Impressionist/Modern and Contemporary Art

RICHARD NEUTRA'S KAUFMANN HOUSE

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THAT CHRISTIE'S HAS PLACED ARCHITECTURE IN THE CONTEXT OF A CONTEMPORARY SALE. >

Robert Rauschenberg Andy Warhol Sam Francis Pablo Picasso Alberto Giacometti Mark Rothko Roy Lichtenstein Gerhard Richter

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Offered by a European collector, the 66 1/8-by-77 ¾-inch canvas has not been widely exhibited in the United States. It displays all the hallmarks of the artist’s immense talent as he emerged from his graffiti days to become a mainstream star. Set against a sky of deep blue, the composition is both madcap and intriguing. A single figure dominates, his outstretched arms spanning the width of the canvas, with viscera and male organ portrayed for all to see. Wings and a spiky halo turn him into an angel that is hardly angelic, with one blackened arm ending in fingers that resemble pitchfork tines and a face that is more gargoyle than Gabriel.

As Basquiat’s oeuvre—abridged by his death, in 1988, at age 27—is cherry-picked by die-hard fans, early gems like this have become rare, and all the more prized. “This is the last call for Basquiat,” says Chelsea secondary-market dealer Christophe van de Weghe. “The great ones aren’t going to be around.”

The performance of Untitled (Fallen Angel) will be influenced in part by the sale price of another first-rate Basquiat at Sotheby’s the night before. Untitled (Prophet I), 1981–82 (est. $9–12 million), consigned by Paris dealer Enrico Navarra, will gauge the thirst of what seems to be an unquenchable market.

Pablo Picasso
Le baiser, 1969
Estimate $10-15 milion
Sotheby's Imp/mod

Picasso painted Le baiser in October 1969, just two years before his death. The 38 1/8-by-51 ¼-inch picture, his last of a subject he revisited throughout his career, shows the grizzled visage of the aged artist with that of his devoted wife and last muse, Jacqueline.

Unlike earlier depictions, this one is predominantly gray and has a decidedly brutal quality. The severely cropped composition reveals only the couple’s heads, shoulders and one of Jacqueline’s upturned breasts. The pair, almost becoming one as their lips and tongues crash together, have startled expressions, as if swept away with a violent passion.

Le baiser is a superb example of the artist’s late period, when he and Jacqueline were living in Mougins, on the French Riviera. Writing about the works from this time in her book Art Can Only Be Erotic, Diana Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s granddaughter, states: “These are not embraces but wrestling matches the sexes have abandoned themselves to. The unleashing of sexual passions is total, a lack of inhibition stamped with bestiality, animality.”

The guaranteed Picasso is one of some 200 lots consigned from the holdings of the late Patsy and Raymond Nasher—among the greatest postwar collectors of modern and contemporary art in America—who acquired the painting in 1985 from Basel dealer Ernst Beyeler. The group of works is being split among four sales at Sotheby’s this month, with the proceeds, expected to be in excess of $30 million, going to benefit the Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas.

Robert Rauschenberg
Overdrive, 1963
Estimate $10-15 milion
Sotheby's contemporary

Major Rauschenbergs rarely surface at auction. Certainly, nothing like the large oil and silkscreen-ink Overdrive—one of a handful of the artist’s works that debuted at the Leo Castelli Gallery in October 1963—has ever appeared on the block.

Painted the year that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the complex multi-image work, utilizing some of Rauschenberg’s bravura photography as well as textbook images of songbirds and schematic drawings of timepieces, delivers a sizzling commentary on the United States in that turbulent time. The atmosphere of the era is captured through images of Cold War posturing, space exploration and civil rights demonstrations, reinforced by Rauschenberg’s upside-down placement of the Statue of Liberty at the top of the 84-by-60-inch canvas. The composition contains no fewer than five STOP signs, plus two one way indicators pointing in opposite directions, and conveys more than a hint of autobiography: A transferred photograph shows the street signs at the intersection of Pine and Nassau, a corner close to the artist’s former loft near Wall Street, where Castelli first saw his work and that of Jasper Johns.