Works of exceptional quality and importance from every key period in the canon will be offered at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern evening sale in London on February 8. Highlights include Joan Miró’s monumental Peinture of 1933, estimated at £7-10 million, Gustav Klimt’s recently rediscovered landscape Seeufer mit Birken (£6 – 8 million), which has not been seen in public in over a century, a rare and atmospheric winter scene by Claude Monet, L’entrée de Giverny en hiver (£4.5 – 6.5 million), and one of Fernand Léger’s definitive compositions of the 1940s, La Jeune fille à l’échelle (£3.8 – 4.5 million).
The auction features a particularly strong Surrealist group, with works by Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and René Magritte. There is an outstanding group of paintings by German artists including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Lyonel Feininger and Otto Dix. The sale is estimated to realise in excess of £78 million.