A disembodied Marilyn Monroe and a vibrant De Kooning from the collection of Eric Clapton: our pick of the October sales
Plus, a colourful Magritte painting and a Simone Baltaxé tapestry.
The Kaspar König Collection: His Private Choice, Van Ham, Cologne, 1 October
Estimate: €100,000 to €150,000
This mixed media Claes Oldenburg work is one of around 100 offered from the collection of the storied German curator Kaspar König, who died in August (seep58).
Oldenburg developed a close professional and personal relationship with König over 50 years, beginning in New York, where the curator had moved in the 1960s as the New York representative for Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. König curated a solo show of Oldenburg’s sculptures at that museum in 1966, and he later organised the artist’s Documenta 5 project.
Mouse Museum, in 1972, for which the pair chose more than 300 of Oldbenburg’s works to be catalogued for a Mickey Mouse-shaped “museum”.
König also included Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls in the first edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1977, which is still installed in an artificial lake there.
This present work was made for a 1967 group show at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, in memory of Marilyn Monroe, who had died five years previously. It was from this show that König bought the work. Oldenburg here presents a disembodied version of the film star.
The three garments reference famous costumes worn by Monroe
The three garments reference famous costumes worn by Monroe, including the white dress from The Seven Year Itch (1955) and the evening gown worn to the 1962 birthday celebration of US president John F. Kennedy Jr.
Consisting of three metal hangers attached to water pipes, it is a modified version of Oldenburg’s first ever metal sculpture, Lipstick. It has been exhibited widely, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Courtesy Christie’s
Willem de Kooning, Untitled XVIII (1986)
20th/21st Century Evening Sale, Christie’s, London, 8 October
Estimate: £4m to £6m
Untitled XVIII was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial, where it was shown in one of the main galleries alongside works by Louise Bourgeois in a “European pocket”, said a review in The New York Times.
It is quite typical of De Kooning’s later style, which saw him move away from more aggressive brushstrokes to ribbon-like ones executed on emptier, white backgrounds, in an aesthetic redolent of Matisse.
De Kooning started his compositions during this period by projecting sections of earlier drawings onto a canvas, using charcoal to trace and then rearrange or fragment the patterns. In 2007, Christie’s sold De Kooning’s Untitled I (1981) for $19m, setting a record for a work by the artist from that decade.
Since then, seven of the top ten prices for the artist have been realised at Christie’s.
This painting comes from the collection of the English rock musician Eric Clapton, who has consigned a few other notable works to Christie’s over the years, including three monumental paintings by Gerhard Richter from his Abstraktes Bild series, one of which fetched $22m in New York in 2016.
