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Monday 12 May 10:00am - 4:00pm
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\nIf you would like to bid in person, via absentee, or over the telephone, please reach out to bidsnewyork@phillips.com for registration assistance.
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Highlights Tour
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\nLos Angeles
\n22—24 April
\nPHILLIPS
\n9041 Nemo St
\nLos Angeles, CA 90069 (map)

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View Conditions of Sale >
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\n","auctionDetailsSmall","New York Auction 14 May 2025","extraInfo","

Annie Dolan
\nNY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
\n+1 212 940 1288
\nadolan@phillips.com

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Yu Nishimura, marin drive (after the rain), 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York.

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Yu Nishimura

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Yu Nishimura, lovers, 2020. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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Japanese artist Yu Nishimura’s captivating works blend traditional oil and tempera techniques with the visual traits of postwar Japanese photography and street photography. Throughout his works, we frequently see the blurred, hazy impressions of afterimages or double exposures that add unique emotional resonance to everyday scenes. This effect is clearly seen in marin drive (after the rain), which explores the relationship between perception and memory. By contrast, in his 2020 work lovers, we see the artist approach a shared sense of interiority between two figures, the multiple impressions of their eyes creating a sense of motion at rest. All told, his works often show us how the pleasure of looking can enhance the experience of a life lived slowly, so it’s no surprise that art lovers around the globe have taken notice.

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Born in 1982 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, where he continues to live and work today, Nishimura is rapidly gaining momentum. His first solo exhibition in the United States, Yu Nishimura: Clearing Unfolds, is currently on view at the 69th Street location of David Zwirner Gallery, New York. His recent solo exhibitions have been held at Sadie Coles HQ, London, and ARCH, Athens, among many others. His work is also held in several institutional collections around the globe, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Jack Whitten

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Jack Whitten, Her Majesty’s Angle, 1980. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Known for his experimental practice and approach to painting as an art form, Jack Whitten situated abstraction within the legacy of African American history. His work during the 1980s, “driven by his proclivity towards the cosmic and quantum,” engaged with painting as a sculptural composition, often manipulating a work’s dimension, depth, and plane to explore the dynamism of abstraction on a nearly computational scale.

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Executed in 1980, Her Majesty’s Angle depicts a rainbow of geometric shapes and markings against a black vacuum — the otherworldly precision of the dashed lines, rippling circles, and trapezoidal center made human by Whitten’s raised triangles and the honeycomb panel texture of the canvas. Whitten’s characteristic balance between the ordinary and the sublime feels especially prescient in hindsight: at the dawn of the digital age, with the frictionless kaleidoscope of all to come, Whitten’s protrusive simplicity makes the artist’s presence a material reality, an immediacy — something spotted on the radar, and coming right for us. Jack Whitten: The Messenger, on view through 2 August at MoMA, New York, highlights the artist’s commitment to activism through non-representational art and his intersections with race, music, and technology as new forms of seeing. “Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world,” the New York Times writes of the retrospective and Whitten’s desire for “only life,” adding that “life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with.”

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Firelei Báez

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Firelei Báez, Untitled, 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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Firelei Báez’s practice reorients the Western art-historical canon through the lived experiences of those it never centered. The artist often explores traditional visual elements in ways that challenge the racial and class structures of their origins and subsequent ascension into artistic doctrine. In 2017’s Untitled, we see an assemblage of colors that recall the 19th century icons today considered “high” art. In the present work’s flowing green and blue undercurrent, one can be transported to Monet’s Water Lilies, whose ubiquitous palette acts as almost a skeleton key to the work’s inquiry. The tranquil scene is made active by splashes of orange, pink, and yellow, which flow throughout like submerged strands of hair and bring a mythical exchange to Báez’s confrontations with history, realizing a Caribbean vitality while establishing a new locus for action. “I tend to work hypersymbolically,” says the artist. “I know what every single element means for me.”

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Marina Adams

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Marina Adams, Stone Cold Fox, 2022. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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For Marina Adams, color provides an opportunity to find a rhythm in an otherwise guideless environment. “Meaning and intellect in abstract art can be difficult to locate,” the artist notes, “I use pattern and color to create the voice. And I use structure and form to channel it.” Movement then becomes the site of interaction between figuration and gesture, with graphic shapes, each carrying their own visual weight, creating a flowing aggregate work.

