In 1894 in Berlin, Edvard Munch is tempted by the edition of his works. The most significant among these first trials takes up the theme of the two lonely characters, prepared with the dry point.

In the next year he is very prolific including among others the original lithographs of The Scream, Madonna and Vampyr. The Norwegian public does not follow. Happy that The Scream was published by La Revue Blanche, Munch comes to try his luck in Paris where he arrives in February 1896.

Now working with Clot, Munch is perfecting his approach to color lithography. Angst (anxiety) is inspired by an oil on canvas of the same title painted in 1894 on the theme of the funeral procession.

All of them looking in the direction of the observer while ignoring each other, these bereaved characters have small hallucinated eyes. They turn their backs from the fjord. The tormented sky which occupies all the upper half of the image makes this work a counterpart to The Scream. The artist is not mistaken : describing much later the preparatory phase of his Frieze of Life, he puts forward these two works along with Madonna and Vampyr.

After a first state, Vollard chooses Angst among the nine images to be published in his ambitious album of color lithographs titled Les Peintres-Graveurs. This second and final state of Angst is printed in 1896 by Clot in 100 copies 41 x 39 cm on wove paper 57 x 43 cm. This lithograph is in two tones, a dismal black for the whole figurative part and a scary blood red for the sinuous lines that fill the sky.

The two top auction results for this image were recorded by Sotheby's : $ 900K including premium on May 1, 2008 and $ 830K including premium on October 27, 2016. A copy with full margins is estimated $ 600K for sale by Christie's in New York on April 17, lot 151.

Gun collectors enjoy vintage pieces in their original configuration, in pristine condition, with superb engraving and impeccable provenance. The Colt revolver serial number 16477 is a wonder in all these criteria. It is estimated beyond $ 1.2M for sale on May 3 by RIA Company at Rock Island IL, lot 8. Please watch the video shared by the auction house.

Designed in 1848, the Colt Dragoon was an improvement to the Colt Walker. 16477 is a third model Dragoon made circa 1857. It was engraved by Gustave Young with lush floral scrolls and a few animal heads, in the signature profuse style of this artist between 1852 and 1869. Other revolvers in the same series of numbers have been used by Colt as presentation arms.

16477 was inscribed in the name of Colonel P.M. Milliken, a likely intentional misspelling for Millikin. A colonel during the Spanish-American War of 1898, Paul Minor Millikin had inherited this item from his father John Minor Millikin, a colonel of the Union Army killed in action in 1862 while preventing the Confederates from taking a supply train.

A native of rural Ohio, John Minor had been known as an accomplished rider and swordsman. In the year of his death, his position as an officer had been twice challenged. The purchase by him of such a top luxury firearm seems unlikely. A posthumous presentation for his ultimate act of heroism is however not documented.

With the Liangzhu culture that began around 5,300 years ago, the agrarian civilization is developing, already using irrigation, dwellings on stilts, fortification of cities. Liangzhu is the first archaeological site that has been studied in this culture, since 1936. 200 sites are currently known.

The polishing of jade was already practiced in China three millennia before the Liangzhu culture. Its hardness and durability made it the preferred material for liturgical objects. At the time of Liangzhu, two shapes were very abundant, bi and cong, probably used together in funerary rituals.

The bi is a flat disc with a central hole. The cong is a complex tubular form whose outer wall is a square appearing over the cylinder on all or part of the height.

Each corner of the cong is used to position on both sides an archaic mask of taotie, similar as 1,000 years later on the Shang and Zhou bronze vessels but with a simpler style which brings in the best cases a good readability of the face.

The proportions of the Liangzhu cong have a high variety that has not been explained. A 24 cm high narrow tube with its square section divided into nine registers was sold for HK $ 8.5M including premium by Christie's on November 29, 2017.

On May 29, 2018, Bonhams sold for HK $ 21.7M including premium a Liangzhu cong 8.4 cm wide with two registers. The lower illustrations, centered on the rather flattened ridges, undeniably represent faces, each one with both concentric eyes, the nose and the mouth. On the upper register the image is stylized up to abstraction, as an ultimate figure of the creature to which the mysterious liturgy is addressed.

On April 2 in Hong Kong, Sotheby's sells a cong made around the mid Liangzhu period 4,500 years ago, lot 3020 estimated HK $ 8M. This piece 10 cm wide with flattened corners has the proportions of a bracelet but certainly did not have such a use.

Its extremely thin carving is very well preserved on half of the surface. The very detailed eyes that widen in the direction of the temples are not human.

Founded by Stieglitz in New York in 1902, the Photo-Secession group  transforms photography into a new art. A great attention is brought to the processing of the negative and the positive, and the editions are very carefully prepared. With the use of special effects and an optimal choice of photosensitive paper, the best prints are no longer multiples but indeed unique masterpieces, due to high difficulty to apply twice the same conditions.

On February 14, 2006, Sotheby's sold for $ 2.9M including premium a 41 x 51 cm platinum print made by Edward Steichen in 1904. Titled The pond - moonlight, this photograph combines moonlight conditions at shooting with several gum bichromate applications, bringing to the positive an effect of colors that could not be obtained by other techniques at that time.

