Christie’s is honored to announce the sale of one of the greatest private American collections of Modern Art to come to auction: The Collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody. Remarkable for its extraordinary depth and quality, the collection boasts a wealth of master works by the towering figures of the Modernist movement, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, Edouard Vuillard, Marino Marini, and Henry Moore. The total value of the works to be offered is expected to exceed $150 million, making it one of the most valuable single-owner collections ever offered at auction.
- Highlights from the Collection of Mrs. Sidney F. Brody include:
The centerpiece of the Brody collection is Picasso’s spell-binding Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust. This large-scale portrait of Picasso’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, is inarguably one of the finest of Picasso’s celebrated 1932 paintings. Painted in rich blues, pinks and vibrant greens, with accents of red and orange, this deeply sensual and thematically complex work can be read above all as a declaration of love from the artist to his young muse. Marie-Thérèse’s sleeping form, seemingly suspended in swaths of black, dominates the lower half of the canvas. Above, her sculpted head rests upon a pedestal, and the barely perceptible outline of another face emerges from behind the philodendrons. The painting was completed on 8 March 1932, during one of most intensely creative periods of Picasso’s career. He had celebrated his 50th birthday the prior Fall, and was preparing for a retrospective exhibition to be held in June 1932 at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. The Brodys acquired the work direct from Picasso’s dealers in the 1950s and made it the focal point of their expanding collection. This remarkable painting has only been exhibited once in the United States, when the Brodys generously loaned it to the 1961 exhibition Bonne Fête Monsieur Picasso, a retrospective staged in honor of Picasso’s 80th birthday that was sponsored by the UCLA Art Council. The upcoming sale preview marks the first time in 50 years the work will be publicly displayed. Expected to sell for more than $80 million.
Another cornerstone of the collection is Matisse’s Nu au coussin bleu, the finest 1920s-era picture by the artist to appear on the market in many years. Executed in 1924, the work uses lush pattern, rich coloration, and confident modeling to brilliant effect, a characteristic of the most important of the odalisques Matisse painted in Nice during this period. The model’s sinuous pose, with her arms crossed overhead and one leg drawn up, relates closely to Grand nu assis, the artist’s celebrated bronze. Works of this era are in high demand within the global collecting community; during the last three years Christie’s has twice achieved record-breaking prices for Matisse works, including L’odalisque, harmonie bleue of 1937, which sold for $33.6 million in November 2007, and Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose of 1911, which sold for $45.2 million in February 2009.
Leading the collection’s impressive selection of sculpture is the stunning Giacometti bronze, Grande tête de Diego – the most highly-prized of the artist’s sculptural portraits of his brother. This large version, conceived in 1954, counts among the first in Giacometti’s series of radically innovative sculptural portraits in which he sought to reclaim a more realistic and concrete sense of space. By dramatically compressing the width of the face, Giacometti presented the viewer with two completely opposite and distinct representations of his model that are never simultaneously viewable. “No other Giacometti portrait bust of Diego has the electric charge of this particular cast from the Brody collection. Simultaneously monumental and fragile, expansive and taut, its drastic proportions and tremulous surface cut through the air like a knife. This should be an irresistible work for any serious collector of 20th century sculpture,” noted Mr. Jordan.
A thrilling sculptural counterpoint to the monumental grandeur of Grande tête de Diego is a second, earlier Giacometti bronze, the artist’s famous depiction of a lean, stealthy feline in mid-stride entitled Le chat (estimate: $12-18 million). Fascinated by the pliancy of the animal’s sleek form, Giacometti stretched Le chat lengthwise, making its body extremely narrow and taut. Though the figure measures two-and-a-half feet in length, the sculpture’s sinewy form inspired the writer Jean Genet to remark that Le chat could likely “pass through a mouse hole.”
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