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1935

Except otherwise stated, all results include the premium.
​See also : Kandinsky  Matisse  Picasso later 1930s  Zhang Daqian < 1965  Cars 1930s  Cars 1934-35  Duesenberg 
1934

1935 PICASSO

1
Tête de Femme
2013 SOLD for $ 40M by Sotheby's

Pablo Picasso admires the face and the eyes of Marie-Thérèse. She is pregnant, but Picasso is forced to leave her temporarily to prepare his divorce from Olga.

Tête de femme, oil on canvas 65 x 54 cm painted on March 12, 1935, is a tribute by Pablo to his goddess, with bright colors. The artist uncorrelated the two themes of his aesthetic admiration : the face is seen in profile, which is a great angle to highlight the beauty of this young woman, but the eyes look straight towards the observer.

Afterwards, particularly with Dora, Pablo abused with this theme of dislocating the face. Here, the result is fresh and surprising, generating a real illusion of movement of the pretty head.

This artwork is also unique in the career of Pablo. After completing it, he will stop painting during a few months to satisfy other fantasies, including the Minotauromachie.

It was sold by Sotheby's for $ 40M on November 6, 2013. and for £ 19M on February 3, 2016, lot 10. Please watch the video shared by the auction house in 2013.
Picasso later 1930s

2
Jeune Fille Endormie
​2011 SOLD for £ 13.5M by Christie's

The youth and innocence of Marie-Thérèse Walter had amazed Picasso. Her nude portraits, resting in an armchair or sleeping, painted in 1932 are an art of passion.

In the years that followed, the beautiful model is resting, reading or sleeping. Her own personality is eluded because she is never shown in activity. Unless her main quality, precisely, was to keep quiet even in the presence of the tireless Pablo.

Jeune fille endormie (asleep girl) signed on February 3, 1935 was sold for £ 13.5M from a lower estimate of £ 9M by Christie's on June 21, 2011. This small oil on canvas 46 x 55 cm is the achievement of the expression of feelings by bright colors, blue, yellow and red, as Matisse or Léger could also have done.

The face of Marie-Thérèse had for some time a trend to turn to blue sky. Here, it has several shades of rather dark blue, giving up the purity for the benefit of some maturity. Maya was born eight months later, on October 5.

1935 KANDINSKY

1
Rigide et Courbé
​​2016 SOLD for $ 23.3M by Christie's

In 1933, when the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, Wassily Kandinsky moved to an apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine where he was to reside until his death. In his new Parisian life, he was helped by Duchamp. He went into a creative anonymity, keeping himself far away from the Surrealists but enjoying Miro's mingling of poetry and abstraction.

From 1922 to 1933, he had investigated with his colleagues from the Bauhaus the basic elements of the pictorial creation.

His exile in Paris frees him from teaching, and consequently from his subjugation to geometry. The forms observed in embryology and microbiology generate an unprecedented variant of his pantheism. He admires these flexible organisms invented by nature, which move under the microscope in a harmony that had escaped human eyes.

He then revisited the basic ideas of his early career about the pre-eminence of colors. The musical influence, triggered in 1911 by Schönberg, will never leave him. Nothing is left from a figurative inspiration.

Kandinsky loves the light and weather of Paris where he feels free despite the increasing heaviness of the European totalitarianisms. He introduces the curve, or more precisely the planar projection of a flexible tape, in his pictorial vocabulary and lets reappear some figurative symbols.

Rigide et courbé is painted in December 1935 with his new technique where he improves the texture by mingling sand in the oil paint. This mixed media on canvas 114 x 162 cm, is typical of the new style with the melody simulated by the curves of its central ribbon. It was sold for $ 23.3M from a lower estimate of $ 18M by Christie's on November 16, 2016, lot 18 B. Please watch the video shared by Christie's.

'Courbé' is the central tape, accompanied by a musical rhythm. Its flexibility expresses with a new optimism the vagaries of fate. This figure is flanked by a bulge and extended at its right end by the horns of a bovine. Its interpretation as the theme of the rape of Europa is plausible and seductive. At the same time Picasso identifies himself with the Minotaur.

'Rigide' is the totalitarianism reduced to a group of skyscrapers from which however escapes a sign of life which may be a leafy branch or perhaps a fetus. In the following year in his Composition No. 9, the symbols of birth become dominant and the theme of the fetus is confirmed in several places either by an explicit figuration or by the addition of umbilical cords.