A Luxembourg-born made US citizen in 1900, Steichen settles in 1908 in Voulangis, a village not far from current-day Disneyland Paris. He leads to Stieglitz the best modern European artists, thus allowing his friends Matisse, Rodin and Brancusi to exhibit their work in New York for the first time.

On April 4 in New York, Phillips sells Heavy Roses, a 19 x 24 cm palladium print made by Steichen in 1914 and located in Voulangis. To preserve the details within the shadows, the photographer used the Sabatier effect, also called solarization or pseudo-solarization, consisting in interrupting the chemical development for bringing a short exposure to white light. This photo is estimated $ 400K, lot 15.

The deliberate use of the Sabatier effect in the dark room is a highly rare refinement at that time. The solarization that was later practiced by Man Ray and Lee Miller to provide silhouette underlinings is another application of this physico-chemical phenomenon that locally reverses the tones.

In the early 1950s Charles Blackman looks for a surrealist theme. He paints morbid scenes of Schoolgirls and Schoolboys in the sad occupations of childhood.

His wife Barbara is an avid reader despite her almost complete blindness. In 1956 she borrows a copy of Alice in Wonderland. Charles is thrilled by this extravagant story. In addition, in her fall, Alice believes that she is on her way to down under.

Charles immediately begins a series of scenes inspired by the adventures of Alice in Wonderland, as his friend Sidney Nolan was doing with the bushranger Ned Kelly. In the following year Arthur Boyd will take as theme the forbidden marriage of the half castes.

Blackman's Alice is a little girl with a haggard gaze and circled eyes, not even interested in the scale variations of furniture and objects. The morose rabbit is a witness to the action, to which it sometimes deigns to participate.

The four examples below were painted in tempera and oil on board in 1956.

The Game of Chess, 107 x 122 cm, was sold for AUD 1.8M including premium by Sotheby's Australia on November 23, 2016. Mad Hatter's tea party, 105 x 121 cm, was sold for AUD 1.9M including premium by the same auction house on November 21, 2017.

Alice on the table, 121 x 112 cm, is estimated AUD 1.5M for sale on April 10 in Sydney by Deutscher and Hackett, lot 9. A scene by night without the rabbit titled Dreaming Alice, 97 x 136 cm, is estimated AUD 1M for sale by Sotheby's Australia on April 9, lot 24, also in Sydney.

Helmut Newton is a fashion photographer, close to Yves Saint-Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. Working for Vogue, Playboy, Spiegel and Stern, he looks for eroticism beyond charm. He publishes his first two books in New York. White Women, in 1976, confronts the nude and the dressed. Sleepless nights, in 1978, partly photographed in the streets of Paris, adds the mystery of wax mannequins and is in colors.

A further step is reached from 1980 with the appreciation by the artist of the expressive force of very large formats applied in black and white to standing female nudes with sculptural bodies. The high-heeled shoes worn by naked women bring an effect of power and dominance that demonstrates the completion of the sexual revolution. The third book of the artist, Big Nudes, published in Paris in 1981, is a collection of these images.

Big Nudes includes a diptych titled Sie kommen. In the studio without decoration, four women walk forward as in a fashion show. They have the same full frontal position and the same attitude on both photos. On the left they are elegantly dressed. On the right they are naked on their high heels.

In the largest format on which the four women are life-size, each photo of the diptych is separated into two elements. A set of four 193 x 99 cm exhibition panels, each numbered II/III and annotated in 1995 for the Venice Biennal, was sold for $ 660K including premium by Christie's on December 16, 2008.

In a similar format, a group of four unmounted prints numbered 1/3 is estimated $ 600K for sale by Phillips in New York on April 4, lot 85.

A Sie kommen diptych in two elements 106 x 106 cm without the central separation of each image was sold for $ 670K including premium by Sotheby's on April 3, 2016.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the mechanics are highly excited : unlike rail, the automobile allows transportation at will. Three technologies compete : the ignition engine that uses a fuel, the electric motor and the steam engine.

The electric motor originally takes the lead : the speed records are alternately established by Jenatzy on cars of his design and by Chasseloup-Laubat on Jeantaud.

The Serpollet brothers are specialists of the steam engines which they use for manufacturing and marketing automobile tricycles as early as 1888. Patented by Léon Serpollet in 1888 and 1896, the flash boiler makes this technology operational for automobiles. In 1898 he interests a wealthy American with whom he founds the Gardner-Serpollet company and starts two years later the brand of that name.

In 1902 a Gardner-Serpollet driven by Léon Serpollet is the first steam car to break the land speed record, reaching 120 km/h on the flying kilometer, 15 km/h more than the previous achievement by Jenatzy. Like Jenatzy's bombshell-shaped La Jamais Contente, Serpollet's L'Oeuf de Pâques has a minimalist body.

In the same year Gardner-Serpollet promotes the advantages of the steam by advertising the absence of noise, smell and vibrations of its deluxe cars.

