NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s will present A Celebration of Art Deco: Masterworks from the Collection of Dr. Stephen E. Kelly across a series of sales beginning this December in New York as the centerpieces of our Design Week auctions.
A consummate collector and connoisseur, the late Dr. Stephen E. Kelly became enamored with Art Deco in 1982 while partnering with famed interior designers Jay Spectre and Geoffrey Bradfield to design the interior of his Upper East Side townhouse in New York. Built in 1915, the dazzling multi-floor townhouse simultaneously served as Dr. Kelly’s personal residence, ophthalmology office and art gallery. Acquired over the course of three decades, the Kelly Collection is remarkable for its superlative quality and comprehensive depth of exemplary Art Deco and modernist objects, with a special focus on design from this historic period.
The nearly 200 works on offer in December reflect Dr. Kelly’s longstanding passion and nuanced appreciation for French art and design from the 1920-30s. Featuring museum-quality masterworks by Jean Dunand, Jean-Michel Frank, Jean Goulden, Eileen Gray, André Groult, Gustave Miklos, Armand-Albert Rateau, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann and more, these exceptional offerings celebrate Dr. Kelly’s renowned connoisseurship and passion for decorative arts and design across every medium, from furniture and objects to paintings and sculpture. Following the Evening and Day auctions on 9 and 10 December, Sotheby’s will present additional works from Dr. Kelly’s collection across a diverse array of online sales through 2021.
In a testament to Dr. Kelly’s philanthropic commitment to his alma mater, proceeds from the sale of the Kelly Collection will benefit the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Sotheby’s Design Week auctions will follow on the heels of our marquee December sale of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art, and coincide with our winter Festival of Wonder in New York. Sotheby’s Design Week exhibitions will be open to the public by appointment beginning 5 December through 9 December.
AN ICONIC TOWNHOUSE & COLLECTION
Jay Spectre and Geoffrey Bradfield transformed the top floors of Dr. Kelly’s Upper East Side townhouse to create a spectacular and celebrated modernist Art Deco apartment, complete with a two-story solarium that became an instantly recognizable area of the home.
Taken with the designers’ concept, Dr. Kelly continued to build upon this aesthetic by acquiring superlative French Art Deco furnishings, with a focus on pieces from 1918 to 1939. Dr. Kelly was especially drawn to the materials that defined the era, such as shagreen, parchment, lacquer, enamel, and exotic woods, as well as pieces with clean lines, bold shapes, and exquisite craftsmanship. Concurrent with his passion for collecting design, Dr. Kelly also developed a keen interest in paintings and fine prints from artistic movements that characterized the period, such as Cubism and Surrealism.
Over time, the collection outgrew the rooms in the townhouse, necessitating an expansion to accommodate Dr. Kelly’s voracious yet acutely discerning appetite for exceptional Art Deco objects. After retiring from his medical practice in 2016, Dr. Kelly converted the townhouse into a triplex with the addition of a fourth floor, which would later become the Kelly Gallery. The gallery flourished into an independent business, showcasing some 1,400 pieces of furniture, fine art, sculpture, silver, ceramics, metal work, and jewelry.
DECEMBER EVENING AND DAY SALE HIGHLIGHTS
The December Evening sale features a curated selection of 50 masterpieces of Art Deco and modernist design that represents the pinnacle of Dr. Kelly’s connouisseurial eye, with singular examples by Eileen Gray, Armand-Albert Rateau, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Jean Goulden, and Jean Dunand, among others.
An undisputed masterpiece by Eileen Gray leads this exceptional group: An Important and Unique Six-Panel Screen designed and executed between 1921 and 1923 (estimate $1.5/2 million). This modernist icon is one of few screens made by the architect and designer over her decades-long career and signals a pivotal stylistic shift in Gray’s oeuvre towards Abstraction in the 1920s. The subtle balance of lines, half circles and angles resonate with work produced by the neo-Constructivist avant-garde and creates an ensemble that harmoniously combines Symbolist and Modernist influences.
Attesting to its exceptional stature, the work has been featured in seminal retrospectives of Gray’s work at the Centre Pompidou in 2013, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2014, as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The piece is one of very few screens to have remained in private hands and is endowed with impeccable provenance that includes the legendary collectors Jean-Henri Labourdette, Jean-Claude Brugnot, and Steven A. Greenberg.
Further highlights include an Important and Rare “Oiseaux” Low Table by Armand-Albert Rateau, one of the artist’s most emblematic and singular creations (estimate $1/1.5 million). Dating from 1924, the work showcases Rateau’s modern reinterpretation of classical and Baroque themes which instill in the present Table a timeless and universal artistic appeal, making it a masterpiece of animalier sculpture in and of itself. Over the course of his career, Rateau gave life to a myriad of animals in bronze and created a mythical “bestiary,” whose scope and variety foreshadow François-Xavier Lalanne’s functional animalier designs several decades later. Underscoring the work’s significance, only two other examples of this specific table model are known to exist and were included in the legendary interiors of famed couturier Jeanne Lanvin and the Duchess of Alba.
Works by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann are led by an exquisite Monumental Luminaire dating from 1928 (estimate $250/350,000). The Luminaire was designed by Ruhlmann and the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres for the historic Île-de-France ocean liner – a beacon of Art Deco design and an ambassador for the decorative arts of France, with rooms commissioned by other leading decorators of that time. Though the original examples from the ship were destroyed, the present work is one of only two period Luminaires from the era to have survived. To this day, the only other documented example is located at the Hôtel Potocki in Paris, an Art Deco landmark renovated in 1925-1927 by Ruhlmann himself.
Once in the collection of celebrated Art Deco collector Félix Marcilhac, Gustave Miklos’s L’Homme et son Destin from 1929 is another highlight from the Evening Sale (estimate $350/550,000). One of his most complex sculptural works in bronze, the present sculpture is a unique work and cast, executed at the height of Miklos’s career. As formally harmonious as it is curiously enigmatic, L’Homme showcases the artist’s predilection for geometric and abstract elements. The sculpture reflects the artist’s growth towards the end of the 1920s and the accomplished synthesis of artistic references in his practice, which contribute to making L’Homme et son Destin one of his most eminent masterpieces.
Other highlights include a superlative array of vases by Jean Dunand that exemplify his masterful use of red and black lacquer as well as a selection of rare works by Jean Goulden. Illustrating the latter is a unique and Important Clock from 1928, a highly celebrated work and one of his most outstanding and large-scale achievements in the champlevé enamel technique (estimate $200/300,000). The clock embodies the timeless artistry that made Goulden’s work an emblematic symbol of the Jazz Age in France and overseas. It is all the more exceptional that only 190 objects by Goulden are known to exist, contributing to their rarity and the high demand of his prized objects among Art Deco collectors.
The approximately 150 works on offer in the Day sale showcase the encyclopedic spectrum of Dr. Kelly’s Collection with a particular focus on the artists that he regarded most highly, which include rare concentrations of works by Clément Rousseau, Émile Decœur, and Claudius Linossier, among others. In particular, the sale offers myriad examples of metal lighting by Maison Desny and Jean Boris Lacroix in a curated selection that embodies the diversity and superior quality of their respective production in the 1920s and 1930s. With diverse and high-quality works by superior makers and artists, the Day sale constitutes an unmissable opportunity for Art Deco enthusiasts worldwide.
