Fauvists Take the Lead
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For those who haven’t already spent all their money at the auctions this week, there is more shopping to do this weekend at the International Fine Art Fair at the Seventh Regiment Armory. The fair, which opens to the public tomorrow, features a mix of New York and European galleries, showing painting, drawing, and sculpture from old masters to near-contemporary work.
The highest-priced works in the fair this year are mostly from the early to mid-20th century, including particularly strong works by Fauvists such as Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees Van Dongen. Galerie Fabien Boulakia from Paris is selling Picasso’s “Femme accroupie,” a brightly colored portrait of Picasso’s last wife, Jacqueline, who Mr. Boulakia said would always crouch, as she does in the painting, when she came to Picasso’s studio. The painting comes from the artist’s estate and is priced at $9.5 million.
Mr. Boulakia also has a haunting, melancholic Van Dongen work, “Fille-mère” (1907-8), priced at $4.5 million.
Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière, also from Paris, has a Vlaminck landscape, which Jacques de la Béraudière said was priced “over $5 million,” and Chaim Soutine’s “Arbre de Vence,” which is $4.2 million. “Soutine is much in demand, and prices have been rocketing,” the gallery co-owner Jacques de la Béraudière said. They now rival prices for the works of Soutine’s contemporary Amedeo Modigliani. He cited the Jewish Museum’s 1998 retrospective as a major influence on the revaluation of the artist’s work.
But there are also major pre-20th-century works. French & Co. of New York is selling Gustave Courbet’s “Effet de Neige,” a landscape from around 1866-68, which Martin Zimet described as in perfect condition, for “seven to eight million” dollars.
Richard Green has a painting of St. Catherine of Alexandria by Simon Vouet, a French painter who studied in Italy between 1613 and 1627 and then brought the influence of Italian Baroque style home to Paris. The painting at Richard Green is signed and dated “Rome, 1626.” Despite its being signed, the painting was unidentified for years. Richard Green bought it at an auction in the Midwest, where its estimate between $2,000 and $4,000. “We paid considerably more for it,” an employee of the gallery, Alex Parish, said, “because about 30 other dealers knew what it was, too.” Mr. Parish said an American probably purchased it in the early 20th century and brought it here, assuming it was Italian. “They all came into the U.S. described as ‘by Michelangelo’ or ‘by Raphael.'”
In terms of sculpture, the fair has several animal bronzes by Rembrandt Bugatti, the son of the furniture designer Carlo Bugatti and brother of the car manufacturer Ettore Bugatti. According to a probably apocryphal story, Ettore was sent off to art school and Rembrandt to engineering school; they came home after the first semester, both unhappy, and decided to switch places. Rembrandt, a remarkably talented sculptor, moved to Paris when he was 18 and was picked up by the Hébrard foundry and gallery. (Hébrard had cast all of Degas’s bronzes.)
French & Co. has a Bugatti baboon, priced at $4 million. Sladmore Gallery has a bison in its booth, and is also selling a unique cast of two deer nuzzling each other, called “Mes Antelopes,” priced at $5 million. (Because of their size, the deer are displayed in the center of the Armory.) One of Sladmore’s directors, Edward Horswell, who has published a book on Bugatti, explained that Bugatti borrowed the deer from the Antwerp zoo in 1909 and had them sent to Paris, where he kept them in his studio while he worked.
“He is a sculptor of emotion,” Mr. Horswell said, looking at the two deer. “Most sculptures of multiple animals prior to this were of one animal eating another. In the whole of Bugatti’s oeuvre, 350 works, there is only one piece of an animal eating another — and that is at the very end, a tiger who is startled by a snake. Instead, he made many groups of animals interacting.” Mr. Horswell said that Bugatti, who committed suicide in 1916 at the age of 31, was working “on the cusp of the first writings that credited animals with emotion.”