Kandinsky painting bought directly from the artist by Solomon Guggenheim returns to auction https://t.co/qDctYtdUAX pic.twitter.com/73XK1bmZar

— The Art Newspaper (@TheArtNewspaper) September 15, 2016
Kandinsky

2
Noir bigarré
2021 SOLD for £ 8.8M by Christie's

Noir bigarré, painted by Kandinsky in Paris in October 1935, features free floating embryonic forms and amoebas surrounded by geometric figures over a black background of irregular border inspired from his experiences in the Bauhaus amidst a modulation of subtle colors.

A visit on Normandie's sea shore at low tide had revived in the previous year an interest for the tiny biological shapes which he managed to combine with a cosmic view.

Kandinsky kept that painting in his collection. This oil on canvas 116 x 89 cm was sold for £ 8.8M by Christie's on June 30, 2021, lot 17.

1935 Portrait au Manteau Bleu by Matisse
2008 SOLD for $ 22.4M by Christie's

A penniless Siberian exile in Nice, Lydia was temporarily hired by Monsieur et Madame Matisse as a studio assistant and a domestic help in 1932, aged 22. Coming back in the fall of 1934, she becomes the muse of the artist.

Portrait au manteau bleu, oil on canvas 91 x 60 cm, is a three quarter length portrait of the blue eyed blonde Lydia displaying the modern woman of her time, in opposition in this opus to the signature fantasy odalisques by the artist. It was painted in December 1935 shortly after the completion of the Nu Rose that also featured Lydia.

The drawing is schematic and flat in black paint contours. The colors are a rich saturation in dark blue, green, violet and red plus the warm skin of face and hands. The little hat is stylish and the pearl necklace and wristlets are elegant. Her attitude is of dignity and seriousness.

This modernist portrait was sold for $ 22.4M by Christie's on May 6, 2008, lot 6.
Matisse

​1935 Duesenberg SSJ
​2018 SOLD for $ 22M by Gooding

In May 1935 the management of Duesenberg recognizes the commercial failure of their high-end chassis, the Model J released in 1928. EL Cord, boss of the group that owns Duesenberg, launches a project that could save the brand : create the best car in two units to be entrusted respectively to Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. This Duesenberg Special Speedster will be identified from 1951 with the reference SSJ.

The brand's chief designer, J. Herbert Newport, plans to use on a shortened chassis the powerful Duesenberg Special 400 hp eight-cylinder in-line engine under development. The stars give their opinion. An enthusiast about luxury cars, Gary Cooper is appealed by the unprecedented performance of the future model but prefers that this roadster looks like a classic Duesenberg. Newport gives up the idea of ​​a modernist body.

The two cars are provided to the actors in December 1935 for a long-term loan. Cooper's wife, Sandra Shaw, immediately has sent their car back to the factory for changing the color.

Six months later the two stars receive a proposal to buy their car at one-third the price of an ordinary Model J. Cooper accepts. Gable is not interested : he already owns one of the ten units of the Duesenberg JN also produced in 1935.

Cooper and Gable did not make the spectacular use that Cord was waiting for. We do not know when Cooper sold his car. Cord could have anticipated that it is not so easy to use the capricious Hollywood celebrities as advertising agents for luxury cars. Already in 1934 Mae West had refused the project of a SJ Town Car designed especially for her by Duesenberg.

There will be no other SSJ. Its supercharged engine was only used on these two cars and temporarily on the one-off Special ordered by Ab Jenkins to race the land speed record in Bonneville.

Little used, Gary Cooper's SSJ has only 20,000 miles on the clock. It had only two owners since 1949, Briggs Cunningham and Miles Collier. Historian of automotive technology and tall ships, Collier wisely prefers to preserve the old cars rather than to restore them. This SSJ has kept intact its original chassis, engine and body and even has the canvas of its folding roof. It was sold for $ 22M from a lower estimate of $ 10M by Gooding on August 24, 2018, lot 35.

​The car is driven and narrated by David Gooding in the video shared by the auction house.
Duesenberg
Cars of the 1930s
Cars 1934-35

1934-1935 L'Angelus by Dali
2021 SOLD for $ 10.7M by Sotheby's

The art of Jean-François Millet fascinated Van Gogh, who in his early days wanted to become the painter of rural life.

From 1932 
Dali, researching how virtue hides vice and shame, tries Freudian interpretations of Millet's Angélus, a famous symbol of rural piety where he suspected unconscious thoughts. The angelus is a Catholic devotion recited at dawn, midday and dusk.

