Wassily Kandinsky’s Rigide et courbé will be a highlight of the Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale at Christie’s in New York on November 16. Estimated at $18-25 million Rigide et courbé (Rigid and Curved) is one Kandinsky’s dynamic compositions of grand scale. The canvas is densely packed with lively geometric vignettes and a thoughtfully textured surface composed of sand mixed with paint, a technique Kandinsky used only in his Paris paintings of 1934-1935. Solomon R. Guggenheim acquired it from Kandinsky in 1936. It was extensively published and highly exhibited from 1937-1949. The work is being offered from an important private American collection and has not been on the market since 1964.
Conor Jordan, Deputy Chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art said: “With its dynamic sweep of upward energy, Kandinsky’s Rigide et courbé, a late masterpiece from the mid-1930s, unseen in public for over fifty years, evokes an epic paean, a rhapsodic song of thanksgiving suggesting the bright hope the artist saw in his new home in Paris following his flight from Nazi Germany. Abstract forms, runic symbols and mythic references, summoning Kandinsky’s life and career, intertwine with veiled allusions to contemporary events, across the broad dimensions of this technically audacious canvas which is richly worked in oil and sand. It ranks among the greatest Kandinskys still in private hands.”