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1905

Except otherwise stated, all results include the premium.
​See also : Art on paper  Children  Nude  Flowers  Music and dance  Self portrait  Self portrait II  Picasso  Picasso < 1907  Paris  Bassin aux nymphéas  Alps  US painting < 1940  Sargent 
1904

natural wonder
1905 the Cullinan
British Royal collection

The Cullinan mine was discovered in 1902. In 1905 a miner unearthed a type IIa historic gem weighing 3,106 carats that remains unique by its weight and quality.

​Two famous white diamonds belonging to the British Royal Collection were extracted from the "Cullinan": the Great Star of Africa mounted on the scepter and the Second Star of Africa mounted on the crown. 
The 530-carat Great Star of Africa is the largest faceted colorless diamond in the world.

​An image of the rough Cullinan diamond is shared by Wikimedia.
Rough cullinan diamond

masterpiece
1905 Femme au Chapeau by Matisse
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Matisse's Femme au chapeau of 1905, a portrait of his wife Amélie, had been an excuse for an explosion of colors, a breakthrough in modern art that led to the pejorative qualification of Fauvisme to the new trend.

​The image is shared by Wikimedia.

Matisse-Woman-with-a-Hat

masterpiece
1905 Le Lion ayant Faim by Rousseau
Fondation Beyeler

Henri "le Douanier" Rousseau was enlarging with a pantograph his selected illustrations from post cards, botanical treatises and dime store novels. His lush exotic forest is totally dreamlike.

Exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 beside avant-garde paintings by Matisse and Derain.  Commented as follows by Rousseau for the exhibition :
"Le lion, ayant faim, se jette sur l'antilope, la dévore. La panthère attend avec anxiété le moment où, elle aussi, pourra en avoir sa part. Des oiseaux carnivores ont déchiqueté chacun un morceau de chair de dessus le pauvre animal versant un pleur! Soleil couchant."

A Renaissance style sculpture was also exhibited in the same room. Vauxcelles commented : "Donatello chez les Fauves". So was coined the term Fauvisme for the new style of Matisse and Derain.


The image is shared by Wikimedia.
Rousseau-Hungry-Lion

1905 PICASSO

1
​Fillette à la Corbeille Fleurie
​2018 SOLD for $ 115M by Christie's

Pablo Picasso is back in Paris in April 1904. Barcelona had not dissipated his morbid obsessions and he needs a restart. He installs his workshop at the Bateau-Lavoir and finally manages to create a couple, with Fernande.

The miserability of his Période Bleue, based on the difficult life of circus acrobats, was socially a dead end. In 1905 he reacts with new themes where the characters imagine their future without losing a stuck or surly attitude. His painting loses its blue predominant to include warm colors like pink or orange. It is his Période Rose. These works include the Femme à l'éventail and two children, the Fillette à la corbeille de fleurs and the Garçon à la pipe.


The theme of poverty is now superseded by the optimistic and promising theme of children ready to enter adulthood. Pablo mixes the innocence of the nude with the acquisition of a first job. Although the formats are very different, the Fillette à la corbeille fleurie, 155 x 66 cm painted in 1905, and the Garçon menant un cheval, 220 x 131 cm finished in 1906, appear as pendants.

The girl is standing in profile. The body is healthy, straight. The expression is rebellious without any excuse for immodesty, in a striking psychological effect : this young person has obviously been disturbed in her occupation.

During the very short Période Rose the line is delimited and effective. The figurative realism of this Fillette makes forget that nudity may not have been necessary. This artwork successively delighted Gertrude Stein and David Rockefeller. It was sold for $ 115M by Christie's on May 8, 2018, lot 15.
Children
Nude
Flowers
Picasso
Picasso before 1907
Decade 1900-1909

2
​Le Garçon à la Pipe
2004 SOLD for $ 104M by Sotheby's​

Le Garçon à la Pipe is a subtle blend of realism and dreamlike and, as such, will remain the archetype of the Période Rose. Dressed in blue overalls, the gloomy teenager is drawn in a fine line. The pipe marks his expectation of maturity. Picasso did not reveal his identity, because it is an allegory. He is however P'tit Louis, a boy from Montmartre who spent long hours watching the artists working at the Bateau-Lavoir.

