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Lot 3217 - A183 Impressionist & Modern Art - Friday, 08. December 2017, 04.00 PM

ALBERT MARQUET

(Bordeaux 1875–1947 Paris)
Boulogne-sur-mer, le port. 1930.
Oil on canvas board.
Signed lower right: marquet.
33 x 40.8 cm.

The authenticity of the work has been confirmed by Elizabeth Gorayeb and the Wildenstein-Plattner Institute, New York, 23 October 2017.

Provenance:
- Druet, Paris, 14 October 1930, bought directly from the artist.
- Ziegler, 26 November 1930, bought from the above.
- Collection F. F. Uthemann, Geneva.

Exhibition: Geneva 1967, A. Marquet, Galerie du Théâtre, 3 November - 14 December 1967, no. 11 (with ill.).

Albert Marquet exhibited in the legendary and art-historically groundbreaking "Cage aux fauves", a room gathering the works of young painters that scandalised the 1905 Salon d'Automne through the violence of their colours. This is quite a paradox for an amateur of grey, rainy atmospheres, whose very modern cityscapes evoke a seemingly banal atmosphere. Critics called him a "non-roaring" Fauve or even "an indoor cat". If Marquet did not make his colours scream, the focus is all the more on the drawing, which already vibrates in two or three lines with him. He was extremely upset by the debates and left no theoretical text. His simple style of painting, however, fascinated photographers and film directors, eventually earning him the deserved fame as one of the most important painters of the 20th century, alongside his lifelong friend Matisse.

A number of painters had discovered the harbour as a subject before Albert Marquet, but he was perhaps the first to turn it into a modern landscape. His harbours seem alive; the sea is disturbed by the port traffic and mixes with the ascending smoke of the tugboats. Marquet's ports, be they Marseille, Le Havre, Stockholm, Algiers or Hamburg, convey his typical palette of a light grisaille: leaden sky, dark waters, white clouds, billowing smoke, and hazy fog blurring the details.
Marquet painted the present work in Boulogne-sur-mer in the summer of 1930.


CHF 50 000 / 70 000 | (€ 51 550 / 72 160)

Sold for CHF 89 300 (including buyer’s premium)
All information is subject to change.