Stimulated by the very high auctions of the last auction dedicated to the Editions, which totalled more than 500,000 euros on 26 June 2019, PIASA presents, on Wednesday 11 December 2019 at 3pm, a selection of works by some of the most important artists of the 20th century.
The polarity of this new selection clearly indicates the effervescence and diversity of the artistic scenes that developed from the immediate post-war period on both sides of the Atlantic.
The first part of this session will present a set of about fifty engravings in a catalogue: "Sam Francis - Engravings". The artist who settled in Paris in the 1950s/60s will be shown again on the screen at 118 rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré. This session will present a rich panel ranging from lithography, etching and silkscreen printing.
The second catalogue of this session will logically highlight the intimacy of the links that the PIASA auction house has maintained with modern and contemporary engraving. This sale will start with a magnificent collection of Picasso ceramics with a set of 17 Picasso ceramics.
The Americans will also be honoured in this sale with a work by Jean Michel Basquiat, "Cabeza" estimated at between 70,000 and 90,000 euros, unpublished on the Parisian market, a set of prints by Robert Longo, Frank Stella and Robert Indiana.
A logical extension of the intimacy of the links that the auction house has maintained with contemporary creation, this session also highlights contemporary engraving with artists who are still very active, such as Roberto Longo, Giuseppe Penone, Alex Katz and Thomas Ruff, Daniel Arsham, Banksy.
FOCUS / Sam Francis (1923-1994) : Engraving
Sam Francis (1923-1994)
SFE-075 RC, Trietto 2 – 1991
Estimation : 4 000 / 6 000 euros
As part of its semi-annual sale dedicated to the Edition, PIASA is honoured to present an exceptional selection of fifty prints presenting the work of Sam Francis. Through magnificent lithographs, serigraphs and etchings, it effectively highlights the artist's total involvement in the demanding discipline of engraving.
Sam Francis (1923-1994)
SFE 081 RC – 1992
Estimate : 4 000 / 6 000 euros
At the age of 20, a long convalescence following a plane crash pushed the young Sam Francis towards his first pictorial experiments. After this founding episode, the practice of art will correspond to a real therapy.
Two years later, his attendance at the works of Klee, Picasso, Miro and especially Greco prompted him to follow a course at the University of Berkeley from 1948.
It was in Zurich, in 1960, that the artist produced his first series of lithographs with the printer Emil Matthieu. This medium corresponds to the aesthetics of a Sam Francis taking pleasure in superimposing layers of colour and exploring the transparency of the ink.
Sam Francis' relationship with the lithographic stone is a mystical one. She seems to be the only medium through which her dreams can take shape.
A central element in his work, the white of paper gradually becomes a subject in its own right, even pushing colored shapes to the margins.
After working in several engraving workshops around the world, he opened his own ("The Litho Shop") in 1970 in Santa Monica in order to master all aspects of production. Three years later, the artist was confronted with etchings. But this experience did not reach the intensity of his relationship to the lithographic stone.
The works offered for sale are mainly large or even monumental in size. These dimensions, often more than a meter wide, increase their expressive power and reflect the importance that this medium had acquired in the artist's production.
Sam Francis (1923-1994)
SF 345 ou Sans titre – 1991
Estimate : 3 000 / 4 000 euros
EDITION / Selection
The selection proposed by PIASA's Publishing Department offers an almost complete panorama of the artistic abundance of the 20th century on both sides of the Atlantic.
Within the framework of this sale, a focus is proposed around twenty ceramics (dishes, plates, jugs...) made by Pablo Picasso.
With works by New Yorkers Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat and Daniel Arsham and others signed by Robert Indiana from New Castle, Indiana and Frank Stella, born in Malden, Massachusetts, the American production is particularly well represented.