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There is an almost mosaic quality to Stone Cold Fox, with its column of diamond-shaped green and blue tessellating over a deep purple base and building high and out of our reach. At each side the white tracts act more as bonding agents than negative space — an interplay with Matisse wherein each section of the image plays a part in its overall motion.

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Uman

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Uman, The Shaman, 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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Through a swirl of colors, reflections, and chant-like repetitions, Uman’s The Shaman undulates with an energy that traverses the physical and spiritual realms, exploring abstraction, the figure, and the self. “I think everything I do now is a self-portrait in different ways,” the artist explains. “Even my abstract paintings, mythical in nature, are self-portraits. I love drama, and so I depict myself with several mouths, and several eyes, just like a creature.”

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There’s an appealing cultural and gender fluidity in the self-taught multicultural artist’s works. They are as likely to take inspiration from Yayoi Kusama, Keith Haring, or Henri Matisse as they are from her memories of the kaleidoscopic Islamic visual culture of her East African upbringing. Looking closer at The Shaman — which was included in the lauded 2021 exhibition Uman: I hope this finds u well at Fierman, New York — we discover that the figure is at once a mystic and muse, male and female, self-portrait and icon, and ultimately, both the seer and the seen.

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Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, Uman undertook rigorous study of traditional calligraphy as a child, eventually discovering her love of Western art while visiting family in Europe. She settled in New York City following a stint in Denmark, and now maintains her studio upstate. Represented by Hauser and Wirth in equal partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery, Uman has presented solo exhibitions at Nicola Vassell, New York; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece; Fierman, New York; Anne De Villepoix, Paris; and White Columns, New York — in addition to several group exhibitions.

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Richard Hunt

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Richard Hunt, Life Force (5472), 2007. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Born in 1935 on the South Side of Chicago, Richard Hunt was the first Black sculptor to have a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Where others saw metals as industrial, man-made materials, Hunt was quick to point out that they emerge from the earth. Holding a lifelong interest in biological science and the natural world, Hunt’s sculptures result from an alchemy that turned what were frequently scrap metals into imaginative biomorphic forms, the artist once explaining that his intention was “to develop the kind of forms nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her.” Life Force (5472) is a defining example of the artist’s work, its enticing curvilinear bronze form negotiating the tensions between natural growth and industrial production, tangible forms and intangible ideas.

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Hunt, who passed in 2023, has long been included in prominent institutional collections, but his works take on a newfound significance today as global culture continues to wrestle with the impacts of marginalization and climate change. White Cube Gallery now represents the artist’s estate and presented the lauded exhibition Richard Hunt: Early Masterworks last year in New York. Today, the artist’s first major posthumous retrospective is on view at White Cube London through June. His works are also in the permanent collections of notable institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Joan Snyder

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Joan Snyder, OH Elena, 2020. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Joan Snyder’s autobiographical style connects personal and communal experiences through symbol, gesture, text, and expression. A touching personal tribute to the artist’s longtime friend and gallerist Elena Zhang, the work achieves a universal feeling of remembrance and celebration. OH Elena combines a floral arrangement surrounding a central, radiating bloom with blended text at the top and bottom of the canvas. As the bright yellow Ohs provide light to the garden below them, the colors root and seep downward into Elena, the substrate which provides vibrancy to all above it.

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Snyder, now 85, has recently seen substantial performance at auction, with many of her large-scale works achieving well above presale estimates. This surge reflects interest in both her ongoing artistic practice and a renewed appreciation for her earlier work, which together highlight a lifetime of feminist painting. Recent shows include CANADA in New York and Thaddaeus Ropac in London (both of whom jointly represent the artist in the US and UK, respectively). The latter hosted “the most comprehensive presentation of her work in Europe to date” last fall into early this year, and her work has been featured in museum shows over the past few years at Tate London, MFA Boston, and more.

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Soumya Netrabile

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Soumya Netrabile, The Meadow, 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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Soumya Netrabile’s large-scale works envelop the viewer in the hazy atmosphere of nature at transitory moments — sunsets, the dewy stillness of dawn, or those moments just before a storm. They are physical expressions of sensory memory, often gleaned from the forest preserve near her Chicago home. On daily explorations, she focuses on the impressions nature leaves on each of her senses. The resulting works, like 2021’s The Meadow, seem to impart the scent and sound of an environment as much as the sight of it. They’re experiential and refined, with the misty quality of a memory or a dream, where one loses grasp of the difference between touch and sight, sound and scent.

