire charge regardless of the destination of the property. Please refer to “Information on Sales and Use Tax Related to Purchases at Auction”.

Collection and Delivery

Post Sale Services + 1 212 606 7444

FAX: + 1 212 606 7043

uspostsaleservices@sothebys.com

All collections and deliveries for purchased property will be handled by Post Sale Services in coordination with purchasers after the auction. Unless otherwise agreed by Sotheby’s, all property must be removed from our or our vendor’s premises (as indicated on the invoice) by the purchaser at his expense not later than 30 calendar days following the close of the auction. As a reminder your property cannot be released until payment has been received and cleared.

Shipping Services Sotheby’s offers a comprehensive shipping service to meet all of your requirements. If you received a shipping quotation or have any questions about the services we offer please contact us.

Collecting your Property All collections and deliveries for purchased property will be handled by Post Sale Services in coordination with purchasers after the auction. Unless otherwise agreed by Sotheby’s, all property must be removed from our or our vendor’s premises (as indicated on the invoice) by the purchaser at his expense not later than 30 calendar days following the close of the auction. As a courtesy to purchasers who come to Sotheby’s to collect property, Sotheby’s will assist in the packing of lots, although Sotheby’s may, in the case of fragile articles, choose not to pack or otherwise handle a purchase.

If you are using your own shipper to collect property from Sotheby’s, please provide a letter of authorization and kindly instruct your shipper that they must provide a Bill of Lading prior to collection. Both documents must be sent to Post Sale Services prior to collection.

The Bill of Lading must include: the purchaser’s full name, the full delivery address including the street name and number, city and state or city and country, the sale and lot number.

Sotheby’s will contact your shipper within 24 hours of receipt of the Bill of Lading to confirm the date and time that your property can be collected. Property will not be released without this confirmation and your shipper must bring the same Bill of Lading that was faxed to Sotheby’s when collecting. All property releases are subject to the receipt of cleared funds.

Endangered Species Certain property sold at auction, for example, items made of or incorporating plant or animal materials such as coral, crocodile, ivory, whalebone, tortoiseshell, rhinoceros horn, rosewood, etc., irrespective of age or value, may require a license or certificate prior to exportation and additional licenses or certificates upon importation to another country. Sotheby’s suggests that buyers check on their government wildlife import requirements prior to placing a bid. Please note that the ability to obtain an export license or certificate does not ensure the ability to obtain an import license or certificate in another country, and vice versa. It is the purchaser’s responsibility to obtain any export or import licenses and/ or certificates as well as any other required documentation. In the case of denial of any export or import license or of delay in the obtaining of such licenses, the purchaser is still responsible for making on-time payment of the total purchase price for the lot.

Although licenses can be obtained to export some types of endangered species, other types may not be exported at all, and other types may not be resold in the United States. Upon request, Sotheby’s is willing to assist the purchaser in attempting to obtain the appropriate licenses and/or certificates. However, there is no assurance that an export license or certificate can be obtained. Please check with the specialist department or the Shipping Department if you are uncertain as to whether a lot is subject to these export/ import license and certificate requirements, or any other restrictions on exportation.

The Art Loss Register As part of Sotheby’s efforts to support only the legitimate art market and to combat the illegitimate market in stolen property, Sotheby’s has retained the Art Loss Register to check all uniquely identifiable items offered for sale in this catalogue that are estimated at more than the equivalent of US$1,500 against the Art Loss Register’s computerized database of objects reported as stolen or lost. The Art Loss Register is pleased to provide purchasers with a certificate confirming that a search has been made. All inquiries regarding search certificates should be directed to The Art Loss Register, First Floor, 63-66 Hatten Garden, London EC1N 8LE or by email at artloss@ artloss.com. The Art Loss Register does not guarantee the provenance or title of any catalogued item against which they search and will not be liable for any direct or consequential losses of any nature howsoever arising. This statement and the ALR’s service do not affect your rights and obligations under the Conditions of Business for Buyers applicable to the sale.

IMPORTANT NOTICES

Property Collection All collections and deliveries for purchased property will be handled by Post Sale Services in coordination with purchasers after the auction. Invoices will be issued to the successful party, which will include total purchase price, payment options, and next steps on delivery.

During this time, payment for property is still due as per the Conditions of Business for Buyers. Post Sale Services will be in touch for future collection scheduling or shipping arrangements.

Property Payment All property must be paid in full before collection or release from any of our or our vendor’s premises. Payment must be made through Sotheby’s New York Post Sale Services by way of our acceptable forms of payment methods mentioned on your invoice. To arrange for payment, please contact Post Sale Services at +1 212 606 7444 or USPostSaleServices@sothebys.com. Payment will not be accepted at any offsite facility. Dealers and resale clients should fill out the appropriate forms where applicable or contact Post Sale Services with any questions.

Loss and Liability Unless otherwise agreed by Sotheby’s, all sold property must be removed from any of our premises or our vendor’s premises by the buyer at their expense no later than 30 calendar days following the auction. Buyers are reminded that Sotheby’s liability for loss or damage to sold property shall cease no later than 30 calendar days after the date of the auction.

Collection & Shipping All collections and deliveries for purchased property will be handled by Post Sale Services in coordination with purchasers after the auction.

For any in-person collections at any of our vendor’s premises, please alert Post Sale Services of your proposed collection date, ensure that all outstanding invoices have been paid for, and that you or your agent have the appropriate photo identification upon arrival.

If you are using your own shipper to collect property, please provide a letter of authorization and instruct your shipper to email their bill of lading to billsoflading@sothebys.com and ensure the correct collection location is specified.

Sotheby’s can arrange for delivery of your property through one of our contracted vendors or can coordinate pick up at our offsite location with you or your shipper directly. Please contact Post Sale Services at +1 212 606 7444 or USPostSaleServices @sothebys.com to start your collection process.

Important Notice Regarding Packing

As a courtesy to purchasers who come to Sotheby’s to pick up property, Sotheby’s will assist in packing framed paintings. Sotheby’s is unable to remove canvases off stretchers or to roll works on paper. Purchasers are advised to contact an independent painting restorer to pack works in this manner.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR CERAMICS

The catalogue descriptions do not include a general indication of repair and damage, and this absence of any comment should not be interpreted as a guarantee of the condition of the lot. All lots are sold “AS IS” as set forth in paragraph 1 of the Conditions of Sale and prospective purchasers are advised that all lots should be viewed personally.

Arp, Jean 1

Baziotes, William 2

Calder, Alexander 3

Dubuffet, Jean 5, 6, 7

Giacometti, Alberto 8

Klee, Paul 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

de Kooning, Willem 10

Léger, Fernand 11, 20, 23

Mathieu, Georges 9

Miró, Joan 4, 22

Picasso, Pablo 19

Soulages, Pierre 21 de Staël, Nicolas 13

Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena 12