Alongside these great names in art history and the image of PIASA's commitment to today's creation, artists such as Katz, Ruff, Penonne, Arsham and the French artist Bernard Venet.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
A set of twenty ceramics
In 1946, the chance of a Mediterranean itinerary led Picasso to visit the annual exhibition of Vallauris potters. The plasticity of the material and the almost magical process of transformation by baking in the oven persuaded the painter to embark on this technique. He met Georges and Suzanne Ramié and started working in their Madoura factory.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Corrida verte - 1949 (Ramié 81)
Estimate : 8 000 / 12 000 euros
Constituting a considerable part of his work, the some 3,500 pieces he produced until 1971 are now estimated at their fair value. This production is also located at the confluence of plural inspirations, mainly from the Mediterranean basin
Extending the iconography of bullfighting, which has been very abundant in his painting and drawings since the 1930s, Pablo Picasso uses the round and oval shapes of ceramics to represent the space of the arena. A symbol of Hispanicity, this theme reflects in the 1950s and 1970s the nostalgia for a country whose artist is deprived because of the despotic presence of the Franciscan regime.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Taureau dans l'arène - 1948, (Ramié 80)
Estimate : 8 000 / 12 000 euros
Within the Picassian bestiary, owls and owls occupy a very special place. Fascinated by this nocturnal animal, which refers to ancient themes, Picasso never ceased to appear in his frescoes (War and Peace in the Chapel of Vallauris), in his paintings and sculptures as well as in ceramics as on the surface of this jug offered for sale by PIASA.
This highly ambivalent iconographic theme was the subject of an exhibition at the Pablo Picasso National Museum in 2016.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Cruchon Hibou - 1955, (Ramié 293)
Estimate : 8 000 / 12 000 euros
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
Visage à la grille - 1956, (Ramié 352)
Estimate : 8 000 / 12 000 euros
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
From Puerto Rican and Haitian origin, born in 1960 in Brooklyn and died in New York in 1988 following an overdose at the age of twenty-seven, Basquiat belongs to a generation of graffiti artists who suddenly emerged in New York in the late 1970s.
Author of a work of more than 2,000 drawings and paintings, Jean-Michel Basquiat has crossed the New York scene at the pace of a dislocated meteor. The product of an American urban culture strongly impacted by social and ethnic violence; the artist is one of the actors who allowed Street Art to enter the museum halls. Immediately identifiable, his painting is the place of the emergence of a new iconographic repertoire and a style that inspired many artists to this day.
As early as 1976, at the age of 16, the young man intrigued the East Village's artistic community by graffitiing the street walls near Manhattan's galleries under the pseudonym SAMO (Same Old shit). After several projects and collaborations (music, cinema...), his painting was the subject of a first exhibition in Annina Nosei's gallery in Soho and then in 1980 in the Larry Gagosian gallery in Los Angeles.
On a yellow background, in the centre of this silkscreen print numbered 85 copies, the character is schematically represented. The large black lines starting from his skull evoke the artist's hair, which rises to the sandstone of the portraits and photographs published in the press as a symbol. Very clearly written on the character's chest, the word "Aopkhes", recurred in the artist's work, refers to the culture of ancient Egypt, a source of fascination.
Since the artist's untimely death in 1988, his work, exhibited all over the world, has been elevated to the status of an icon of contemporary art. Almost 10 years after the exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris - the first of its kind for the artist on French soil - the recent exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation (2018-2019) attracted over half a million visitors.
D'après Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
Cabeza, issue du Portfolio II - 1982 / 2005
Estimate : 70 000 / 90 000 euros
The emblematic character of Basquiat's work affects the public but also collectors all over the world. In the auction room, the record for this artist was reached in New York in May 2017 with an auction of nearly 100 million euros.
Robert Indiana (1928-2018)
The work of Robert Indiana, who died in 2018 at the age of 89, has become an icon of contemporary art. While she has contributed considerably to her public success, her series "Love" cannot sum up in itself a career spanning more than sixty years as the title of the retrospective Barbara Haskell organized in 2013 at the Whitney Museum in New York: "Beyond LOVE". Nevertheless, it is an essential milestone.
A figure of American Pop Art, Robert Indiana moved to New York in 1954 after his studies in London. He exhibited the series "Love" in 1966 at the Stable Gallery in New York. It will be followed by a sculpture installed in Philadelphia's Love Park.
The result of ten years of work, which soon became a modern icon, questions the role that writing can play in art after the Cubist experience. He will decline this stamped image as the one presented for sale with an estimate between 15,000 and 20,000 euros.
