Rich Selection of Modern and Contemporary Works at Sotheby's Prints Sale

Written by Farley Morgan Wednesday, 23 September 2009 20:27

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s autumn auction of Prints will be held in New York on 29 October, 2009, and will offer collectors a broad selection of modern and contemporary works from the 19th century to present day. Works from the sale, estimated to bring in excess of $7.8 million, will be on view at Sotheby’s New York galleries beginning 25 October at 1 pm. The sale will also include Richard Diebenkorn’s 'Green', a large scale etching and aquatint from 1986 (est. $200/300,000).

The auction begins with works by American artists, most notably the well-known George Bellows’ lithograph A Stag at Sharkey’s (est. $80/120,000), John Marin’s 1913 etching of the Woolworth Building (est. $175/250,000) and a wonderful group of Martin Lewis’ etchings portraying New York at night (est. ranging from $5,000 to $30,000).

Also featured in the modern offerings is a woodcut by Max Beckmann from 1923, Group Portrait, Eden Bar (est. $200/300,000). This very rare work depicts a trio at the Eden Bar at the Berlin hotel of the same name.

The contemporary portion of the auction is led by Jasper Johns’ 1973 Flags I (est. $350/550,000). The Flag is an icon of Jasper Johns’ imagery in all media and this richly layered screen-print represents the most elaborate example of the Flag within his printmaking oeuvre. Other important Jasper Johns’ images on offer will be lithographs from the late 1960s: Two Maps I and Gray Alphabets (est. $90/120,000 and $75/100,000 respectively).

Among the modern highlights of the sale is Pablo Picasso’s 1938-9 etching and aquatint Femme au Tambourin (est. $500/600,000), which depicts Picasso’s lover Dora Maar. One of the best utilizations of aquatint within Picasso’s body of work, Femme au Tambourin is also amongst the finest examples of Cubist and Modernist printmaking. Additional portraits by Picasso include two important linoleum cut images from 1958, Buste de Femme de Jeune Fille d’Apres Cranach le Jeune (est. $500/700,000) and a proof of the never published Portrait de Jacqueline au Fauteuil (est. $150/200,000).  

Sotheby’s will also present an extraordinary set of nine engravings by Louise Bourgeois executed in 1947 and titled He Disappeared into Complete Silence (est. $120/180,000). Described by the artist as an exploration of the spiral into and recovery from depression, the proposed edition was 44, however only a small number of complete sets are known to exist and even fewer were assembled and issued at the time they were made.

On March 11, 1744, Samuel Baker, founder of Sotheby's, held the first-ever sale under his own name. The library of a certain Rt. Hon. Sir John Stanley, Bart. described as "containing several Hundred scarce and valuable books in all branches of Polite Literature" sold for a few hundred pounds. Well over two centuries later, on December 6, 1983, Sotheby's sold a single book, The Gospels of Henry the Lion, for more than 8 million pounds.

Since those early days, it is not just prices that have grown considerably. So too have the scope and scale of Sotheby's itself. Samuel Baker would hardly recognize his old firm, were he to take a stroll down London's present day New Bond Street - or, for that matter, down Manhattan's York Avenue. It has only been in the last century, after all, that the original London company has expanded from book auctions to cover all areas of the fine and decorative arts. This great expansion means that Sotheby's is not just one of the oldest fine art auctioneers in the world, but also now the largest. There are more than 100 Sotheby's offices around the world; and, in 1998, auction sales produced a turnover of just under $2 billion.

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