NEW YORK, NY.- This May in New York, Sotheby’s will offer some 17 exceptional works from the collection of Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem, passionate collectors, highly successful entrepreneurs and visionaries and, not least, philanthropists of the highest order whose transformative support has benefitted a wide-range of causes in the fine arts, music, education, and medical research.

Keenly aware that arts and culture can only survive and flourish if nurtured and taught, Jan and Maria have in recent times lent their support to more than 40 charitable programs around the world. In addition to leading centers of medical research (UCSF, CPMC, Meyer Pediatrics Hospital), beneficiaries include New York’s Metropolitan Opera; UC Davis; the San Francisco Opera; the Royal Drawing School in London; SFMoMA; Festival Napa Valley and KQED; as well as numerous initiatives and causes in Florence, including Il Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Meyer Pediatrics Hospital, the Andrea Bocelli Foundation and, not least, the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation. Beyond this, Jan and Maria are widely celebrated for their funding of an award-winning teaching museum (the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art) at the University of California, Davis – where leading contemporary artists teach aspiring young talents in the spirit of a Renaissance workshop.

True to the Manetti Shrem spirit, proceeds from the works to be offered at Sotheby’s this May – among them a rare large-scale 1964 Picasso depicting a reclining Jacqueline with the couple’s new-found cat; a striking Fontana painted in the last year of the artist’s life; and further impressive works by Óscar Domínguez, Odilon Redon, Bruce Nauman, Marc Quinn, Tony Smith and Richard Long – will benefit the artistic and scientific causes closest to the couple’s hearts. More than that, Maria hopes that the act of selling for charitable purposes will inspire others to follow suit, giving in their lifetime with, as she puts it, “warm hands and not with cold ones after passing”.

“Now the most important role of my life is to motivate young people, to support both the talented and the ones most in need, to dedicate myself completely to philanthropy… I firmly believe that the art of living is the art of giving.” - Maria Manetti Shrem

Maria Manetti Shrem

Born in Florence, from where her love of the arts naturally springs, Maria was in her thirties when she made the brave, life-changing decision to leave her native city and to follow her heart, in the form of a new love, to San Francisco.

Arriving in this bracingly different environment with only limited means, Maria wasted no time in adapting to her new surroundings. Her idea was to present the best of Italy to America, bringing the great Italian fashion designers she adored to the attention of this new world. Together with her new husband, she founded the fashion distribution powerhouse, Manetti Farrow, designing and implementing a highly successful distribution system to sell the best Italian brands to a country hungry for a dash of European style.

Her success was spectacular: her work for the Florentine brand Gucci helped it achieve previously unimaginable global recognition (Bruna, Aldo Gucci’s wife, even nicknamed her “Aldo Gucci in gonnella”, “Aldo Gucci in a skirt”); and her involvement with brands such as Fendi has been no less transformative. But the path to success was not always easy, and in the face of life’s vicissitudes Maria has always found solace in music and in art, a love that was born one evening in her native Florence when, just fifteen years old, she happened across an outdoor performance of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème, with Mimi sung by Renata Tebaldi. Music (opera in particular) has been central to Maria’s life ever since, underpinning inspired acts such as the first naming of the General Manager role at the Metropolitan Opera; Maria hopes this will encourage others to support leading roles in the arts in similar fashion.

It is also Maria’s love of the arts that, in the early 1990s, informed her decision to furnish the grounds of her beautiful, Tuscan-style Villa in Napa Valley (the ‘Villa Mille Rose’) with magnificent sculptures by the likes of Marc Quinn and Richard Long – many of which will be offered at Sotheby’s this May. And it is this same passion for the arts that informs her friendships with many leading practitioners across the full spectrum of the arts: with Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliason, Peter Gelb, Renée Fleming, Placido Domingo, Andrea Bocelli and Nadine Sierra, to name but a few.

But Maria’s engagement in the arts has never been passive. Rather, she has used her formidable network of contacts from fashion and the arts to initiate change, bringing together people from different walks of life in order to make things happen. Most recently, for instance, she initiated discussions between Dolce & Gabbana and the Andrea Bocelli Foundation which will support the creation of a new, dedicated school building within the Ospedale Pediatrico Meyer in Florence, one of the oldest pediatric hospitals in Europe.

