Immortalising a doomed love affair
Impressionist and Modern Art, Bonhams, London 4 February
A sculpture that immortalises Auguste Rodin’s love affair with his young assistant, Camille Claudel—Eternal Spring, conceived in 1884 and cast between 1905 and 1907 (est £500,000-£700,000)—leads Bonhams’ Impressionist and Modern sale this month. Claudel was Rodin’s muse and his mistress for ten years, as well as a prolific figurative sculptor in her own right, although she was often dismissed as his protégée. Although Claudel inspired and helped to sculpt some of Rodin’s most transformative works, such as the monumental The Gates of Hell (1880-1917), she achieved limited independent recognition and Rodin never left his wife, Rose Beuret, despite his promises. Claudel was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1905 and spent the last 30 years of her life in a French asylum, where she allegedly ate only meals that she personally prepared, fearing that Rodin would poison her. The sculpture previously sold at Sotheby’s for £769,250 (with premium, est £500,000-£700,000), in 2012.
Seized photographs go to auction
Modern Visions: Exceptional Photographs, Christie’s, New York
17 February
Christie’s in New York has organised a series of auctions, starting on 17 February, to sell a $15m collection of 2,000 photographs seized from Philip Rivkin by the US authorities. The owner of the Green Diesel Engineering company pleaded guilty to a biodiesel fraud scheme last year and allegedly bought the works with the proceeds to launder money. The collection includes works by such leading 19th- and 20th-century photographers as Edward Steichen and Man Ray. A highlight of the opening sale is a waxed palladium print, Georgia O’Keeffe with African Statuary (around 1919, est $250,000-$350,000), shot by the US photographer Alfred Stieglitz during the early years of the artists’ passionate relationship (they married in 1924). Rivkin bought the photograph from Camera Lucida, LLC for $657,000 in 2011.
Picasso, the man of a thousand masks
Picasso in Private: Works from the Collection of Marina Picasso, Sotheby’s, London
5 February
Pablo Picasso had many faces as an artist: painter, draughtsman, sculptor and, from the late 1940s, ceramicist. He was also an avid collector and maker of masks. Masque (1956), a slab of clay with eyes, a nose and a mouth cut out, impressed with corrugated card and fired in the kiln, hung in La Californie, Picasso’s villa in Cannes. It was one of the props he would “grab from the walls” to startle visitors with, says Siân Folley, an Impressionist and Modern specialist at Sotheby’s in London, where the piece is going to auction (est £35,000-£45,000) among 187 unique ceramics, works on paper and sculptures from the collection of Marina Picasso. The artist’s granddaughter inherited more than 10,000 works from Picasso’s estate after he died intestate in 1973. The sale, which includes pieces spanning the seven decades of his career, follows Sotheby’s “white-glove” ceramics auction from the collection last June, when 100% of 126 lots sold for a combined £12.3m.