The inspiration suddenly came to Picasso after a month of interruption of the work. In the blur of a dream, the character is positioned in front of a wallpaper with patterns of roses and wears a garland of flowers in his hair. A simultaneous use of a sharp image in a floral blur had also been attempted by Odilon Redon.

The little worker thus becomes a supernatural being. A relevant comparison was made with Verlaine's poem titled Crimen Amoris. In the dream of a delicious Orient where the seven sins supersede the five senses amidst the roses, the most handsome of the evil angels, indifferent to temptations and caresses, is a boy of sixteen who wears a crown of flowers. His ambition, annihilated at the end of the poem, was to be "the one who will create God".

Le Garçon, oil on canvas 100 x 81 cm, was sold for 
$ 104M by Sotheby's on May 5, 2004, lot 7.

3
​Les Noces de Pierrette
1989 SOLD for FF 315M by Binoche et Godeau

The Période Bleue begins in 1901 with the suicide of Casagemas. Picasso remains melancholic. His main theme is poverty, painted with cool colors. The associated theme is the contradictory life of circus acrobats, who must amuse the public while their real life is miserable.

Les Noces de Pierrette, oil on canvas 115 x 195 cm, appears at first glance as a work of the blue period. It was however painted in 1905, a year rather characterized by the entry of the artist into his pink period with the return of a positive meaning of life. In this transitional artwork, Picasso criticizes the power of money.

This group depicts six circus characters, three men and three women. During the blue period, the compositions rarely exceeded the couple, sometimes with a child or a partner.

The tension is brought by the whiteness of the faces, the sad expressions, the dark colors of the clothes and of the background. The artist is staging a drama. Pierrette marries the boss of the circus but her amorous look is for Arlequin, who sends her a kiss with one hand while furiously closing the other fist behind his back.

Les Noces de Pierrette was sold on 
November 30, 1989 by Binoche et Godeau for FF 315M, worth US $ 52M. The Minister of Culture had granted this work the authorization to leave France in exchange for the gift to the French State by its owner of La Célestine, another painting of the blue period considered to be more important.
​
Unlike La Célestine, Pierrette is not a character from literature. She would rather be a female equivalent of Pierrot, a Colombine being losing her Arlequin, imagined by Picasso.

4
​Au Lapin Agile
1989 SOLD for $ 41M by Sotheby's

Cabarets had a preponderant place in Picasso's youth. It is indeed at the 4 Gats in Barcelona that he feels the desire to have a bohemian life in Montmartre.

Le Lapin Agile is perfectly located in the heart of Montmartre, rue des Saules. Before 1900 its reputation had been sordid. Its name is a pun on the sign created by the cartoonist André Gill showing a happy rabbit jumping out of a pan.

Picasso arrives in Paris at the time when a new steward nicknamed Frédé organizes evenings in this cabaret during which poets, comedians and artists from Montmartre play music, sing, recite poems, chat with conviviality. Frédé plays guitar and cello.

Au Lapin Agile is an oil on canvas 100 x 100 cm painted by Picasso in 1905 on a commission from Frédé. Pablo prepares it in the graphic style of Toulouse-Lautrec's posters, without any style link either with the blue period or with the pink period. It was sold for $ 41M by Sotheby's on November 27, 1989.

The couple in the foreground, seated in front of glasses of wine, is made up of Picasso dressed as a Harlequin and of Germaine, the woman who had rejected Casagemas but was probably Pablo's mistress throughout the blue period. Behind them, Frédé plays the guitar.

Picasso's painting hung on the wall of the cabaret until 1912. It was therefore a silent witness of the most famous hoax in the history of art.

In 1910 on the cabaret terrace, the writer Roland Dorgelès accompanied by an accomplice attaches brushes to the tail of Lolo, Frédé's donkey. In the presence of a bailiff, they dip the brushes in pots of orange, yellow, red and blue paint and offer the animal a carrot. The frantic movement of the tail creates on a 54 x 81 cm canvas the masterpiece titled
Et le Soleil s'endormit sur l'Adriatique, signed J.R. Boronali, an anagram of Buridan's famous donkey, Aliboron.

They exhibit this Sunset at the Salon des Indépendants as a manifesto of the Excessivisme. The fruitful debates that the hoax has aroused about the meaning of art are thus a direct consequence of the artists' meetings at the Lapin Agile. Picasso's painting is a rare rendering of this environment.
Music and Dance in Art
Self Portrait
Self Portrait 2nd page
Paris

5
Acrobate et Jeune Arlequin
1988 SOLD for £ 21M (worth $ 38.5M at that time) by Christie's

During his blue period, Picasso hesitates between Barcelona and Paris. His fourth trip to Paris, in April 1904, is decisive.

