Maurice de Vlaminck - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • A Restitution Story

     

    André Derain’s Nature morte avec bouteille, circa 1900, and Maurice de Vlaminck’s Village et bord de rivière, circa 1911–1912, are both exceptional examples from the collection of the Reichsman family. A young man growing up in Zagreb, Croatia (formerly Yugoslavia), Franz Reichsman was studying to become a doctor in Vienna. While there, he was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned, released two months later to return to Zagreb to take his final exams. Franz then fled to the United States, attempting to convince his family to emigrate from Europe at the onset of World War II – only his sister, Danica, would leave for London. Franz’s father, Dane, avid art collector and patriarch of the family, stayed in Zagreb and attended an exhibition of the Paris school in 1940, purchasing several works including André Derain’s Nature morte avec bouteille, circa 1900, and Maurice de Vlaminck’s Village et bord de rivière, circa 1911–1912.

     

    Dane and Frieda Reichsman.

    Croatia was invaded by the Germans on April 6th, 1941. Just 12 days later, on April 18th, the Yugoslav army surrendered, and Yugoslavia was divided among the Axis powers, forcing the remaining members of the Reichsman family into a concentration camp, their art seized. The German forces soon occupied Western Croatia, and the family was sent to Auschwitz, where they perished in captivity in April 1944. Nearly 80 years later, after being kept in the collection of the Croatian National Museum of Modern Art, Nature morte avec bouteille and Village et bord de rivière were finally returned to their rightful owners, the surviving member of the Reichsman family, Franz’s son, and Dane’s grandson.

     

    The Reichsman Family, circa 1928. Frieda (leftmost), Danica (fourth from left), Franz (center in striped jacket), and Dane (rightmost)

    Peering through the trees on the bank of a river, a small village comes into view, with buildings rendered in vibrant whites and terracottas, reflecting onto the river below. Using a more naturalistic color palette following the end of Fauvism in 1910, Maurice de Vlaminck’s Village et bord de rivière, circa 1911–1912, reflects the artist’s unique approach to landscape painting. While the artist traveled to London in 1911 and painted along the River Thames, it was France that he called home, ever inspired by the verdant, rolling hills and meandering path of the Seine, west of Paris. As such, Vlaminck combined various influences from memory in the paintings from this period. Using brilliant, earthy tones of green and blue, the present work demonstrates an abandoning of Fauvism in favor of the order of nature according to Paul Cézanne, representing a key transitional period in the artist’s practice.

    “I had no wish for a change of scene. All these places that I knew so well, the Seine with its strings of barges, the tugs with their plumes of smoke, the taverns in the suburbs, the color of the atmosphere, the sky with its great clouds and its patches of sun, these were what I wanted to paint.”
    —Maurice de Vlaminck

    Inspired by Cézanne’s modeling of three-dimensional space, Vlaminck’s works from this time are increasingly more ordered and realistic, forgoing the vibrant, saturated colors of his more imaginary paintings from before. Though never explicitly aligning with Cubism, its effects can clearly be seen in the present work. The square and rectangular forms that make up the buildings on the opposite side of the river and their shadows almost immediately reference the earliest Cubist renderings of cities and towns, using geometric shapes to create depth within the composition. Later moving back to the Seine valley following World War I and shifting entirely to dramatic and moody landscapes, Vlaminck here foreshadows his later work. Village et bord de rivière thus presents a unique transitional piece between the brilliantly colored Fauve landscapes, and his later, darker compositions.

     

    Paul Cézanne, Banks of the Seine at Médan, circa 1885/1890, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Alisa Mellon Bruce Collection, 1970.17.21

     

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    • Description

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    • Provenance

      Ambroise Vollard, Paris
      Erih Šlomović, Paris
      Dane Reichsman, Zagreb (acquired by 1940)
      Confiscated by the Germans during World War II in 1942 and placed on deposit to The National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
      Restituted to the family of Dane Reichsman in 2023

    • Exhibited

      Zagreb, The Gallery of King Peter I, Francuska Umjetnost: Iz Kolekcije Erih Šlomović, 1940, no. 174

Property Restituted to the Heirs of Dane Reichsman

172

Village et bord de rivière

signed "Vlaminck" lower left
oil on canvas
23 5/8 x 28 3/4 in. (60 x 73 cm)
Painted circa 1911–1912.

This work is accompanied by an Attestation of Inclusion from the Wildenstein Institute and it will be included in the forthcoming Vlaminck digital database, being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024