Klee, Leger, Miro, Tamayo add international cachet to Clars’ Feb. 9 art sale

OAKLAND, Calif. – Clars Auction Gallery‘s Important Winter Modern + Contemporary Art Auction, scheduled for Thursday, February 9, will feature a selection of artwork from an array of international artists, led by a watercolor on paper by the influential German-Swiss artist Paul Klee. Absentee and Internet live bidding will be available through LiveAuctioneers.

The Klee piece, titled Fragment of a Mural (Fragment einer Wandmalerei) and estimated at $100,000-$150,000, shows an abstract image that is left to the viewer to decipher. Klee is known for the use of geometric forms in his work, often building his arrangements with triangles and rectangles, but here we see an unrecognizable object, made more mysterious by the title identifying it as just one section from a larger composition. Klee is perhaps even better known for his innovative take on color theory. The blending of purple into red into gray tones seen in this work illustrates Klee’s opinion that small sections of color could be unified to create a harmonious visual. Furthermore, during his time as an instructor at the Bauhaus, Klee taught as a master of stained glass, often using smoking techniques to color pieces of glass. The muted tones in this watercolor echo the hazy, blended hues that would result from smoking glass.

Also included in the sale lineup is a work on paper titled Green Hill by American artist Mark Tobey. As a founder of the Northwest School in Seattle, Washington, Tobey imbued in his peers an appreciation of East Asian culture, the effects of which are visible in Green Hill, with its muted color palette echoing Shan Shui landscapes and an expressionist style that mimics calligraphy. The misty atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest was a driving influence on Tobey, who used earthy tones to illustrate this piece with the green of the hill described in the title obscured almost completely by a heavy fog against a sepia sky. Green Hill is dated 1957, the year before Tobey became the second American artist to win the International Grand Prize at the 1958 Venice Biennale. The work is estimated at $30,000-$50,000.

Another important work in the February sale is Untitled (Dos Figuras), a 1989 steel sculpture by acclaimed Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. The piece depicts a pair of figures, likely one male and one female based on their clothing, standing with hands overlapped. The stylized figures are reminiscent of the simplified figures seen in well-known Tamayo paintings such as Tres Personajes, with dominant geometric lines replacing the naturalistic curves of the human body. The sculpture shows the figures’ bodies as rectangles, with semicircle arms and circular hands. The male figure’s legs and female figure’s skirt are triangular, and the base is a narrow rectangular platform. The gray patina of the metallic material is consistent throughout and recalls the stone and clay sculptures of the Zapotec, an indigenous Pre-Colombian culture from whom Tamayo claimed both heritage and inspiration. The work is estimated at $70,000-$100,000.

Next featured in the February sale is the Makemono lithograph scroll by Catalan painter and sculptor Joan Miro, created circa 1956. Considered a major figure in the Surrealist family, Miro uses this color- printed Chanton silk scroll, which has an estimate of $20,000-$30,000, to marry a traditional East Asian medium with what was dubbed his “automatism” technique, a method of revealing an individual’s psyche through spontaneous drawing and painting. Makemono presents form and color before narrative, showing abstract human figures interspersed with birds, eyes, and nonobjective forms derived purely from the artist’s imagination. From an edition of only 50, the vibrant scroll is anchored by wooden batons on each of the two ends and includes its original carved and painted wood box.

Another standout in the February 9 sale is a work by French Cubist artist Fernand Leger (French, 1881-1955). The watercolor on paper, titled Deux Personnages and estimated at $60,000-$90,000, was created in 1947 and hints at Leger’s abstraction and modification of the Cubist form, sometimes described as “Tubism” by critics of his work. As a Cubist painter, he incorporated the movement of machinery, figures and vibrant colors into his compositions, imagery that influenced him during World War I and later World War II, while he lived in America.

 

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