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Beyond Boundaries: Avant-Garde Masterworks from a European Collection will come up at Christie’s during the second half of 2017 in New York, Geneva, and Paris. The collection is expected to achieve around $30,000,000 and comprises around 180 works from five categories: Impressionist and Modern Art, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Magnificent Jewels, African Art and Design. The Modern and Post-War works of art were assembled with the guidance of renowned advisor Alain Tarica, who also advised Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé as well as Hubertus and Renate Wald for their collections.  This collection is led by Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation mit Pferden (Studie für Improvisation 20) which is estimated between $10,000,000 and 15,000,000, and executed in 1911, the year Kandinsky realised the first abstract painting in history.

Guillaume Cerutti, CEO of Christie’s said: “This collection is without doubt one of the greatest moments of the autumn season. Not only because this group of around 180 works, comprising design, modern art, jewellery and some African sculptures is of the highest quality and refinement, but also because this collection has a soul, a unique spirit. It is obvious that every object has been chosen with passion and with an extraordinary liberty by this couple of collectors. The result is a beautiful testimony for dialogue between arts and styles”.

The images above displays, from left to right,  Wassily Kandinsky – Improvisation mit Pferden; Yves Klein – Monogold: Hemba Figure – Democratic Republic of Congo and Marc Newsom – Pod of Drawers.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) Rigide et curb signed with monogram and dated ’35’  UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR $23,319,500

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.”