Andy Warhol
‘Muhammad Ali’
Arguably the most famous name in pop art meets arguably the most famous sportsman of the 20th century in this set of four screen prints from 1978, created at the behest of US investment banker Richard Weisman. “I felt putting the series together was natural, in that two of the most popular leisure activities at the time were sports and art, yet to my knowledge they had no direct connection,” Weisman said in 2007. “Therefore I thought that having Andy do the series would inspire people who loved sport to come into galleries, maybe for the first time, and people who liked art would take their first look at a sports superstar.” Warhol travelled to Ali’s training camp to take Polaroids for his research, and was “arrested by the serene focus underlying Ali’s power — his contemplative stillness, his inward discipline,” the auction catalogue states.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
‘Untitled’
Basquiat “emerged from New York’s downtown scene to become one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century,” Sotheby’s says. The largely self-taught artist’s 1985 work, seen here, “stands as a vivid testament to (his) singular ability to transform drawing into a site of intellectual inquiry, cultural memory, and visceral self-expression.” Basquiat, who was of Caribbean and Puerto Rican heritage, “developed a visual language of extraordinary immediacy and intelligence, in which image and text collide with raw urgency,” the catalogue continues.
Camille Pissarro
‘Vue de Zevekote, Knokke’
The “Knokke” of the title is Knokke-sur-Mer, a Belgian seaside village, where the hugely influential French-Danish Impressionist stayed in the summer of 1894 and produced 14 paintings, including this one. The village, Sotheby’s says, appealed to Pissarro’s “enduring interest in provincial life.” In this work, “staccato brushstrokes, reminiscent of Pissarro’s paintings of the 1880s, coalesce with the earthy color palette of his later work. The resulting landscape, bathed in a sunlit glow, celebrates the quaint rural environments for which (he) is best known.”
David Hockney
‘5 May’
This iPad drawing comes from the celebrated English artist’s 2011 series “Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011,” which Sotheby’s describes as “one of the artist’s most vibrant and ambitious explorations of landscape, perception, and technological possibility.” Each image in the series documents “subtle shifts in color, light and atmosphere” on the same stretch of the Woldgate, “showing the landscape as something experienced over time rather than frozen in an instant.” The catalogue notes that spring has long been an inspiration for European artists, but says that “no artist has ever observed it so closely, with such fascinated and loving attention, nor recorded it in such detail as an evolving process.”
Zarina
‘Morning’
Sotheby’s describes Indian artist Zarina Hashmi — known by her first name — as “one of the most compelling figures in post-war international art — an artist whose spare, meditative works distilled the tumult of a peripatetic life into visual form.” She was born in Aligarh, British India, and “the tragedy of the 1947 Partition (shaped) a lifelong meditation on the nature of home as both physical place and spiritual concept.” This piece comes from a series of 36 woodcuts Zarina produced under the title “Home is a Foreign Place.”
George Condo
‘Untitled’
This 2016 oil-on-linen painting is the perfect example of what the US artist has called “psychological cubism,” which Sotheby’s defines as “a radical reconfiguration of the human figure that fractures identity into simultaneous emotional and perceptual states.” It’s a piece that “distills decades of inquiry into the mechanics of portraiture, drawing upon art-historical precedent while decisively asserting a contemporary idiom that is at once incisive and darkly humorous,” the catalogue notes, adding that the work is “searing with psychological tension and painterly bravura.”