The 1901 beginning of his Parisian glory is already far away. A friend gives him a place at the Bateau-Lavoir, a dwelling for artists on the slopes of the Butte Montmartre. There he finds emigrant artists, Italian and Spanish, who cannot escape poverty and earn a few cents by selling their works to second-hand dealers.

He has the will to get out of it. This miserable workshop becomes his pied-à-terre from where he makes new friends, including Max Jacob. He wants to have fun and goes to nightclubs and the Medrano circus. His new muse, Fernande, replaces Germaine, the femme fatale who had repelled Casagemas and whose direct influence on Pablo has not been disclosed.

Tragic art is not a lasting solution for this return of ambitions. Picasso observes that clowns, entrusted for entertaining the public, have the same hungry lives as the unknown artists. Acrobats and saltimbanques take the place of the prostitutes from the blue period in Pablo's world. By an optimism which is undoubtedly forced, he adds the children who still believe in the future pleasures of their life.

In February 1905, Picasso prepares an exhibition of several works on the theme of the circus, which followed the edition of the Repas Frugal. A watercolor features an adult acrobat and a teenage harlequin, both costumed to take the stage. They are serious and bony. The warm colors announce the entry into the pink period.

This artwork was sold by Christie's on November 28, 1988 for £ 21M, worth at the time $ 38.5M, from a lower estimate of £ 10M. It is illustrated in the post sale article by Judd Tully, the Washington Post art critic.

1905 Nymphéas by MONET

1
2015 SOLD for $ 54M by Sotheby's

In 1904 Claude Monet is seduced by his own work, not as an artist but as a gardener. Water lilies are now invading his pond at Giverny. The various colors of the flowers match the Art Nouveau sensitivity of the time. In the same year he buys four other hybrids to Latour-Marliac.

Unlike the ivy on the wall, they will not cover the entire available surface. Spreading their leaves flush with water, they materialize in perspective the real surface of the pond, gradually occupying the surface of the pond. The artist has found his master : nature itself, no less.

These nymphéas become a favorite theme in Monet's art. Nothing escapes him in the daily cycle from the opening to the closing of the blossom, or in the reaction of the plant to light and to weather conditions. He still uses the process that was so successful to him in previous decades, by installing several easels and working from canvas to canvas depending on hour and weather.

From 1904 to 1908, Monet produced his first large series of Nymphéas. With more than 60 paintings which he wants all different from one another, the artist expresses the most subtle variations of color and light, changing the distance and population of the flowers, the importance of the reflections from the trees and the expressive power of color. 

The artist later recognized that he "hardly had any other subject since that moment". He was indeed catching in his own garden the most subtle theme of modern painting.

​
The horizon disappears, the details become abstract but the botanical accuracy remains. An early example in this new figurative style, dated 1904, 81 x 100 cm, was sold for £ 18.5M by Sotheby's on 19 June 2007, lot 7.

In 1905 the water lilies are sparse to offer a better role to reflections that became recognizable although the trees are still out of field. The plants form a floating cohort simulating a nice horizontal movement.

On May 5, 2015, Sotheby's sold for $ 54M from a lower estimate of $ 30M an oil on canvas 81 x 100 cm painted in 1905, lot 30. It displays the blocks at the water surface in an atmosphere of early or late hour providing a superb harmony of deep blues and greens.

Durand-Ruel was the first to understand and support the transformation of the art of Monet. In 1909, he assembled in an exhibition 48 Nymphéas by Monet, including the painting narrated above. Through this unique theme, careful observers could detect the infinite variety of the artistic creation.

AuctionUpdate: Sotheby's Chairmen George Wachter and Patti Wong battle for Monet’s ‘Nymphéas,' selling for $54m pic.twitter.com/4mlTAOvKY9

— Sotheby's (@Sothebys) May 6, 2015
Bassin aux Nymphéas

2
​2012 SOLD for $ 44M by Christie's

Continuously in search of the harmony of colors and lights, Monet could not ignore the water lilies. When he installed some of them in his pool at Giverny, it was for the pleasure of gardening. The infinite variety of shapes and reflections pushed Monet to make the Nymphéas his favorite subject.

