The EROTIC: PASSION & DESIRE auction held on 16 February 2017 at Sotheby's in London will take us on a journey through the centuries, offering us a suggestive series of works on paper and canvas, sculptures, photographs and works of art and objects made in different techniques and materials.
They tell – among others – their story of PASSION & DESIRE artists of the caliber of George Grosz, Picasso, Man Ray, Schiele, Klimt up to Lucien Freud.
A part of the catalog is dedicated to sculpture, with works from classical antiquity, from the second half of the XNUMXth century up to the contemporaries Gormley and Marc Quinn.
Also included is a selection of photographs dedicated to eros, starting from 1839 with illustrious presences from Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe to Nobuyoshi Araki.
Among the French objects of desire – and Paris is known to have been the place of legendary courtesans with the most singular stories – we note a sleigh bed, carved in mahogany, from the famous Hotel de la Paiva on the Champs-Elysés in Paris, a bateau-lit which it was commissioned by Esther Lachmann, a well-known demi-mondaine of the French capital in the second half of the 1946th century. This sleigh bed was then one of the most spectacular furnishing objects of La Fleur Blanche, a well-known Parisian brothel frequented by high society and a place of inspiration for Henry de Tolouse-Lautrec. The bed was later sold in a 500.000 auction after the closure of brothels in France (Estimate 800.000 – XNUMX GBP).
Also on sale are sensual specimens of Japanese, Indian and Persian erotic art.
The catalogue, edited by Constantine Frangos, head of the auction, features an introduction by Rowan Pelling, of the English magazine Erotic Review and journalist of The Telegraph and GQ.