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Born in India and emigrating to Chicago with her family when she was seven, Netrabile first studied engineering, working in the field for a few years to support herself through art school. She graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and continued to refine her practice over the next several years. Her works gained momentum in 2020, and a spate of recent exhibitions and fair presentations has pushed her into the limelight.

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Discover More from Modern & Contemporary Art >

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Recommended Reading

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We’re In This Together >

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\n","publishDate","2025-04-24T18:32:06.000000Z","authorCredit","Jesse Limbacher","coverPosX",50,"coverPosY",0,"articleUrl","https://www.phillips.com/article/157839650/artists-to-watch-modern-contemporary-art-auction-new-york","displayOrder","auctionEditorialID",4481,"editorialID",4934,"flocklerID",157839650,"https://flockler.com/thumbs/sites/889/warhol-lead-e5084f35-23e5-433c-9b22-cc2b789877da_s600x0.jpg","Six specialists share their favorite works in our upcoming Modern & Contemporary Art Auctions in New York. ","Specialist Picks: Marquee Week at Phillips","

Andy Warhol, Double Torso, 1966. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Annie Dolan: Andy Warhol

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Andy Warhol, Double Torso, 1966. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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“This piece is much more than meets the eye, both literally and contextually,” Head of Morning Session Annie Dolan tells us. The work appears muted and obfuscated in natural light, but under ultraviolet light, a duplicated image of a woman’s nude torso is revealed. As striking as it is for its ability to explore the full visual spectrum, Dolan points out that there’s great conceptual depth as well: “This work was Warhol’s commentary on the censorship laws of the 1960s, and by making the image invisible until it’s viewed under UV light, he challenges the viewer to question what constitutes pornography.”

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This work was commissioned by Playboy Magazine at a time when the sexual revolution in the United States was met with reactionary politics. The feature, entitled “The Playmate as Fine Art,” also included works by 11 other prominent artists of the time, from Salvador Dalí to Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann.

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Patrizia Koenig: Ull Hohn & Lucas Arruda

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Ull Hohn, Untitled, 1993. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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Head of Afternoon Session Patrizia Koenig selects a pairing of captivating landscapes by Ull Hohn and Lucas Arruda, each revealing more to viewers the deeper we investigate.

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German painter Ull Hohn (1960–1995) has been unfairly overlooked, his life tragically cut short as the AIDS crisis swept New York. Hohn studied with Gerhard Richter in Düsseldorf before moving to New York in 1986 to participate in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. His landscapes are a commentary on the act of painting itself, showcasing his skillful subversion of painterly conventions and fusing “high” and “low” in works that seem to draw equally from the Hudson River School and the Sunday painter. His now lauded 1993 series of untitled landscapes — which includes this work — employs the step-by-step instructions from episodes of Bob Ross’ television show The Joy of Painting. But in Hohn’s hands, the imagery takes on a powerful strangeness that’s as sublime as it is kitsch.

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A major retrospective of his work, Ull Hohn: Reivisions, is currently on view at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin.

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Lucas Arruda, Untitled 17, 2011. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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A similar sense of the sublime is felt in Brazilian artist Lucas Arruda’s evocative landscapes, which blur the lines between memory and imagination, figuration and abstraction. Often marked by faint horizon lines and intense internal light, his works explore the relationship between the mind and the natural world by way of abstracted, illusory forms, drawing connections to artists like Turner, Monet, and Rothko.

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He is currently the subject of two significant institutional exhibitions, including the retrospective Lucas Arruda, Deserto-Modelo at the Carré d'Art - Musée d'art contemporain in Nîmes, France, and Lucas Arruda. Qu’importe le paysag at Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

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John McCord: Robert Rauschenberg

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Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1968. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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“Untitled is a particularly dense transfer drawing from 1968 that, in many ways, is a dark antithesis to Rauschenberg’s iconic Election of 1960,” explains International Specialist John McCord. Taking as its subject a celebratory portrayal of Jackie and John F. Kennedy, Election was made immediately following the 1960 presidential election but before Kennedy assumed the presidency. It was then gifted to the Kennedys by the artist and remained with Jackie until she passed away.

