Furthermore, "2010 was an exceptional year for sculpture, with record-breaking prices seen across the board. Chief among these was Giacometti’s £65 million L’Homme qui marche I, sold at Sotheby’s in February last year and establishing a record for any work of art sold at auction. Given the strength of the sculpture market, this February’s sale includes a fittingly strong selection of sculpture, with works by Marini, Giacometti, Moore and Maillol."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
La Lecture, painted in January 1932
Signed Picasso (upper right), inscribed 11 decembre M.CM.XXXII. on the reverse
Oil on panel (65.5x51cm)
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium £25,241,250 US$40,711,612 €29,744,296 (Sotheby's London, February 8th 2011, Lot 8)
Estimate £12,000,000-18,000,000
Lot sold to Anonymous
«Picasso's iconic paintings of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter reign supreme as the emblems of love, sex and desire in twentieth-century art. The sensual La Lecture, which is one of the most recognisable images among this landmark series from the beginning of 1932, essentially introduced the young woman as an extraordinary new presence in Picasso's life and his art. This exceptional work is one in a series of defining paintings in the artist's oeuvre in which he depicts his lover asleep in an armchair, the curves of her body transformed into a sumptuous confection with colourful swirls and sweeping arabesques. Marie-Thérèse's potent mix of physical attractiveness and sexual naivety had an intoxicating effect on Picasso, and his rapturous desire for the girl brought about a wealth of images that have been acclaimed as the most erotic and emotionally uplifting compositions of his long career. Picasso's unleashed passion is nowhere more apparent than in the depictions of the sleeping beauty, the embodiment of tranquility and physical acquiescence. Similar to Le Rêve (fig. 1), painted only days apart, La Lecture is rich with signifiers of sexual availability, fertility and pleasure and exemplifies Picasso's creative power in full bloom [...]
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
Diego, painted in 1958
Signed Alberto Giacometti and dated 1958 (lower right)
Oil on canvas (81x65cm)
Estimate £3,000,000-5,000,000 (Lot 11)
«Diego is a dramatic and haunting portrait of Giacometti's younger brother, influenced by the post-war Existentialist movement and Giacometti's own reworking of themes from his Surrealist past. Like an apparition in the foggy space of the composition, the bust of a man emerges through a haze of grey paint. The juxtaposition of the slender head and the broad, voluminous bust is reminiscent of Giacometti's bronzes executed around this time. The picture captures a particular sentiment that the artist once expressed in a Surrealist prose poem: 'The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways' (quoted in Alberto Giacometti (exhibition catalogue), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. &San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, 1988-89, p. 37) [...]
Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966)
Grand buste de Diego avec bras, executed in 1957 and cast in bronze in an edition of 6. The present work was cast in 1958.
Inscribed Alberto Giacometti, dated 1957, numbered 5/6 and with the foundry mark Susse Fr, Paris
Bronze, gold platina (height 57,5cm)
Estimate £3,500,000-5,000,000 (Lot 31)
«Grand buste de Diego avec bras belongs to a celebrated series of Alberto Giacometti's sculptural portraits of his younger brother Diego, who was the primary model for the artist's numerous variations on the theme of head and bust sculptures throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout their professional lives, the Giacometti brothers (fig. 1) had an intensely close relationship. Diego devoted the major part of his own artistic career to assisting Alberto with his sculpture and supervising the casting of his bronzes. By the early fifties, Alberto had gained considerable critical recognition in Paris and had amassed a broad clientele, while Diego had just begun to design the bronze furniture which would eventually make him famous in his own right. Well aware of his younger brother's talent, Alberto encouraged Diego to pursue his own career. Nevertheless, Alberto relied heavily upon his brother's expertise and recognised him as indispensable in the production of the numerous innovative sculptures that had secured Alberto a contract with the Galerie Maeght in 1950. Speaking of this relationship, Annette Arm observed of her husband Alberto in June 1952: 'He remains always his same anxious self, but fortunately, he has a brother who is more calm and understands him well' (quoted in James Lord, Giacometti, A Biography, New York, 1983, p. 329) [...]
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
Argenteuil, fin d'après-midi, painted in 1872.
Signed Claude Monet (lower right)
Oil on canvas (60x81cm)
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium £3,401,250 US$5,124,587 €3,744,072 (Sotheby's London, February 8th 2011, Lot 15)
Estimate £3,500,000-4,500,000
Lot sold to Anonymous
«Argenteuil, fin d'après-midi, painted at the dawning of the Impressionist movement in the early 1870s, is one of Monet's first major landscapes of his new home, just outside of Paris. Argenteuil was famous for its annual regatta, and Monet took full advantage of the town's nautical resources to depict scenes of sailboats on the Seine. As Paul Hayes Tucker explains, '[By] 1871, when Monet moved there, his new home was not just some secluded little town outside of Paris but a celebrated center for pleasure boating in France. Boating meant Argenteuil and Argenteuil meant boating; the two were inseparable. The importance of this fact cannot be overemphasized, considering how much of Monet's work is devoted to sailboats on the Seine. He could have painted the barges or the fishing boats as Daubigny had when he came to neighbouring Bezons – for these vessels could still be seen coming and going on the river in Argenteuil in the 1870s –but they were old-fashioned. Rather, Monet chose to depict only those craft that represented the leisure activity of the day, and one of the most up-to-date aspects of the life of the town' (P. H. Tucker, Monet at Argenteuil, New Haven, 1982, pp. 90-91) [...]
Marino Marini (1901-1980)
L'idea del cavaliere, executed in 1955 and cast in bronze in an edition of 4. This work was also carved in wood in 1956.
inscribed MM, numbered 3/3 and stamped with the foundry mark Fonderia d'Arte De Andreis, Milano
Bronze, painted by the artist (height 220cm)
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium £4,185,250 US$5,485,876 €4,008,034 (Sotheby's London, February 8th 2011, Lot 20)
Estimate £3,700,000-4,500,000
Lot sold to Anonymous
«Equestrian images have a long and esteemed tradition in Western art. Throughout the centuries, paintings and sculptures of men on horseback, often depicting noble cavalrymen or generals mounted on their steed, celebrated the glories and victories of an era or an empire. But the sculptures of riders and horses that Marino Marini created after the Second World War are a radical departure from this tradition. Conceived in the midst of profound political transformation, Marini's riders are a response to the wave of uncertainty that engulfed civilisation during the Cold War. Marini was obsessed with making the horse and rider theme applicable to the contemporary age, and no other artist in the history of 20th century art came close to revitalising this age-old subject with such creativity and expressive force. His anonymous, highly abstracted horsemen eschew any pomp or pretence and are rich with psychological complexity and formal beauty. This monumental sculpture from 1955 of a rider and his horse, rigid with explosive tension, is a wonderful example of the artist's achievements in this area [...]
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