Art contemporain

Lots of exceptional private provenance will be offered in this sale, starting with the collection of Dagny and Jan Runnqvist, whose masterpiece is Quinze Août, a large ‘pop’ portrait by Martial Raysse. Four works from the collection of Sébastien and Nancy de la Selle will also be dispersed, of which the top lot is Seated Women, a bronze signed by Willem de Kooning showing his research in three dimensions on the female figure. Among the other major works from private collections are a landscape of the South of France by Nicolas de Staël entitled Arbres et maisons (Landscape), two paintings by Kazuo Shiraga from the beginning of the 1960s which belonged to Rodolphe Stadler, as well as two works on paper by Zao Wou-Ki and paintings by Pierre Soulages from an important French private collection. Finally, Étude, a monumental work by Simon Hantaï, will also be presented. Emblematic of his research on paper-folding, this work was part of the retrospective that was organised by the Centre Pompidou this year.

The Day Sale will begin with the sale of 24 works from the collection of Rodolphe Stadler, among which are two paintings by the Filipino artist Alfonso Ossorio. A collector of, among other artists, Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, he was, in these paintings which integrate secondary raw materials, inspired by Art Brut. The work of Claire Falkenstein, an American artist that Stadler exhibited since the opening of his gallery, will also be presented with two sculptures in welded wire and silver. The sale will also present important works by New Realist artists, most of which are from the collection of Jan and Dagny Runnqvist, who supported them in the Bonnier Gallery: Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein and Arman, of whom several accumulations will be offered. Inherently international, the collection of Sébastien and Nancy de la Selle will offer great names of German contemporary art – Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck, Markus Lupertz, Jörg Immendorff – and of American contemporary art, with two bronzes by Tony Smith.