Suffused with the blazing light and color of the Mediterranean Plage à Agrigente by Nicolas de Staël will highlight the Parisian section of ONE: a Global Sale of the 20th Century at Christie’s on July 10. Launching in Hong Kong, the sale will then transition to auctioneers in Paris and London, concluding in New York.
Plage à Agrigente captures the memory of the landscape around the Ancient Greek city of Agrigento in Southern Sicily, which the artist had visited during the summer of 1953. This exquisite work from one of Nicolas de Staël’s most celebrated and important series was unveiled at Paul Rosenberg’s New York gallery in 1954. The painting has since been featured in some of de Staël’s most important posthumous exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1965, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1966 and the Tobu Art Museum in Tokyo in 1997.