Constable had been the painter of the wind. Monet was the artist of the water surface. After the development of Impressionism, the Nymphéas series is the second revolution brought about by Monet in art history.

A view in clear weather under a gentle sun, oil on canvas 90 x 100 cm painted in 1905, was sold for $ 44M from a lower estimate of $ 30M by Christie's on November 7, 2012. The water lilies have a botanical accuracy, the more readable reflections are a better tribute to the pleasure of the garden. It had been exhibited by Durand-Ruel in the groundbreaking 1909 exhibition.
Art on Paper

1905 Group with Parasols by Sargent
2004 SOLD for $ 23.5M by Sotheby's

Influenced by impressionism, John Singer Sargent was one of the best portrait painters of his time. As he approaches fifty, he wants to live his life better. He has been traveling throughout Europe since his youth. He will now refocus his art on the landscapes of his travels and on the holiday scenes with friends in Italy and Switzerland.

Group with Parasols (A Siesta) is an oil on canvas 55 x 71 cm painted in 1905. Two women and two men enjoy the farniente in a meadow on the border of a wood in the Swiss Alps.

The colors are very contrasted, in the chiaroscuro of a hot summer day. The removal of details takes some parts of the image to the borders of abstraction.

One of the men has his head resting on the belly of his mistress who is peacefully dozing under her white parasol. The painting was dedicated to this friend. This extramarital relationship, as well as the different position of each of the four sleepers, matches the artist's deep desire for a free life.

Group with Parasols was sold for $ 23.5M from a lower estimate of $ 9M by Sotheby's on December 1, 2004, 
lot 7. The image is shared by Wikimedia.
Sargent - Group with Parasols (A Siesta), lot.7
Alps
Sargent
US Painting before 1940

​​1905 Paysage de Banlieue by Vlaminck
2011 SOLD for $ 22.5M by Christie's

Maurice de Vlaminck was an unusual personality. Violinist, cyclist, African tribal art collector, anarchist activist, bulky and thunderous colossus, he did not follow the predefined tracks.

He shares with Derain an artist's studio in Chatou. Success is not to go, and all experiments are possible. The visit made by the two friends to an exhibition of the works of Van Gogh excites Vlaminck, who finds his style.

The idea is powerful: only the color should dominate the painting, and it must be pure. The figure, realistic among Impressionists, shaken by Van Gogh, will become secondary. The bourgeois are horrified. Fauvisme was born.

Executed in 1905 (or perhaps 1906), an oil on canvas 65 x 81cm is typical of this experimental period.

It is a landscape of suburban Paris, with small scattered houses separated by their gardens. It is such a commonplace that this view could be what an amateur photographer captures from his window. Composition has not the originality of a Derain, the line has not the strength of a Van Gogh.

But the boldly applied colors are pure, like from the tube: yellow, blue, green, with details in vermilion distributed all over the surface.

This Vlaminck so reminiscent to a Van Gogh was sold for $ 22.5M by Christie's on May 4, 2011, lot 25.

As early as 1906, Vollard will buy paintings by Vlaminck.

​1905 Collioure by Derain
2010 SOLD for £ 16.3M by Sotheby's

The French Mediterranean coast is renowned for its superb light. Two small ports, St. Tropez and Collioure, were particularly inspiring to young artists for a hundred and thirty years.

During the summer of 1905, Matisse and Derain are resident in Collioure. André Derain is 25 years old. Comparing painting to dynamite, he explodes the colors in his port scenes and views to the sea.

The big question is to decide whether or not to imitate the style of Signac, who preceded the two artists in this small village. Some paintings by Derain, that year, are pointillist while others are not. If he had maintained such creativity for many years, he would be one of the outstanding painters of his time. 

On June 22, 2010, Sotheby's sold for £ 16.3M from a lower estimate of £ 9M a view with some trees in the countryside, a small house in the distance. This oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, is made with pure color, and again with a strong pointillism that creates a successful light effect. It is illustrated in the press release shared by AuctionPublicity.

The painting, that had belonged to Vollard, is fresh on the market, after having been forgotten in a bank vault because of the tragedies of the Second World War.

With broad points closer to Seurat, some boats in Collioure with nice reflections, 60 x 73 cm, fetched $ 14M at Sotheby's on November 4, 2009.
1906
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