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Likewise, the ominous Untitled transfer on offer here was produced immediately following Richard Nixon’s 1968 election and depicts the incoming president alongside his cabinet. Interestingly, just as is the case in the portrayal of the Kennedys, the wives of Nixon and his cabinet are heavily featured in Untitled.

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“Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings strike me as being shockingly undervalued,” adds McCord. “They are among his most iconic works, and when great, as is the case with Untitled, they are layered with subtle imagery and can be endlessly mined.”

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Rebekah Bowling: Kaari Upson

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Kaari Upson, Mauve and Fluorescent Pink, 2013. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York.

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As Phillips’ Head of 21st Century Art, it might come as no surprise that Rebekah Bowling would select such a compelling contemporary work. She tells us how excited she is for Phillips to offer one of Kaari Upson’s celebrated mattress sculptures this season.

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Upson’s multifaceted practice explored the depths of the American psyche, and more specifically, the illusion of the California Dream. She is perhaps best known for her sculptures that make use of unexpected materials, like this one, which is cast from a discarded mattress in silicone and painted in vibrant color. This 2013 work, Mauve and Fluorescent Pink, is an alluring and haunting reimagination of the original object’s form, imbued with the experiences and memories of the person who used it.

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Upson’s powerful influence on contemporary art continues to be felt even after her untimely death from cancer in 2021 at the age of 51. Dollhouse — the first retrospective of her work since her passing — will open later this month at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.

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Takako Nagasawa: Pierre Bonnard & Jean Dubuffet

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Pierre Bonnard, Pins (Environs de Cannes), 1921. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Senior International Specialist Takako Nagasawa is struck by two French works on offer this season. “When looking at Pierre Bonnard’s late canvases, his absolute devotion to and love for his home in Cannes shines through — dozens of green pigments interlace across the foreground, revealing not only his mastery of color, but his knowledge of the natural world,” she tells us. The Bay of Cannes appears in many of Bonnard’s paintings from the ‘20s, and in this work, the bright cobalt blue breaks the wildness below, providing relief and adding a sonic dimension to the composition.

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Jean Dubuffet, Animation parcellaire, 1979. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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In Animation parcellaire, Dubuffet pulls back the curtain to reveal eight characters assembled in six groupings across a collaged background, resembling a stage. Translating to “plot animation,” this work highlights Dubuffet’s charm and whimsy. With no clear narrative, this work is an amalgamation of the artist’s life and imagination, mending the two across a detailed background rendered in collage.

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Nina Piro: Marc Chagall & Suzanne Valadon

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Marc Chagall, Portrait de la soeur de l’artiste, 1908. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Works that stand out to Specialist Nina Piro this season include an incredibly rare and important early Marc Chagall portrait, one of the very few pictures from a series of works the artist painted between 1907 and 1914. “I personally love the almost electric green and his signature blue — a tone he used throughout his life,” Piro tells us. The painting showcases one of the first instances in which Chagall depicts an open window, which became one of his signature motifs, connoting longing and hope. The figure herself is also striking, as Nina explains that it was rare at the time for artists to depict a Jewish woman reading. Here, the subject is one of his sisters, seen deeply engrossed in religious study — a subject that offers Chagall an opportunity to explore his familial and cultural traditions on canvas.

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Adding to its appeal, Piro points out that this painting was once held in the personal collection of Edward Albee, the renowned American playwright and gay icon best known for his searing drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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Suzanne Valadon, Adam et Ève, 1910. Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York.

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Suzanne Valadon’s Adam et Ève also catches Nina’s eye. “Valadon only produced about 500 paintings over the course of her lifetime, so her work coming to auction is rare and exciting,” she says. Valadon was the first woman to enter the turn-of-the-century circle of artists in Montmartre. In addition to pursuing her own painting practice, she was a model for Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others, and was Maurice Utrillo’s mother.

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Piro explains that Valadon is a vastly undervalued but important female artist who is finally getting her due, adding that this painting is a joyful celebration of female desire, which remains an under-represented theme to this day.

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Discover More from Modern & Contemporary Art >

\n\n

Recommended Reading

\n\n

Artists to Watch: New York >

\n\n

We’re In This Together >

\n\n

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128

Richard Serra

Untitled

Full-Cataloguing

Richard Serra