The Collection of Celeste and Armand Bartos to be offered at Christie’s during 2013

NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s announced the forthcoming sale of the Collection of Celeste and Armand Bartos of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Impressionist and Modern Art, Prints and Multiples, African Art, 20th Century Decorative Arts and Photographs. The total combined value of the works is estimated to exceed $30 million. Celeste and Armand Bartos were passionate collectors and true patrons of the arts, with interests that spanned painting, sculpture, cinema, design, architecture, and new media. The diversity and scope of their patronage is emblematic of the curiosity and optimistic engagement the Bartoses had with their world. Their exceptional art collection, which includes works by many of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, including Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, demonstrates the couple’s discerning eye for quality and perfectly embodied their bold tastes.

Post-War & Contemporary Art – New York – 15 May 2013
With Flowers, Warhol skillfully marries together the old and the new; the venerable tradition of the floral still life is updated it by his use of the silkscreen process – still a revolutionary process in the year this work was produced. But, as with Warhol’s best work, Flowers also has a darker, more melancholic quality to it. The brief nature of a flower’s life appealed to Warhol’s fascination with death and represented for him a very personal affinity with the temporary nature of life. Warhol was at the height of his creative powers when he conceived the Flowers series in the summer of 1964. Produced for his first exhibition with his new dealer, Leo Castelli, the show was an immediate success and sold out. The original idea for the series came from a curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Henry Geldzahler. Frustrated with the artist’s morbid obsession with death and seeing him spend months working on his Death and Disaster series, he suggested to Warhol that he try his hand at something different and pointed to a photograph of flowers in Modern Photography magazine. Warhol—in his deadpan style—immediately seized upon the image as his subject.

Andy Warhol, Flowers , 1964 – Estimate: $6,000,000-9,000,000. Photo: Christie’s Images Ltd 2013.

This section of the collection includes several works from the 1960s: an unnamed sculpture in stone and wood executed by Isamu Noguchi in 1968, (estimate: $600,000-800,000), and a vibrant and colorful painting by Frank Stella, Les Indes Galantes (small version) from 1964. This work, estimated at $700,000-$1,000,000, owes its hypnotic excitement to the discord between the controlled composition of the concentric bands and the vibrant colors. The title refers to an operaballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau about Cupid’s search to understand love. From the 1970s, two paintings by Agnes Martin, estimated $1.8-2.2 million and $2-3 million.

Impressionist & Modern Art – New York – 8 May 2013
The Bartoses also collected several key works by Impressionist and Modern artists that prefigure the Post-War period. Two special works in the collection were created by Henri Matisse in 1952 as designs for the front and back covers of the catalogue for the landmark 1953 exhibition of his papiers découpés, or cut-paper works, at the Berggruen gallery in Paris. Matisse viewed his papiers découpés as a fitting culmination to his long career, synthesizing ideas that had preoccupied him for nearly five decades. After 1951, Matisse abandoned painting and sculpture altogether, and the paper cut-out became his sole vehicle for artistic expression. 1952 was ―one of the richest years of Matisse’s career in the sheer number of important works produced,‖ according to art historian John Elderfield. In the two untitled but signed works, to be sold as a pair, (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000), two blue forms have been cut from the very same sheet of paper, creating positive and negative profile faces, which suggest the act of viewing, an apt choice for the cover of an exhibition catalogue. The most striking feature of Matisse’s cut-outs is their fusion of the expressive elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture within a single medium. Matisse described his work in cut paper as ―drawing with scissors on sheets of paper colored in advance, one movement linking line with color, contour with surface.”

