Just a month after the successful Classic Week in Vienna, the next highlight on Dorotheum's calendar is fast approaching: Contemporary Week, featuring masters of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The first auction of the week, scheduled chronologically, will focus on 'Modern Art' and takes place on November 19 at 6 pm. Works by renowned artists such as Gustav Klimt, Alfons Walde, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, and Giacomo Balla will be up for sale.
Among the highlights is a rare work from Max (Mopp) Oppenheimer's oeuvre: one of only four self-portraits created by the Austrian painter during his career. Following earlier self-portraits from 1908, 1911, and 1924, this painting is the last in this small series. Oppenheimer portrays himself frontally, likely studying his image in a mirror. The pose is strikingly assured and seems to extend beyond the dimensions of the canvas.
After Oppenheimer fled Austria in 1938, his studio was looted, and among the stolen works were his self-portrait and the two other paintings featured in this auction. All three works were returned to Max Oppenheimer's heirs this past summer.
After studying in Vienna and Prague, Max Oppenheimer initially aligned himself with the Viennese Expressionists, particularly admiring Egon Schiele; they even painted each other’s portraits. Schiele is represented in Contemporary Week with six works, including four of his superb drawings. Particularly notable are Two Female Nudes from 1918 and Seated Girl with Hair Ribbon, created the year prior. The charcoal drawing is one of Schiele's most striking child portraits, notable not only for its clarity and directness but also for the painting technique he employed to add color. Presumably inspired by drypoint etching, this approach to colour appears only in Schiele’s later works.
“Every picture I paint springs from the deepest sources of my fear,” confessed the Romanian artist Victor Brauner, who joined the Surrealists in Paris in 1930, in one of his notebooks. This sentiment seems to apply especially to his 1951 work, L’Émanatrice, where the protagonist confronts a world in dissolution. Nothing is concrete; her thoughts and identity unravel into a chaotic array of random forms.
Equally notable is the auction 'Contemporary Art I,' taking place on November 20 at 6 pm, featuring works by Maria Lassnig, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Tom Wesselmann, Martha Jungwirth, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and Cindy Sherman, among others.
The auction is headlined by Stanley Whitney’s The Language of Nature from 2005. This large-scale piece once again showcases Whitney's skill in merging geometry and emotion, transforming an initially rigid composition into something vivid and dynamic. Early influences included artists like Mondrian, Morandi, and Rothko, along with later explorations of classicism and the Renaissance during his time in Italy, but it was above all jazz music that inspired Whitney’s unpredictable rhythms.
In the 1960s, gallery owner Marie-Louise Jeanneret, also Le Corbusier’s granddaughter, founded the Centre Internationale d’Experimentation Artistique in Boissano, Northern Italy. In the summer of 1974, she invited Andy Warhol, who likely stayed for just a week. During this time, he photographed several of the guests, including Jeanneret herself, later transforming these images into his famous silkscreen portraits. Jeanneret also arranged for Warhol to undertake a commission for three Turin collectors who admired Marcel Proust, resulting in a portrait of the French writer and another iconic addition to Warhol’s body of work.
In 1982, Emilio Vedova, the esteemed Italian master of Informal art, took part in Documenta 7 in Kassel, exhibiting five large-scale pieces from his Emerging and Compresenze series. The current Compresenze/Tensione '82 (Passa Van Gogh), also from that year, rivals these works in scale and compositional intensity.
The auctions 'Modern' and 'Contemporary Art I' (along with the online auction 'Contemporary Art II' on November 21) will be held at Dorotheum, Dorotheergasse 17, in Vienna. The exhibition opens on November 9.
