At the twilight of his life, too debilitated to paint, Matisse returned to drawing, reducing his art to the essence of the line. In 1948 he tackled the decoration of the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence using this technique. After the inauguration of the chapel in 1951 (which Matisse considered his masterpiece) the artist will devote most of his effort to the guoaches and cut-outs.
Visage is a magnificent example of this series of portraits, a compendium of elegance and purity, defined by a simple but extremely expressive line. Thus Barbara Duthuit states in the certificate of authenticity "it belongs to the group of the last works of Matisse".
The extreme strength of the work derives from the fact that the artist has decided to "zoom" the face rather than define the contours, more traditionally, which makes the work decidedly modern. Only a limited number of "faces" of this quality are known to the international market; most are instead included in the collections of museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. These inks can be considered the master's aesthetic testament.
RETURN OF A STOLEN PASTEL BY BERTHE MORISOT
It is a great privilege for Sotheby's to have up for auction a pastel by Berthe Morisot, returned to its rightful owners David and Flora David-Weill on 27 April 2016, 70 years after it was stolen from them by the Nazis. To this day Jeanne Pointillon à la capeline, 1884 (estimated: €60,000-80,000) has been kept in the Salzburg Museum of Modern Art.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Works on paper by contemporary artists will also be auctioned, including a highly relevant work by Adel Abdessemed, Lampedusa (estimated €50,000-70,000): a work from the series of black chalk drawings on the theme of migrants , which resulted in a major installation of the “Hope” exhibition held at the Center Pompidou in 2012.
