PARIS.- On the evening of Monday 3rd December, during its prestigious Impressionist & Modern Art and Post War & Contemporary Art, Artcurial will present a collection of major twentieth century works. Modern art will be represented by Fernand Léger, Giacomo Balla, Pierre Bonnard and Marc Chagall, while contemporary art by artists such as Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol, Caesar and Maria Elena Vieira Da Silva as top-billed artists. The auction will continue on Tuesday 4th December with a segment devoted to contemporary photography.

Impressionist & Modern Art
On Monday 3rd December, the auction will commence with the chapter devoted to Impressionist & Modern Art. Nature morte à la bouteille by Fernand Léger will undoubtedly be one of the keystone pieces of this event. Created in 1927, this oil on canvas belongs to a period where the artist is strongly influenced by the Purist movement, a critical response to Cubism. Fernand Léger is at that time fully dedicated to this classical genre following his experimentation with Cubism in the years prior to the First World War.

The bottle, both subject and object is representative of mass consumption in a society within which he evolves and is simplified almost to the extreme. The bottle remains clearly identifiable but merges at times with other elements present in the work, recognizable with the use of colourful forms stylizing an echo between the background of the table and its principal subject (estimate: € 1M - 1.5M)

Other peculiar pieces of this auction: a folding screen by Giacomo Balla, leading artist of the Futuristic artistic movement founded in 1909 by poet FilippoTommaso Marinetti. Entitled, Linea di velocità, line-speed on the front et Vortice, Vortex, on the back, it is composed of two hinged panels, painted on each side with abstract and vividly coloured compositions. Kept in the artist’s home until his death in 1958, this piece of furniture is also a painting in the exact style of his contemporary works. The adopted form, a moveable w screen and its articulation allowing the panel orientation to change add to the desired dynamic conception of Bella’s painting (estimate: € 450,000 - 600,000).

Another important moment of the auction will focus on a piece by Pierre Bonnard, entitled Femmes à la fenêtre ou Chez la brodeuse, completed toward 1895. In this period, the «nabi très japonard» as he was nicknamed by his companions, focuses on the inner exploration of his subjects and plastically translates by the representation ofwwww a character on both the inside and outside. The title of the piece itself relays this desire: the former part of the title refers to the window suggesting the outside, the latter, including the word «chez» characterizes an interior. His palette is also reduced to brown and white tones, brown in majority dedicated to the interior, the white to the exterior (estimate: € 300,000 - 400,000).

Finally, we must reflect on Le rêve de la mariée by Marc Chagall, estimate
€200,000 - 250,000. The painter’s universe is fully visible through this oil and Indian ink on canvased cardboard. The violin, the symbol of the life in the shtetl, is reminisce of his childhood, steeped in Jewish traditions. The couple represented in the painting probably represent the young woman’s parents, looking down onto her, accompanying their daughter towards the sacred institution of marriage while the native village in the background emphasises the importance of origins. The sheep, symbol of the divine, and the bride, both depicted in white, are poetically linked by the colour, while the rest of the piece is painted in red.

Works by Maurice Denis, Robert Delaunay, Aristide Maillol and Albert Marquet will also be presented in this segment.

Post War & Contemporary Art
The second part of the auction, devoted to the Post War & Contemporary Art, will present the greatest names of this period. A ceramic mural sculpture by Lucio Fontana will be presented. Dating from 1949-1950 and entitled Pagliaccio, clown in Italian, it is a rare piece both by its quality and its dimensions. The traditional ceramic techniques are here de-structured while the classic character of the clown is revisited by the artist, in excrescence, volumes and movement. This Pagliaccio seems to mischievously imply dislocation of the clown’s body who simultaneously attempts to handle his cumbersome adornment to magnify his status (estimate: € 800,000 - 1,200,000).

Andy Warhol will be represented by an acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, Dollar Sign, from 1982. The reality that it describes at this time is linked to post- Second World War and Trente Glorieuses, a period of new prosperity, rapid improvement of living condition and the development of a consumer society. The dollar also vehicles all the facets of current events transformed by purchasing power. Warhol grasps and blurs the border between art and the daily advertising of the «American way of life», true to the rules of Pop Art. The artist, who has already painted a series of dollar bills in the 1960’s here addresses the theme with a new pattern, developing it in a series of silkscreen (estimate: €400,000 - 600,000).

Other cornerstone of the auction: a Cesar Thumb. A key symbol of his work, the Thumb presented by Artcurial is bronze with brown patina, measuring 1.85m in height. A monumental version of this work was exhibited on the parvis of the Pompidou Centre during a recent retrospective on the artist. Cesar’s Thumb has reached an iconic status as it has been reproduced in several dimensions and in many materials, responding to both the sculptor’s megalomania and the idea of image exhaustion, important for serialization (estimate: € 350,000 - 450,000).

Maria Elena Vieira da Silva’s work will be represented by an oil on canvas, the Combat des soucoupes volantes from 1955. Leader in Abstract Landscaping, the Portuguese artist marked art history with multiple mazes, infinite networks of disjointed lines which the eye struggles to follow. In the Combat des soucoupes volantes, the artist paints a surreal scene where an army of small indistinguishable vehicles evolve within the canvas, leaving red, yellow, blue streaks in their path. The saucers are represented by clusters of fine black lines similar to spiders or calligraphy characters. The architecture of the canvas evokes the azulejos, the small squares of colourful ceramic used in Portugal for house decorations, collected by the artist (estimate: €280,000 - 350,000).

Artists Chu Teh-Chun, Antoni Tàpies, Günther Uecker and Arman will complete this auction.