Sotheby’s spring sales of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York will be held on May 8 & 9, 2007. Among the highlights of the evening sale on May 8th is one of the most important watercolours by Paul Cézanne remaining in private hands, Nature morte au melon vert (est. $14/18 million). Executed in 1902-06, this exquisite masterwork is being sold by the premiere connoisseur of Chinese Art, Giuseppe Eskenazi, who has kept it in his private collection for nearly two decades. The sale will also include a moving Rose period painting by Pablo Picasso, Tête d'arlequin, depicting the same model captured in the artist’s masterful Garçon à la Pipe sold by Sotheby’s in 2004 for a record $104.2 million (est. $14/18 million). Other spectacular paintings and sculpture by Picasso will also be offered, in addition to choice works by Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Marino Marini, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky, among others.David Norman, a Chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department Worldwide said, “This sale is particularly rich with examples of the types of works collectors value most today -- great works on paper; superb sculpture; a wonderful survey of works from a range of periods and executed in a variety of media by Pablo Picasso; and paintings that have remained in private hands for decades.” Nature morte au melon vert is one of the finest watercolours by Paul Cézanne remaining in private hands and a pristine example of one of the artist’s most iconic genres, the still life. Executed from 1902-06, the present work demonstrates the extraordinary audacity of style and the confidence and assured quality of the artist’s technique that characterized his late years. This is third time that Sotheby’s has had the honour of offering this work for sale – first, in the legendary sale of The Robert von Hirsch Collection in 1978, one of the greatest collections to be sold by Sotheby’s after World War II, and second, in the sale of The British Rail Pension Fund in 1989, the finest collection to be sold in Europe in the 1980s at the pinnacle of the art market. Also being offered by Mr. Eskenazi are three other watercolors by Cézanne depicting classic scenes of the artist’s beloved Provence. (Separate release available)The May sale features an outstanding offering of paintings and sculpture spanning the career of Pablo Picasso – from important Rose period works to a powerful painting from 1965 that ranks among the artist’s finest Post-War canvases. Painted in 1905, Tête d'arlequin is one in a series of eight portraits of an anonymous adolescent boy, including the masterful Garçon à la pipe that are considered the artist’s most significant productions of his Rose period. Of all the fabled personae in Picasso’s repertoire, the harlequin is his most poignant, and the present work is one of his earliest depictions of this iconic character. Picasso’s Rose period has always been admired for its melancholic charm and haunting poetry, contrasting with the deep gloom of the immediately preceding Blue period. Mr. Norman noted, “The present work possesses a deeply felt soulfulness and resonance coupled with the kind of timeless character that evokes the great portraits of centuries past by artists such as Velázquez and Goya.” This work has never before appeared at auction, and for most of its history it was in the private collection of Alex Vömel, the important dealer of avant-garde art who owned a gallery in Düsseldorf.Also painted in 1905 is Famille d’arlequin, a wonderful example of the works Picasso executed during the Rose period which are dominated by images of family groups (est. $6/8 million). Like Tête d'arlequin, the present work is inspired by the artist’s fascination with harlequins, acrobats, actors and circus performers. However, the prevailing mood of Famille d’arlequin and related works is not that of melancholy, and here Picasso introduced a new atmosphere of warmth and family closeness that was not seen in his earlier work. Rather than representing the family in a bare, metaphysical landscape (as he does in the great Family of Saltimbanques at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.), he depicts them in a warmer indoor setting. A sense of tenderness is amplified by the intimate interaction of all three family members and was probably inspired by new circumstances in Picasso’s own life, namely his relationship with Fernande Olivier. Executed in gouache and ink, the present work has been consigned by the family of renowned American collector, Joan Whitney Payson. Painted at the height of his Rose period is Tête de Fernande, from a series of figure studies of his young mistress executed in the summer of 1906 when the artist and Fernande spent ten weeks in Gósol, a small village in the Catalan pre-Pyrenées (est. $5/7 million). Picasso was immensely prolific while in Gósol, executing a number of paintings, drawings, watercolors, gouaches and carvings. His chief concerns during this period were portraits and figure-studies inspired by local youth, peasant girls and most importantly, his companion, Fernande. His figure studies of her, including the present work, are considered some of his most expressive works executed during this period.While Fernande was the first significant woman in Picasso’s romantic life, she was by no means his last. Over the course of half a century he would find love with several different women, including a beautiful divorcee named Jacqueline Roque, who became his most devoted mistress and eventually his wife. Jacqueline was the artist’s primary model and source of inspiration for over twenty years and in many of his compositions, including Femme nue assise from 1965, he depicts her as a giant archetypal goddess seated on a throne (est. $8/10 million). Painted on January 3, 5 and 8, the present work is one of the first canvases in a series of large works on the theme of a seated female nude that Picasso executed in the early days of January 1965 in Mougins. Painted in quick succession, these works bear witness to the extraordinary energy and creative urge that characterized Picasso’s late years.Like Picasso, Joan Miró drew inspiration from the itinerant performers of the circus. His extraordinary Peinture (Le Cheval de cirque) is from a series of supremely abstracted depictions of a circus horse that Miró painted at the height of his involvement with the Surrealists (est. $8/10 million). The picture dates from 1927, when Miró was living in Montmartre and working alongside the artists Max Ernst, René Magritte, Jean Arp and the poet Paul Eluard. The entire series of Le Cheval de cirque has come to represent the best of Miró's Surrealist endeavor. The present work in particular was one of the best known of these pictures and was featured in several major retrospectives of the artist's work.Marc Chagall found an endless amount of pleasure in depicting the circus, as its grand spectacle offered relentless visual splendor. According to Emmanuel Di Donna, Senior Vice President in Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Department and Director of the Evening Sales, “Le Grand Cirque is one of the artist’s largest renditions of this theme (159.5 x 308.5 cm) and arguably one of the finest works of its kind to ever appear on the auction market,” (est. $8/12 million). Not long after Chagall finished the present work in 1956, he included it in several major retrospectives of his work throughout Europe and abroad. He believed it to be an appropriate representation of the best of his production from that time, and since then, it has come to be known as one of his most successful depictions of this spectacular theme.Odalisque grise et jaune is one of Henri Matisse's provocative depictions of an odalisque, reclining in a position that best exploits the inviting curves of her flesh (est. $15/20 million). Painted in 1925 while the artist was living in Nice, during what is considered his most accomplished period as a colorist, the composition presents a medley of Matisse’s greatest achievements as a painter and draftsman. He poses the figure reclining with her arm above her head, a position that appeared in several of his paintings, drawings and sculptures of this period. Matisse's model for the present picture was probably Henriette Darricarrère, who worked with the artist throughout his Nice period. Although Matisse considered her his primary source of inspiration, Henriette would stop modeling for him at the end of 1927 due to her failing health. The present work, created two years before her retirement, shows the model in her prime, when she was the main focus of Matisse's compositions.Two works by Amedeo Modigliani will be included in the May sale. No matter whom his models were or how conservatively they dressed, Modigliani reveled in exposing the sensuality of his female sitters. In Jeune fille assise, les cheveux dénoués, a lovely portrait of an anonymous sitter from 1919, the artist achieves intimacy with this model by the very manner in which he applies his paint to the canvas (est. $12/15 million). He renders her figure with semi-transparent, almost hesitant, brush strokes, evoking the innocence of this young girl. The formal qualities of the oil take on the luminescence of a watercolor, and the model is quite literally 'stripped' of any opacity.Among the most provocative of Modigliani’s works are his portraits of his lover Jeanne Hébuterne, who was his primary model and muse during the last years of his life. Portrait de Jeanne Hébuterne is one in a series that Modigliani completed in 1918, depicting Jeanne in profile (est. $8/10 million). Mr. Di