In fact, so pronounced are Maria’s contributions to the city of her birth 1 , she was last year awarded “the keys to the city” in a ceremony which saw the Mayor of Florence describe her as nothing less than a modern- day Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici – the legendary philanthropist who bequeathed to the Tuscan state the vast Medici treasures. Maria’s significant contributions to cultural life have been similarly celebrated in her adopted home, where just last December she was awarded “The Spirit of the Opera” with the City Hall's rotunda lit in her honor in the colors of the Italian flag. Last Summer the mayor of San Francisco proclaimed June 22 Manetti Shrem Philanthropy Day both across the city and the county of San Francisco. Gary May, Chancellor of UC Davis, has also announced that she will be the 2023 UC Davis Medal recipient – the University of California system’s highest honor – putting her in company of former president Bill Clinton, Nobel Laureate Charles Rice, and artist Wayne Thiebaud.

Jan Shrem

Jan Shrem, who spent his early years between Colombia, Jerusalem, and the United States, began his career distributing encyclopedias in Japan before building an international book publishing and distributing empire.

Jan has long loved wine and art in equal measure. In the early 1980s, having retired from the publishing business, he set about building a monument to these two passions, creating the legendary vineyard, Clos Pegase, designed by leading architect Michael Graves (winner of a prestigious competition staged for the project by the San Francisco Museum of Art), and subsequently described by The Washington Post as ‘our first monument to wine and art’. Since then, the idea of furnishing the great vineyards of Napa Valley with fittingly impressive works of art has become something of a trend – one for which Jan Shrem must take full credit.

For Jan, great art and great wine have always been completely complimentary: inspired by Jan’s art collection, the vineyard’s bottles have featured artworks by Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Robert Matta and Odilon Redon, among others. For him, both are to be taken seriously but with the life-affirming lightness of touch they deserve. In 2010, Jan gave a now legendary lecture at UC Davis, outlining the history of wine and the art it has inspired in artists through the ages – from Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and beyond – with all the authority and sensitivity that have been the hallmarks of his approach to life generally, and to collecting in particular.

A glimpse inside the collection

Pablo Picasso

Strolling in the gardens of their home in Mougins in 1964, Picasso and his wife Jacqueline came across a striking black kitten. Lovers of animals of all kinds, they quickly adopted it, welcoming it into their already replete menagerie of dogs, goats and doves. Though Picasso had been painting Jacqueline since soon after their first meeting in 1954, the arrival of this inscrutable, alluring creature prompted a series of ten highly charged reclining nudes – executed between January and May 1964 – in which the kitten features alongside its new mistress.

More than that, the introduction of the cat into Picasso’s paintings enabled him once again to allude to Manet, whose Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe had inspired an earlier series of works. Now, though, it is Manet’s similarly scandalous Olympia, in which a black cat lurks on the edge of the courtesan’s bed, that comes to mind. There, as here, the introduction of the cat heightens the erotic mood of this rare series of paintings.

With its rich layering, its bravura handling of paint, its sensual outpouring of affection for its adoring subject and its references to illustrious pre-cursors, this large- scale canvas has in it all the hallmarks of the greatest late works by Picasso. In addition to which, paintings from this acclaimed series are remarkably rare on the market: of the ten monumental reclining nudes Picasso produced at this time, only three remain in private hands, and no other example has appeared at auction in the last four decades.

Lucia Fontana

The vivid azure blue of this canvas, executed in the final year of Fontana’s life, seems to be a reflection of the artist’s appreciation for his friend and artistic sparring partner Yves Klein. Though much different in age (Fontana was some thirty years Klein’s senior), the two artists enjoyed a powerful kinship. They first met at Klein’s inaugural solo exhibition in 1957, where Fontana was immediately captivated by the power and vibrancy of Klein’s Blue Monochromes. He purchased a work on the spot, becoming among the first to buy one of Klein’s works. From that day on, the two would remain in close contact, exchanging ideas, meeting up on trips to America and Europe respectively, even embarking on a project together for the 1960 Venice Biennale.

