Two Picassos up for sale at Sotheby's

NEW YORK: Sotheby's evening sale of impressionist and modern art on November 7 will feature two spectacular works by Pablo Picasso.

The finest sculpture by the artist to ever appear at auction, Tête de femme (Dora Maar) and La Lampe, an important work from 1931 that comes directly from the artist's family, will go under the hammer.

Both works, which have never before been offered at auction, will be on view at Sotheby's London from October 7 to 12 and in New York from November 2 to 7 prior to their sale on the evening of November 7 in New York. While Tete de femme (Dora Maar) is expected to sell for $20-30 million, La Lampe is estimated to bring in $25-35 million.

Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar are the two women who inspired Picasso's art more than any others and their reigns in his life and oeuvre over-lapped.

In these two works we have an illustration of the reciprocal effect that painting and sculpture had upon each other, the transition from the surrealist-inflected and peaceful early 1930s to the gravity of the War Years, and the model as the sensual, pliant object of the artists gaze versus the forceful, challenging personality of Maar.

Viewed together, these great works stimulate as well as elucidate the course of Picasso's art post-Cubism.

"La Lampe, a masterpiece by Picasso which has been kept in the artist's family until now, is one of the key works of the 1930s - a crucial and highly sought-after period in the artist's oeuvre," said Di Donna, senior vice president in Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Department.

"This remarkable and monumental canvas appears to be a vibrantly colourful ode to classicism: a plaster bust, framed and illuminated against the dark archway and surrounded by a garland of leaves. But there is much more to this picture than meets the eye. What we see here, bathed in the warm glow of a gas lamp that hung in his Boisgeloup studio, is the unmistakable likeness of the artist's mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter," Donna added.

Painted during the summer of 1931, the theme of illumination is timely. It was during these months that Picasso began to cast his artistic spotlight on his young lover, a sensual young blonde whose unveiled presence would raise the suspicions of Picasso's wife the following year.

Up until this point he had only referenced his extramarital affair with Marie-Thérèse in his pictures in code, sometimes imbedding her initials in a composition or rendering her strong, Grecian profile as a feature of the background.

By 1931, Picasso could no longer repress his creative impulse with regard to Marie-Thérèse, and she became the primary focus of his art.

He occupied himself during the first few months of the year with modelling large plaster heads of her likeness. Not stopping there, he even incorporated these sculptures into a series of paintings between 1931 and 1932.

It is one of these plaster heads that we see here, cast in the powerful light of the artist's studio. La Lampe and the others in this series that were to follow it, brought about a revolution in Picasso's art and in his life.

Never before offered at auction, the present work is estimated to sell for $25-35 million. Tête de femme (Dora Maar), a larger-than-life (31.5 inches in height) bust portrait of Dora Maar is one of Picasso's greatest achievements in the medium of sculpture.

Its monumental scale, power and authority convey the model's strength of character and imposing presence as a figure in Picasso's life during the war years.

The bronze is also one of the artist's most respectful and idealized portrayals of Dora, rendered without any of the abstraction that characterized his more menacing depictions of her as the weeping woman. Picasso created Tête de Femme (Dora Maar) in 1941 in his studio on the rue des Grands Augustins in Paris.