Donna continued, “This exquisite portrait, with its delicate colors and extreme purity of the lines, reflects the love the artist had for his muse. Its quality is one rarely seen on the market and the painting has been in the same private collection for over fifty years.” By the time Modigliani started painting Jeanne in 1917, he had developed his mature style, and the portraits of her, painted during the last three years of his life, are among his most refined and accomplished works.Works by Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky from an important American private collection will also be sold in May. Painted in 1915, at the height of Feininger’s Expressionist period, Jesuiten III is characteristic of the style that set him apart from his contemporaries (pictured right, est. $7/9 million). The brightly coloured canvas shows priests circling an elegantly-dressed woman who has, in the two earlier versions of this subject, been interpreted as a prostitute, making the scene even more biting. The composition’s linear rhythm, fragmented figures and explosion of colour help to create a palpable sense of tension. Like Feininger, Kandinsky was also influenced by the radical use of color and space employed by the Fauvists working in France in the early 1900s. He believed that color should resonate in the mind, a theory often reflected in the titles of his works. Weisser Klang (White Sound) is a veritable symphony on canvas and is believed to illustrate a poem called White Song by the German Symbolist poet, Stephen George, whose aesthetic philosophies about sound, vision and imagination mirrored Kandinsky’s (est. $6/8 million). Among the sculpture to be offered is a rare, unique and monumental sculpture by Marino Marini, L’Idea del Cavaliere. The sculpture is a painted wood version of a work that that was originally conceived in 1955 in plaster and cast in bronze in an edition of four (est. $6/8 million). Two works by Alberto Giacometti will be offered in the evening sale including Homme Traversant une place parun matin soleil, the artist’s proof from an edition of six casts, and uniquely painted by the artist (est. $4/6 million). Tête de Diego is one of Giacometti’s first sculptural portraits of his younger brother, who was the primary model for his numerous variations on the theme of head and bust sculptures throughout the 1950s and 1960s (est. $3/4 million). An early, unique Surrealist stone sculpture by Henry Moore will also be offered. His elegantly carved Figure displays a high degree of abstraction, while at the same time containing elements of a female figure ($2.5/3.5 million). Executed in 1933-34, the sculpture was formerly in the collection of Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren. Two superb oils by Fernand Léger from an important private collection will also be offered. Each executed in 1918 immediately after the First World War, Les Usines (pictured left, est. $5/7 million) and La Gare (est. $2.5/3.5 million), are brilliant examples of the artist’s fascination with the rapidly evolving urban environment that is portrayed in his hard-edged, collage-like handling of objects in space. Léger recognized the impact that industrialization and modern transport had on the human condition and, like the Italian Futurists, made this modernization his subject matter. Stylistically these works – referred to collectively as Elements Mécanique – have a brilliance of color and syncopation of forms that make them the perfect emblems of the dynamic environment.For the third time, Sotheby’s has the privilege of offering works from the Neumann Family Collection, one of the most important collections of 20th century art in private hands. The collection began over 50 years ago when Morton G. Neumann actively sought out the critical artists of the day, visiting studios and establishing friendships with many of the leading painters such as Picasso and Miró. Four works from the collection will be offered in the May evening sale including Giacomo Balla’s Velocità d’automobile + luci, which belongs to a seminal group of works executed in 1913-14 on the theme of cars in movement, exploring the ultimate concepts of Futurism: dynamism, speed and light (est. $3.5/4.5 million). Fascinated with the pace of modern life and excited by new technology, Balla found their perfect embodiment in the image of a speeding automobile. In the present work, the image of the automobile is highly stylized, and the sensation of energy and movement is created by the whirling lines epitomizing its dizzying speed, as well as by the bright flashes of light reflected on its surface as the car passes. In addition to works on paper by Picasso and Klee, Contra-Composition VII, a rare work by Theo van Doesburg, a leading member of the De Stijl movement, will also be offered (est. $1.8/2.5 million).