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Boxing Day

(Photo: Courtesy of Christie's Images Ltd. and Sotheby's)

impressionism and modernism 2006
The Year of the Woman

Two very lovely ladies face off on consecutive nights of Impressionist and Modern auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which together could total nearly $400 million. The placid café proprietress of Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux (1890; [1]) is expected to attract between $40 million and $50 million at Christie’s on May 2. Vincent imagined the woman, whom he and his friend Gauguin discovered as a model, as an impassioned reader: She leans on French translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dickens’s Christmas stories. It is the last of six portraits of Ginoux that the mentally ragged artist painted, and the only one not in a museum. The following night, Sotheby’s brings out the fierce, Cubist Dora Maar au chat (1941; [2]), Picasso’s portrait of his long-standing mistress, which is estimated to make $50 million. Essentially a record of a lovers’ quarrel, the painting shows a black kitten at the shoulder of cat-hater Dora Maar, whose dog had just died. Picasso once said that Maar to him was the personification of war.

If $50 million is too steep, there are more of Picasso’s women to go around. Sotheby’s also has a late portrait being deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (1960), estimated at $3 million to $5 million, and a planar portrait of the artist’s young neighbor, Sylvette (1954), at $4.5 million to $6 million. At Christie’s, an early blue-period portrait of Germaine, a hollow-cheeked French flirt for whom a romantic competitor of Picasso’s killed himself, is estimated at $12 million to $18 million. And Picasso’s first wife, Olga, is a flurry of pink against rainbow colors in Le repos (1932), at $15 million to $20 million.

Then there’s Matisse’s decidedly more relaxed odalisque at Sotheby’s: In Nu couché vu de dos (1927; [3]), her bountiful rear is the calm in the middle of a gentle storm of overlapping patterns. Sotheby’s estimates the picture will sell for $12 million to $15 million.