Assembled by the Zweigs in the 1990s, the collection offers works that are both exquisite and fresh to the market, by some of the greatest French artists of the turn of the 20th Century, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Manet. The Evening Sale will offer eight works from the collection, together expected to achieve in excess of $20 million. Separate release available.

A SURREALIST SCENE BY RENÉ MAGRITTE
Le Banquet is one of René Magritte's most daring and inventive Surrealist landscapes (estimate $12/18 million). Depicting a forest at sunset, with the bright red sun pasted onto the trees, Le Banquet is a large-scale, magnificent example of two key elements of Magritte’s art: the influence of papiers collés on his painterly technique, and the juxtaposition of the visible and the invisible. The brightly colored and sharply defined image of the setting sun, which would normally be hidden behind the trees, evokes the paper cut-outs that Magritte first developed in his early drawings and papiers collés of the 1920s.

MAGNIFICENT GESTURES: MASTERWORKS FROM THE DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL COLLECTION
Sotheby’s is honored to offer masterworks on paper from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection as a highlight of our November sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary Art. Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Ambassador Carl Spielvogel have meticulously built an unprecedented collection of drawings and works on paper that offers unique insight into the creative spirit and personality of an impressive array of artists working across the 20th and 21st centuries. Full proceeds from the sale of works from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Collection will benefit a charitable foundation of the same name, which was established to support causes that the Spielvogels have actively championed throughout their lives. Separate release available.

The 14 November auction offers works from the collection by René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee and Georges Braque. The selection is led by Magritte’s entrancing La Réponse imprévu – a masterful celebration of the medium in which the artist achieves a level of detail only available to him on paper, and compounds these striking characteristics (estimate $2/3 million). The work employs one of Magritte's most enigmatic tropes of the door, capturing the ‘treachery of images’ for which the artist is well-known: here the door fails to serve its purpose of closing off the space, opening to a world that cannot quite be seen or understood. La Réponse imprévu relates to an important oil painting of the same name in the collection of the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.

AUCTION HIGHLIGHTS
Further highlights of the Evening Sale include Georges Braque’s Le Pyrogène et le quotidien Gil Blas – an early Cubist canvas, which has remained in the same family collection since it was acquired directly from the artist’s dealer (estimate $2.5/3.5 million). The painting is the first work by either Braque or Pablo Picasso to incorporate lettering into its composition – a symbol that would become a recognized attribute of the Cubist movement.

Yellow Sweet Peas by Georgia O’Keeffe – on offer from the Family Collection of Paul G. Allen – is a sensuous meditation on form and design that reveals her mastery of the pastel medium, and marks the artist’s first appearance in this auction (estimate $2.5/$3.5 million).

Painted in 1892, at the height of his artistic production, Théo van Rysselberghe’s Port de Cette, Les Tartanes (estimate $6/8 million) is a dazzling example of the artist’s mastery of the pointilliste technique. One of his most acknowledged masterpieces, the canvas has been included in several major Neo-Impressionist exhibitions, and was part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Élément méchanique sur fond jaune (construction métallique) represents the culmination of Fernand Léger’s ode to the modern working man (estimate $2.5/3.5 million). Painted in 1950, following his return to France at the end of World War II, the work exemplifies Léger’s predilection for mechanical and technological subject matter, which led the artist to produce Les Constructeurs – one of his most acclaimed series of paintings that were produced concurrently with the present work. Extraordinary in its use of color, the painting monumentalizes aspects of every-day life, which would later inspire the first generation of Pop artists, including Roy Lichtenstein.