Robert Indiana (1928-2018)
Heliotherapy Love – 1995
Estimate : 15 000 / 20 000 euros
Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013)
An authentic bridge between East and West, the career of the painter Zao Wou-ki, naturalized in 1964, is a long journey from a figuration inspired by traditional Chinese painting to a gestural abstraction of a metaphorical nature.
Published in 90 copies, the etching offered for sale by PIASA is emblematic of an aesthetic where the material deposited on the surface becomes the vestige of a movement that is by definition ephemeral.
Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013)
Issue de La peau des choses - 1968, (Agerup 187)
Estimate : 3500 / 4 000 euros
Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013)
Sans titre - 1963, (Agerup 154)
Estimate: 3 000 / 5 000 euros
Gerhard Richter (né en 1932)
Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, Gerhard Richter has relied on photography since the early 1960s to feed a painting that was then firmly rooted in reality.
His work is the place where abstraction (geometric and gestural) meets the reproduction of photographs from magazines and newspapers. This peaceful coexistence appears as an abyss echoing the material depth of the surface.
Gerhard Richter
Victoria I & Victoria II - 1986 – 2003
Estimate : 10 000 / 15 000 euros
By offering for sale works by artists such as New Yorkers Alex Katz (born 1927) and Robert Longo (born 1953), German Thomas Ruff (born 1958), or Italian Giuseppe Penone (born 1947), the Publishing Department demonstrates the solid links between the auction house and current creation.
Giuseppe Penone (né en 1947)
A native of Piedmont, the artist was associated, in the mid-1960s, with Arte Povera. Her studies at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin allowed her to become familiar with American minimalism, particularly with the works of Donald Judd and Robert Morris.
Penone's work is based on the artist's body, contact with her own body, the imprints of her body and her relationship with nature. Reflecting an inner landscape, his works appear as the vestige of a creative process.
As part of the 2019 edition of FIAC, the Palais d'Iéna hosted "Matrix di linfa" ("Sap Matrix"), a 43-metre long installation.
Giuseppe Penone (né en 1947)
Images de Pierres – 1993
Estimate: 1 000 / 1 500 euros
Robert Longo (né en 1953)
For the young New Yorker Roberto Longo, television, cinema and comic strips constitute a repertoire of images, colours and shapes. He studied at the Academy of Drawing in Florence and then at Buffalo State College.
The artist's first successes came in the 1980s with his series Men in the Cities featuring men and women on an immaculate background adopting constrained, contorted positions.
Robert Longo (né en 1953)
Men in the cities, Planche 1 – 1990
Estimate: 6 000 / 8 000 euros
Bernar Venet (né en 1941)
The simplicity of the curves of the first "Arcs", created by Bernar Venet in 1979, completes the trajectory of a singular aesthetic, continuously fuelled by the artist's passion for mathematics and geometry.
Removing him from the backstage of the Nice opera house where he worked as an assistant decorator, his military service led the artist to the Tarascon barracks, under the attic, where he set up a studio. On the surface of his canvases, the unichrome abstraction gives way to a monochromatic painting where black unfolds all its expressive power.
Back from a mobilization of nearly ten months in Algeria, Bernar Venet gravitates around the nebula of New Realism and frequents the Nice scene, of which César and Arman are the most emblematic representatives.
Bernar Venet (né en 1941)
Quatre Arcs – 2017
Estimate : 8 000 / 12 000 euros
Frank Stella (né en 1936)
A pioneer of Minimalism and a leading figure, Frank Stella trained alongside Joseph Albers of Op Art at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then at Princeton University.
It gradually moves away from the abstract Expressionism embodied by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline to approach the less lyrical painting of a Barnett Newman. In 1959, as part of the exhibition "Sixteen Americans", the MoMA presented its work, which was the subject of an individual exhibition four years later.
The 1970s saw the emergence of a style that some critics were able to liken to graffiti. More and more, the works contain gluing elements, pieces of canvas glued on plywood and thus gain in volume.
During the 1990s, from Miami to Singapore, Berlin to Toronto, the artist created monumental works for public places.
Frank Stella (né en 1936)
Had Gadya Series, "Then Came a Fire and Burnt the Stick"
Estimate : 10 000 / 15 000 euros
Frank Stella (né en 1936)
Had Gadya Series, "The Butcher Came and Slew the Ox"
Estimate : 10 000 / 15 000 euros