The composition of L'Angelus, painted by Dali ca 1934-1935, is inspired from Millet's painting.

The characters are silhouetted in the shadow of a twilight. The body of the woman is elongated, reinforcing her praying attitude with a bowing head. Millet's field is replaced by a ground shaped like a track or a parqueted floor, with small scattered rocks in the foreground and with Cadaquès-like big eroded rocks from which a car is taking off. Both lateral sides constitute a dark window, with musicians in small cartouches.

​L'Angelus, oil on panel 15.7 x 22 cm, was sold for $ 10.7M from a lower estimate of $ 4M by Sotheby's on November 17, 2021, lot 15.

Other paintings display various sceneries and actions. In Les Atavismes du crépuscule, the man has a skull head. L'Angélus Architectonique de Millet includes a spear that sexually joins the two characters transformed into gigantic monuments.

​Dali remained obsessed with the Angélus, to which he devoted in 1963 an entire book titled Le Mythe tragique de l'Angélus de Millet. Le Louvre took an x-ray of the painting. The woman's gaze is  directed towards a basket which peacefully symbolizes the harvest. In this place the original painting, masked by a repaint made by Millet, showed a child's coffin. Dali's intuition was confirmed, demonstrating the correctness of his paranoiac-critical hypersensitivity in this specific case.

1935 Heavenly Maiden scattering Flowers by Zhang Daqian
​2010 SOLD for RMB 75M by Poly

In 1927 the 29 year old Zhang Daqian was already an established artist. He was guided by a Japanese friend to visit Korea then under Japanese rule. In this travel he was attributed a gisheng, the Korean equivalent to a geisha. He coined a Chinese nickname to her.

Zhang fell mad in love with the charming and clever girl, taking fun of the fact that they did not speak the same language. Despite the anger of Zhang's two wives, the affair lasted until the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937.

Zhang wrote love poems and executed paintings of the young woman. She is his goddess as the Heavenly Maiden scattering Flowers in a color on paper 167 x 72 cm executed in 1935. Its Tang style predates by six years his artistic expedition to Dunhuang.

This hanging scroll was sold for RMB 75M by Poly on December 3, 2010, lot 2979.
Zhang Daqian before 1965

1935 Fruits by Bonnard
2006 SOLD for $ 8.5M by Christie's

Pierre Bonnard moves in 1927 to a cottage near Le Cannet on the French Riviera. Far away from his beginnings with the Nabi group, he indefatigably exercises his skills to his personal style of painting where the colors and the balance of the surface take precedence over the subject and over the modeling. This highly prolific artist was not a skilled draughtsman.

In that phase Bonnard used to paint multiple canvases simultaneously, adding and erasing colored spots on each of them in his quest for his self defined perfection. He was still working to improve a painting while in his deathbed in 1947.

Deux corbeilles de fruits was acquired in 1935 soon after its completion by its first owner. The tabletop with its checkered tablecloth is a reminiscence of the unbalanced spaces by Cézanne and Matisse while the
 vivid colors and the unconventional perspective may have been inspired from Gauguin and from Japanese prints.

This oil on canvas 60 x 81 cm was sold by Christie's for $ 8.5M on November 8, 2006, lot 73, and for $ 6.7M on November 9, 2022, lot 13.

1935 Workmen in the House by Spencer
2011 SOLD for £ 4.7M by Sotheby's

Born in Cookham, a small village beside the river Thames, Stanley Spencer used to mingle the daily life of the villagers with the epic narrations of the Christian Gospels in a dense profusion of details.

His patrons Louis and Mary Behrend commissioned him with frescoes for an oratory in the memory of Mary's brother, a lieutenant killed in the First World War. This project known as the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere made him busy from 1927 to 1932.

He nevertheless accepted other commissions, including in 1929 a series on industry and peace. From that set The Garage is an early example by the artist in the theme of groups of people absorbed in their individual occupation. This oil on canvas 102 x 125 cm was sold for £ 1.6M by Christie's on June 30, 2016, lot 3.

In 1935, a patron commissioned a work on the theme of building. Spencer split the work in two parts titled respectively Workmen in the House and The Builders. The angry customer rejected the whole.

Workmen in the House displays two carpenters busy to repair a fire place. That scheduled invasion disturbs the daily activity of the five year daughter of the artist ready for a walk with her devoted maid. This oil on canvas 112 x 93 cm was sold for £ 4.7M from a lower estimate of £ 1.5M by Sotheby's on June 15, 2011, lot 7.
1936
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