On March 23 in Fontainebleau, Osenat sells a Gardner-Serpollet Type F from 1902, lot 112 estimated € 200K. The video illustrating this lot is included in the tweet below. In the same sale, the lot 113 estimated € 60K is a recent replica of L'Oeuf de Pâques.

RESULTS BEFORE FEES :
Lot 112 SOLD for € 210K
Lot 113 SOLD for € 73K

In 1921 the young René Magritte is hired as a draftsman in a wallpaper factory in Brussels. He frequents Surrealist and Dadaist literary circles and would like to become independent as an advertising illustrator.

Attentive to avant-garde art, Magritte is subjugated in 1923 by an image of the Canto d'amore, a surrealist work painted in 1914 by De Chirico. Ordinary objects constitute a poetic universe if their positioning is absurd.

On March 29 in Paris, Sotheby's sells La salle d'armes, oil and industrial painting on jute canvas 78 x 63 cm painted by Magritte in 1925 or 1926, lot 411 estimated € 700K.

The room proper is the interior of an elongated cube, totally symmetrical with perfect perspective lines. The only decoration is the large target in four concentric rings on the back wall. The only furniture is a coffee table. The X-ray inspection reveals that La salle d'armes had overpainted a geometric abstraction, a style that no longer suits Magritte's fancy.

No gun or arrow is visible but a heap of figs lies on the table. The absurd dimension is very simply ensured by the bust of a woman that hangs upside down from the ceiling and whose base overflows the upper stripe of the false frame. In the surrealist world of De Chirico, the marble bust was symbolizing the actuality of antiquity.

From 1926 Magritte observes that an image of an object remains an image and is not the object. He begins to confront the drawing of his pipe with the word 'pipe' or with an abstraction. In 1929 La trahison des images is an artistic manifesto of a sublime simplicity, in just six words: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."

In the same period Miro also was appreciating that the new poetic dimension of modern art was a personal work that could not be attached to a movement and even less to a political affiliation.

The image of the tweet below is truncated, bringing to the work a banality that would have amused Magritte.

A silver print of Steps by Rodchenko was sold for $ 275K including premium by Sotheby's on September 30, 2014, lot 127, and passed at Phillips on November 6, 2015, lot 67. It is now estimated $ 150K for sale by Christie's in New York on April 2, lot 372.

I narrated this photo as follows before the previous sales.

Constructivism, in parallel to Malevich's Suprematism, is a Soviet variant of Futurism. Its target is to create new art and poetry by eliminating spontaneity and emotion for superseding the bourgeois art. 

The pioneer of constructivism, Alexander Rodchenko, reached the end of his process in 1921 with his first monochrome paintings. He immediately gave up painting for photography. In a similar approach as the Bauhaus, he became interested in collages which he used to illustrate the poems by Mayakovsky. 

Rodchenko was a contemporary of Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Leaving photomontage for photography proper around 1925, he looked for a formalism in architecture and in the scenery of modern life, with extreme angles of view that remove the reference to horizontal and vertical planes. 

Taken in 1929, the steps of a staircase in Moscow bring the best photographic demonstration of Rodchenko's constructivism. The lighting is strong, offering no intermediate between light and shadow with the consequence of removing unnecessary details. In the center of the image, a woman climbs the stairs with a baby in her arms. The copy for sale is an exhibition print 38 x 57 cm dated 1935 by the artist's daughter.

Rodchenko's steps are photographed four years after the more famous staircase of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. The similar scenery can hardly be a coincidence but the contrast of the action is total between the peaceful movement of Rodchenko's figure with child which is a symbol of life and the terrible fall of the push-chair, a symbol of child's death.

Rodchenko also seconded the documentarist director and theorist Dziga Vertov, rejecting both narrative and show. 

The tweet below has been issued by Phillips before the 2015 sale.

The jade plaque has been used in China since Neolithic times. It is perforated for use as a pendant, necklace or belt ornament. Recognizable zoomorphic figures appear more than 5,000 years ago:  fish, turtle, bird.

Under the Shang and Zhou, increasingly elegant plaques in polished jade can take the form of indomitable beasts : tiger, rhinoceros, dragon. Used as chest ornaments, they are a sign of the power of the wearer and accompany him into the grave. This practice continues under the Han.

Among the zoomorphic pieces, the elongated 'tiger plaque' is not uncommon. The detail of the clipping is an adaptation of the artist to the shape of the pebble, just as the parietal painters used the asperities of the walls of the caves to conceive their figuration.

On April 3 in Hong Kong, Sotheby's sells a yellow jade plaque carved in low relief on both sides, lot 3620 estimated HK $ 25M. It is 22 cm long, which is an extreme width for a pectoral use. It was made in the final period of the Eastern Zhou overlapping the Warring States period around 2,300 years ago.

The reclining animal is not identifiable : the artist has voluntarily created a hybrid with muscular forms, displaying the massive silhouette of a rhinoceros, the skin with pustules of a dragon, the large snout of a ruminant and a long horn on the forehead. The smooth areas of shoulders and hips are illustrated respectively with a bird and a dragon with similar elegant undulations. The edge of the plaque bears an inscription in two characters that has not been deciphered.