ZURICH.- The top lot of the 8 December auction of Impressionist & Modern Art at Koller Zurich is a landscape by Max Beckmann, “Waldgracht mit Segeln” (Woodland canal with sailing ships). Beckmann painted this work during his exile in Holland in the 1940s. The artist and his wife had fled Germany in 1937 on the opening day of the Nazi government’s “Degenerate Art” exhibition, which included many of his works. Although the landscape depicts an outwardly idyllic scene, an undercurrent of tension marks the work, from a very uncertain yet highly creative period in Beckmann’s career.

A still life by Fernand Léger is also from a crucial period in that artist’s career: the mid-1920s, when Léger was fully occupied with pushing beyond the boundaries of classic still lifes by liberating the objects from their surroundings and from the very subject of the painting. An oil on canvas version of the gouache offered here is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Another devotee of the still life was Felix Vallotton, especially late in his career, and an interesting work from this period will be featured in Koller’s Swiss Art auction on 8 December. “Corbeille de mandarines et bananes” (Basket with mandarin oranges and bananas) is a complex composition in which the fruit, basket and shawl on which they rest are all rendered by economical brushstrokes in a wide palette of colours, a work by a mature artist who was a master at depicting matter, whether it be skin, fabrics or fruit.

Two paintings by Chinese abstract artist Chu Teh-Chun will be offered in the PostWar & Contemporary Art auction on 9 December, both acquired from the artist in 1987 and conserved since then in a Swiss private collection. Chu The-Chun was a master of lyrical abstraction, and these two works are beautiful examples of his blending of Chinese and Western artistic influences.

“Thinking Nude” is a mature work by Roy Lichtenstein, to be offered in the Prints & Multiples auction on 9 December. In this silkscreen print, Lichtenstein uses his trademark dots and stripes in a new way, to create patterns of light and shade. He also experiments in this series with different printing states, and State I offered here, with its dominant red tones, yields a particularly harmonious result.