Pablo Picasso
Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil
Estimate: $12–18 million
Sotheby’s to sell a Picasso from the Goldwyn Collection Sotheby’s will present Property from the Goldwyn Collection across a series of auctions in 2015. The star of the collection is Picasso’s ‘Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil’, estimated to achieve $12–18 million.]]>
March 23, 2015, source: Sotheby’s
While the Goldwyn family is legendary within the film industry, many will discover in these sales that their creative vision also extended to collecting fine art. Samuel Goldwyn Sr. assembled a core group of works from the late-1940s through the 1960s during Hollywood’s Golden Age, from which standout pieces by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse will emerge. Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in turn judiciously added to the collection, bringing in important works by David Hockney, Milton Avery, Diego Rivera and more.
“Property from the Goldwyn Collection” is led by Pablo Picasso’s “Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil”, a richly-colored depiction of the artist’s lover Françoise Gilot (estimate $12/18 million). The work is dated to the fall of 1948, not long after Picasso returned from a conference of the Communist Party in Warsaw. At the time, Françoise was pregnant with the couple’s child, and she was furious that Picasso had left her alone for several weeks. As a gift of appeasement, he returned from Poland – Sam Goldwyn Sr.’s country of birth – with an embroidered red peasant jacket, which Francoise wore when she sat for the present portrait. Picasso loaned this work to several important career retrospectives held at museums throughout Europe in the early 1950s. He only parted with the picture in 1956, when it was acquired by the Goldwyn family through Galerie Berès.
“Anémones et grenades” by Henri Matisse was the first picture that Samuel Goldwyn Sr. purchased for his collection, in March 1948 – just two years after the artist painted it (estimate $5/7 million). Goldwyn purchased it for $13,500 from Alfred Moritz Frankfurter, who was a New York-based art historian, critic and editor of Art News. As one of his final works on canvas, “Anémones et grenades” demonstrates Matisse’s painterly technique at 4 its full maturity. The vibrancy of these late canvases provided inspiration for Picasso, who frequently visited Matisse’s studio during this period.
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