Lisa Brice, After Embah (2018)
Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction, Sotheby’s, London, 4 March
Estimate: £1m to £1.5m
South African artist Lisa Brice’s record at auction was set in 2021 when her painting No Bare Back, after Embah (2017) sold for $3.1m with fees against a $200,000-$300,000 estimate at Sotheby’s New York. Now, its sister canvas After Embah (2018) is up for auction. Like much of the artist’s work, the painting challenges how women are depicted in art and popular culture. After Embah starkly references work by Édouard Manet and the Anaconda music video from rapper Nicki Minaj, both controversial in their respective times for how they represented female sexuality. Brice’s work rarely comes to market, according to Sotheby’s, and a comparable painting has not come up for sale since 2021.
Pablo Picasso, Tête d’homme et nu assis (1964)
Photo courtesy of Phillips
Pablo Picasso, Tête d’homme et nu assis (1964)
Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, Phillips, London, 6 March
Estimate: £1.5m to £2m
Pablo Picasso was preoccupied with depicting male sexual desire throughout his nearly eight-decade- long career, and in the winter of 1964 particularly honed in on a series of paintings of abstract male faces gazing at female nudes. This version shows a nude woman with long black hair and strong narrow eyes, matching Picasso’s other depictions of his last wife Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961 when he was 79 and she was 34. Roque was Picasso’s most recurrent muse, and was the subject of his work more than any of his other wives or lovers. Their marriage lasted until Picasso died in 1973. Tête d’homme et nu assis (1964) remained in Roque’s possession after his death and the Phillips sale marks the first time the painting has ever appeared at auction after being consigned by a European collection.
Paul Delvaux, Les belles de nuit (1936)
Photo courtesy of Christie’s
Paul Delvaux, Les belles de nuit (1936)
The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, Christie’s, London, 5 March
Estimate: £500,000 to £1m
Les belles de nuit was once owned by the British poet Edward James, a major patron of the Surrealist movement who helped elevate the careers of artists like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. One of James’s most memorable endeavours was remodelling his family’s country home, Monkton House in West Sussex, into a Surrealist haven, with the input of some of the most influential architects, designers and artists of the time. Les belles de nuit once hung on the first-floor landing of Monkton House, according to Christie’s. James’s close ties to Surrealist artists allowed him to develop one of the world’s most important art collections dedicated to the movement, but Les belles de nuit was the only work by Delvaux he owned. Two more paintings by Delvaux from the same consignor will also appear at the sale: La ville endormie (1938), estimated to sell for between £1.2m and £1.8m, and Nuit de Noël (1956) for between £1m and £2m. For three of Delvaux’s works to be up for sale in one auction is unprecedented, according to Christie’s.
John Frederick Lewis, A Reception in the Harem (1873)
Photo courtesy of Bonhams
John Frederick Lewis, A Reception in the Harem (1873)
19th Century & British Impressionist Art, London, Bonhams, 26 March
Estimate: £650,000 to £850,000
John Frederick Lewis’s watercolour A Reception in the Harem is a larger version of the well-known oil painting in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut (see p35). The artist would often produce two nearly identical versions of a painting—one in oil and another in watercolour—to exhibit the oil and sell the watercolour to collectors. The watercolour versions were more elaborate, according to Bonhams, thanks to Lewis’s discovery that mixing a specific shade of white paint with watercolour pigments mimicked the look of oil painting. A Reception in the Harem shows a wealthy woman receiving guests in an apartment streaming with lights through lattice and stained-glass windows. Lewis was inspired by the decade he spent living in Egypt—the Nile River can be spotted in the distance through the windows. The painting was previously owned by the renowned British collectors Stephen George Holland, a fabric merchant, and industrialist Abel Buckley.