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KollerView_2-26

EDITORIAL

Dear Reader,


Our second major auction series of the year, from 16 June to 1 July, is already just around the corner. Following our successful auction series in March – including a landscape by Pieter Brueghel the Younger which achieved the impressive sum of CHF 1.8 million, and works of art ranging from Antiquity to the 19th century, such as a Roman Venus that changed hands for CHF 1.2 million – we now once again turn our attention to art from the Impressionists to the current day. ↘


June
Auctions


Dates


Contacts

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Sails dipped
in gold

In this painting, executed in 1906, Paul Signac presents Venice not as a physical city, but as a shimmering apparition of light and colour. The restless waters of the lagoon flow through the composition like a quiet pulse, guiding the eye towards the silhouette of the votive church Santa Maria della Salute. Its famous double dome and flanking campanili rise in the distance, not as sharply defined architecture, but as a vibrating constellation of delicate pinks, blues and violets. The church seems less constructed than dissolved within the haze itself. ↘

Between distance
and intimacy

With ‘Femme nue couchée de dos’, Félix Vallotton achieves that singular tension which makes his work appear so strikingly modern to this day. The female nude lies turned away from the viewer, calm, almost absorbed in herself. Nothing distracts from the body. There is no anecdotal detail, no indication of a specific situation. The space is composed of broad, quiet planes of muted colour, of fabrics, curtains and shadows that seem less described than staged. It is precisely this reduction that lends the painting its intensity.↘

Interplay of proximity and distance

‘The Jungfrau Massif from Mürren’ ranks among the most important alpine landscapes from Ferdinand Hodler’s late oeuvre. Through a slight shift in viewpoint and a deliberately simplified pictorial structure, Hodler achieves a clear and monumental frontal view. The rock formations are arranged in a rigorously balanced composition, while narrative details recede into the background. Instead, rhythm, repetition and symmetry determine the structure of the painting and constitute central elements of Hodler’s theory of parallelism. ↘

With a sense of humour

In Barry Flanagan’s bronze sculpture ‘Jackass and Elephant’, two animals are brought together in an apparition that is at once playful and unsettling. Perched upon the back of an elephant sits a donkey, slightly off balance and yet surprisingly assured. The sculpture, standing almost two metres high, derives its vitality from this interplay of weight and movement. Compositionally, it is governed by a delicate vertical equilibrium. The massive body of the elephant forms a stable foundation, while the donkey above creates a dynamic counter-movement charged with tension. Flanagan leaves the surface rough and open. Indentations, fractures and visible traces of modelling recall that the form here has not been smoothed into perfection, but developed through process. It is precisely in this that his departure from the strict language of post-war modernism becomes apparent. Rather than flawless perfection, he is interested in process, experimentation and the provisional. Since the 1960s, Flanagan expanded the possibilities of sculpture through unusual materials and a new freedom in the treatment of volume and space. ‘Jackass and Elephant’, too, unites humour with sculptural precision. ↘

Planetary
landscape

Ferdinand Hodler’s late landscapes rank among the most radical pictorial inventions of European Modernism. Painted in 1917, ‘Sunset over Lake Geneva from Caux’ exemplifies the way in which, during the final years of his life, the artist moved away from contour-defined painting and assigned the central role within the composition to colour. Hodler himself described this development with remarkable candour in October 1917: for him, form no longer determined colour; rather, form only began to live through colour. In this insight lies the key to his late work. ↘

Where art and life converge

In ‘The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’, Damien Hirst unites nature and order in a work of striking intensity. Hundreds of butterfly wings, sealed beneath glossy lacquer, are arranged into a rigorously symmetrical triangle. The radiant blues and yellows exert an almost hypnotic pull, recalling the splendour of stained-glass windows and imbuing the composition with a distinctly sacred aura. Yet on closer inspection, the material reality underlying this beauty becomes unmistakable. ↘

The mystery of forms:
Arp and Magritte

Hans Arp began working in sculpture in the 1930s. His models often began in plaster, a medium that allowed him greater flexibility to create his abstract, biomorphic forms. ‘This is the mystery: my hands talk to themselves’, Arp said of his process. ↘

The path to Expressionism

Three paintings, all created in the closing years of World War I, will be presented in our June auction. Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter were friends, who summered together for many years in Murnau, an idyllic village at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. There with their partners, Alexej Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky, they painted together and exchanged ideas and techniques. Both relationships eventually ended badly, but they would indelibly shape the future of modern art.↘

Albert Anker:
social revolutionary

Albert Anker has often been characterised as ‘old school’, and not always in the admirative tone that Van Gogh employed. But when one looks past the initial impression of a simple, idealised rendering of country life, the artist’s singular devotion to a progressist and egalitarian society becomes evident. Anker worked throughout his life to improve the lot of all Swiss people, and was convinced that this begins with the young – by improving education. ↘

‘We owe him everything’:
Durand-Ruel and ‘his’ artists

The paintings illustrated here all have one thing in common, beyond what can be seen in their style or subject: the artists were all represented by the legendary art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. He took over his parents’ art gallery at a time when there was only one way to discover and purchase art: the annual Paris Salon. It was a must-see annual event, which the ‘tout Paris’ attended. Bypassing the Salon system, Durand-Ruel introduced a concept which today we take for granted, but at the time seemed far from likely to succeed. ↘

Legends and uncompromising creavity

Among the over 300 lots in our Jewellery auction on 24 June, a group of pieces by the Munich jeweller Hemmerle is particularly outstanding. Founded over 120 years ago, Hemmerle has, over the past five decades, become one of the world’s most innovative and sought-after luxury jewellery houses. Their philosophy centres on creating each piece around the stone itself, often in their signature combination of precious and base metals, while allowing the time necessary to achieve the finest possible result. ↘

A jewel of Japanese printmaking

The series of colour woodblock prints entitled ‘One Hundred Aspects of the Moon’ by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi unfolds like a poetic testament to the art of Japanese printmaking. Created during the early years of the Meiji period, at a time when Japan was undergoing rapid transformation, the series acts both as a retrospective and a quiet homage to tradition. ↘