Minimal and yet charged with the intensity that both Fontana and Klein both sought to evoke through their work, Concetto Spaziale, Attese from 1968 is an exceptional example of the iconic Tagli series, in which Fontana treads a tantalizing fine line between painting and sculpture: vigorous slashes break though the flawless monochrome canvas, revealing a dark third plane beyond and drawing the viewer into a new three- dimensional world.

Bruce Nauman

A 1966 alumnus of the Shrem’s beloved UC Davis, Bruce Nauman is part of the Californian artistic circle for which Maria Shrem has pronounced affection. In fact, Nauman was taught at UC Davis by both Wayne Thiebaud and by William Wiley, the last of whom in 1965 bought for his student an oddly shaped stool, found in a thrift store. That stool, or ‘slant step’ was to inspire a whole new wave of artistic production, at the epicenter of which were master and pupil Wiley and Nauman.

Simultaneous with his love of found objects, Nauman was also, from the very beginning of his career, intrigued by the idea of creating “experience architecture”, in which the artist produces built environments specially conceived to discomfort and disorientate the visitor. One of the greatest manifestations of this is Green Passage with Four Corridors, from 1984, featuring a series of unnavigable obstacles (in the form of everyday tables, chairs and other domestic objects) and dead ends bathed in bright fluorescent light which together create a dreamlike familiar-yet-alien and disorienting environment.

In this rare large-scale preparatory study for Nauman’s seminal installation, we see the four impassable corridors of the title hatched out across the paper in expressive style, with touches of ochre yellow representing the glow of fluorescent yellow neon lights. Large scale works on paper by Nauman’s are extremely rare at auction, with only two of this scale having been offered in the past ten years.

Óscar Domínguez

Óscar Domínguez’s Le plus du temps II was painted in Nazi occupied Paris in 1943 – at the height of the Second World War. While many of his fellow Surrealists had fled from Paris to New York, Domínguez chose to stay in the French capital, painting and contributing to La Main à Plume, an underground publication committed to keeping alive the ‘Surrealist Revolution’ in the face of Nazi censorship, to which Paul Éluard, Réné Magritte and Pablo Picasso also contributed.

Dominguez’s experience of the war years had a profound impact on his work. Shortly after the outbreak of war, for instance, complex and claustrophobic geometric webs began to dominate the background of his paintings, the first example of which, Nostalgia of Space from 1939, is now held in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Similar crystalized, fractured elements can also be found in the background of Le Plus clair du temps II. At the same time, the treatment of space and geometric planes reflects the influence of Domínguez’s contemporary Giorgio de Chirico, with a seemingly arbitrary combination of objects – butterflies, a sundial and an hourglass, all suggestive, perhaps, of ephemerality and the inescapable passage of time – scattered across the picture plane.

Le Plus clair du temps II was painted the same year Domínguez was given his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Louis Carré. This was a critical moment in the artist’s career, in which his immutable dedication to the Surrealist movement is at its height, and in which he masterfully synthesizes the influence and ideas of his prominent Surrealist contemporaries to create a pictorial poem that is uniquely his own.

Odilon Redon

This evocative rendition of Pegasus – symbol of unfettered freedom and creativity and a recurring leitmotif in the work of Redon – was the emblem of Jan Shrem’s celebrated winery in Napa Valley. Not only did it give the vineyard its name (Clos Pegase), it also appeared on the labels of the wines made there, becoming the ultimate visual symbol for Jan Shrem’s achievements in viticulture.

A number of sculptures, which once adorned the grounds of ‘Villa Mille Rose’ will also be offered at Sotheby’s in May, including: an almost eight meter high surreal, reflective sculpture, Tongue, by Swiss artist Not Vital; a monumental homage in bronze to the life- affirming qualities of the orchid by Marc Quinn; and Richard Long’s land art installation, Georgia Granite Line’, acquired by Maria on a visit to London and the first artwork she bought for ‘Villa Mille Rose’ – an early manifestation of her desire to create a bridge between Europe and her new Californian home.