Another strikingly Modern work in the Bartos collection is a 1917 oil painting by Theo Van Doesburg (1883-1931), titled Composition (Ochre and Black) , (estimate: $700,000-1,000,000). As the catalyst behind the journal De Stijl, Van Doesburg was the public spokeperson for the group of Dutch architects and artists, including Piet Mondrian, who formulated a distinctly purist strain of idealism in a synthesis of art, architecture and design. Painted while he collaborated with fellow De Stijl architect JJ Oud on the design of a holiday residence called De Vonk (the Spark), this work is closely related to Van Doesburg’s designs for a tiled floor that he considered one of the first successful expressions of the group’s principles. Their goal was a new harmony in the expression of universal values, based on the precise geometry of abstraction, and the absolute supremacy that human thought and invention should wield over nature. The three colors may be read as alternately overlapping and cut open superimposed planes, a sort of synthetic cubist puzzle. The composition is static–yet the elements, as cohesively interlocked as they are, produce the illusion of being in a state of flux.

Other works to be offered in the Impressionist and Modern day sale in New York include a 1946 painting by Fernand Leger (1881-1955), Composition en rouge et noir 1er état, estimated at $250,000-350,000; two polished bronze sculptures by Jean Arp, Hurlou, 19 1/4 in. high, conceived in 1957 ($150,000-250,000) and L’egyptienne, 10 in. high, from 1938 (estimate: $80,000-100,000).

Prints & Multiples – New York – 30 April 2013
Avid collectors of modern and contemporary art, Celeste and Armand gave many pieces to The Museum of Modern Art in New York, including 21 of Universal Limited Editions’ (ULAE) earliest prints. These included some of Jasper Johns first forays in the printmaking. The Bartos’ also supported ULAE in the early years in exchange for the first impression of every print to be gifted to the MoMA. Among the works offered at Christie’s from the Bartos collection are 24 prints by contemporary artists including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist. In addition, the Bartos collected select works by Modern artists. From Armand’s work in the field of architecture, 10 rare lithographs by El Lissitzky feature prominently in the collection.

African & Oceanic Art – Paris – 19 June 2013
A superb selection of 20 African works of art also formed the core of the Bartos Collection, and will be sold in Paris. Among the highlights, a fine and historic Fang Reliquary Guardian head, Blo Byeri, from Gabon (estimate: €300,000-500,000 / $ 469,000-782,000) – And an important and exquisite Baga figure of a Snake Bansonyi, from the Republic of Guinea, which was collected insitu by Helene and Henri Kamer in 1957, (estimate: €800,000-1,200,000 / $1,251,000-1,877,000). The superb painterly surface of the Baga snake is enhanced with black and white pigments forming triangular geometric patterns and further reinforces the form’s rhythm. The head, cut in a lozenge shape, is highly stylized and also enhanced by sets of color. The strong plasticity of this bansonyi snake places it among the major Baga works of art, and, further, that it can be positioned as a major work of monumental African statuary, which is extremely rare. Comparable snakes are in prestigious collections: the one belonging to the Musée du Quai Branly, now exhibited in the Pavillon des Sessions (Louvre, Paris), another one is in the Menil Collection in Houston, another at the Metropolitan Museum of New York formerly in the Rockefeller collection. The spirit of the snake called bansonyi reigned among the Baga people, who feared him. He was the spirit who could bring rain, provide wealth, and children to infertile women. Associated with the rainbow, considered the source of the rivers and a marker of the end of the rains, the snake evokes the idea of life and death, the beginning and the end.

Celeste and Armand Bartos rank among the rare breed of the most sophisticated collectors of art – a couple who built a collection with a true appreciation for art, artists, aesthetics, affinities and art history. They clearly understood the relevance of African art as the genesis of Modern Art. The first generation of African art collectors lived in both Europe and America and are names we all know: Picasso, Matisse, Ernst, Andre Breton, Helena Rubinstein and Alfred Stieglitz, for example. A second generation emerged after the second World War and included, Pierre Matisse, Arman, John and Domique De Menil, and, perhaps most famously, Nelson Rockefeller, whose collection of African and Oceanic Art would later form the core of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was an enlightened and philanthropic collector, like Celeste and Armand Bartos. At the same time, Rockefeller, the Menils and many others were acquiring African art in New York from dealers such as John J. Klejman, as did Celeste and Armand Bartos.