MAASTRICHT.- For their fifth year at TEFAF, Hammer Galleries will be exhibiting an exceptional selection of Impressionist and Modern Masters with key highlights by Monet, Modigliani and Picasso (booth #451).

Hammer will exhibit a major oil painting by Claude Monet titled Ice Floes, the Port-Villez Lock. This beautiful work belongs to an exclusive group of paintings that Monet kept as personal favorites. Indeed, it remained a part of his private collection for more than thirty years. Several photographs show the canvas prominently hung as part of a display in the artist’s so-called first studio in Giverny, and in one particular photograph, Monet can be seen proudly posing immediately beside the work. It is believed that Ice Floes, the Port-Villez Lock is the first of a series of thirteen landscape paintings the artist completed in January of 1893. The icy scene at Port-Villez is depicted through a cluster of swift strokes in muted tones that expertly capture the loose crystalline texture of the gently windswept envelope of space scintillating against the winter sky and is considered a precursor to his water lilies.

Hammer Galleries’ TEFAF exhibition will also include major portraits by two of the most sought after artists of the twentieth-century: Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. Modigliani’s Jeune fille assise, les cheveux dénoués (Jeune fille en bleu) is a beautiful painting that depicts a young anonymous female model in Modigliani’s emblematic style. Given the young artist’s untimely death at thirty-five and his very limited output, it is incredibly rare to have a major oil portrait such as this for display. Modigliani’s Jeune fille assise, les cheveux dénoués (Jeune fille en bleu) is one of only 347 works recognized in the highly respected Ceroni Catalogue.

The gallery will exhibit portraits of two of Picasso’s most influential muses: Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. The profound influence of Picasso’s lovers on his art can best be seen through his affairs with these two women, which led the artist to produce some of his best regarded and most desirable paintings. Hammer will bring to TEFAF a major oil portrait of Dora Maar from 1941, titled Femme dans un Fauteuil (Dora Maar). The intellectual beauty is depicted on the canvas sitting in an armchair and wearing a fashionable hat decorated with a large feather. The image of Maar appears in Picasso’s work throughout the length of their stormy affair in the 1930s and 1940s. Hammer Galleries will also exhibit Picasso’s Le joueur de clarinette, a lyrical work on paper that explores Picasso’s relationship with his young “Golden Muse” Marie-Thérèse Walter, who he considered to be the very embodiment of the Eternal Feminine.

Additional works will include two noteworthy oil paintings by Dutch master Kees van Dongen, La rue de la Paix and Le jardin (Le Louvard).

Also on display in Hammer Galleries’ booth at TEFAF 2014 will be works by Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-August Renoir, Alfred Sisley, among others.