HONG KONG, 21 March 2018 – In tandem with the ever-increasing interest being shown by Asian audiences in Western art, Sotheby’s Hong Kong is set to open its doors on the most comprehensive and important exhibition of Western Modern & Contemporary art ever staged by the company in Asia. Panorama: A New Perspective – a selling exhibition featuring over 40 paintings and sculptures by the foremost names in Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art – will open to the public from 29th March to 3rd April, alongside Sotheby’s Spring 2018 Hong Kong Sale Series. The show will be led by four powerful works by Pablo Picasso, spanning 50 years of the artist’s extraordinary career and all coming direct from the collection of the artist’s grand-daughter, Marina Picasso. These will be presented in tandem with other major works by established masters such as Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Pierre Bonnard, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder and Gerhard Richter. Together, the group of works to be exhibited carries a total value in excess of HK$ 1.6 billion / US$ 200 million.

Patti Wong, Chairman, Sotheby’s Asia, commented: “Panorama is our latest initiative to integrate Western Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art into the artistic vocabulary of our Asian audience, and to cater to our collectors’ growing demand for Western masterworks. This unprecedented Hong Kong event – a superb compilation of archetypal paintings and sculptures by prominent artists, many of whom have established new auction records in the past year – is the result of a truly global effort by our colleagues from around the world. We look forward to sharing this exhibition with our clients from across Asia, whose curiosity and participation in this category grows every year.”

David Schrader, Senior Vice President, Head of Private Sales, noted: “Every April and October, the art world descends upon Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale series. This spring, we are thrilled to introduce a survey of artwork by the most celebrated names from the 19th and 20th centuries, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Willem de Kooning and Lucio Fontana, in an exhibition format that has seen tremendous success in New York. Available for immediate purchase, this is a fantastic opportunity for both new and established collectors across Asia to immerse themselves in some of the very best Western art of the period.”

Helena Newman, Co-Head of Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide, said: “Current demand for Picasso’s work is extraordinarily strong, as seen most recently in London when our sale of a fabulous 1937 painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter dominated a hugely successful fortnight for the artist. In this context we’re thrilled to be able to bring a further selection of his works to Asia, which is such a fast-moving and dynamic hub for the arts at the moment.”

Marina Picasso commented: “I’m very excited to be showing a select group of works from my collection in Asia, an area of the world with which I’m passionately engaged, both at a personal level and via my charitable activities. My grand-father’s work has enjoyed a global appreciation for many years now, and I’m sure he would have been delighted by the idea that his legacy is currently the subject of such particular interest in Asia.”

FOUR WORKS FROM THE COLLECTION OF MARINA PICASSO

Pablo PicassoHomme à la pipe assis et amoursigned Picasso upper left; dated 17-2-1969 on the reverseoil on canvas195.5 by 96.5 cm.

Conceived on a grand scale and painted with extraordinary energy, Homme à la pipe assis et amour is a superb example of the creative force which characterised Picasso’s late years. This work stands as a defiant tribute to the heroic figure of the matador, a life-long obsession of Picasso’s and one of the most important themes throughout his career. The matador was one of a cast of characters deployed by the artist as a means of projecting different aspects of his own identity. By including the figure of Cupid, Picasso emphasises the matador’s potency, at a time in his life when he had begun to contemplate his own mortalilty. Large-scale late paintings by the artist, featuring matadors, rarely come to the market and are highly sought after. The last work of comparable scale and quality to be offered at auction was Mousquetaire à la pipe, sold by Sotheby’s in New York for $30.1 million in 2013.

Pablo PicassoEnfant jouant, Claude, 1952dated 15.4.52. on the reverseoil on canvas65 by 54 cm.

An extraordinary work that has never been seen in public before and is totally fresh to the market, this painting of Picasso’s son, Claude, remained in the artist’s collection until his death in 1973 and then passed into the collection of his granddaughter, Marina Picasso. Born in 1947 to Picasso and his then lover, Françoise Gilot, Claude would have been five years old when this monochrome painting was produced. Picasso often drew or painted Claude and his younger sister Paloma, playing or reading together at home in Vallauris in the South of France. These tender, intimate portraits of his children are some of the most expressively powerful works that Picasso made during the 1950s. A painting of Paloma, dated 1954, was recently offered at auction, where it doubled its pre-sale low estimate.

Pablo PicassoFemme à la robe verte (Femme Fleur), 1946oil on panel101 by 81.5 cm.

Painted in 1946, Femme à la robe (Femme Fleur) belongs to a period of Picasso’s work characterised by an increasing energy and artistic freedom after the war years. The work depicts Françoise Gilot who Picasso met in 1943, during his tumultuous relationship with Dora Maar. They settled in the south of France in the year this painting was produced, and the period that followed was marked by great personal fulfilment, during which Picasso was devoted to his family, including the couple’s two children, Claude and Paloma.

Pablo PicassoTête (Nature morte à la guitare), 1927-28oil on canvas60 by 73 cm.

Picasso was an enormously rich and varied artist, experimenting, over the course of his long career, with a host of different painterly styles, and quickly absorbing the artistic influences of those around him. While many of his ‘styles’ were unique entirely to him, others – such as cubism, classicism and surrealism - were more obviously connected to artistic and literary movements of the moment. First fully articulated in French writer and poet André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto of 1924, the concept of Surrealism evolves around irrational connections, chaos, surprise, and the heightened reality of dreams. Although Picasso never officially joined the Surrealist movement, Tête, painted between 1927 and 1928, dates from that first moment when his work begins to show signs of the influence of the French surrealist thinkers around him. Here, a fluid surrealist line and strong concentrated imagery are set against a schematic background that harks back to Cubism. Major oils from Picasso’s Surrealist period are exceedingly rare and much sought-after on the market, as witnessed by the strong price achieved in London this season when Figure, of 1930, made $11m against an estimate of $4-7m.