When the Bauhaus was shut down officially at the end of 1932, Kandinsky left Germany for Paris. Following his move to the French capital, Kandinsky increasingly came into contact with works by Surrealist artists such as Joan Miró and Jean Arp, and under the influence of their style he moved away from the hard-edged geometrical abstraction that had dominated his oeuvre throughout the 1920s. He found a new, more organic abstract idiom, reflected in the biomorphic shape of the La Forme Blanche (, estimate $400/600,000). Like his contemporaries Klee and Arp, Kandinsky had become interested in nature and organic growth. He began to produce anthropomorphic forms in his paintings which grew from ideas about zoology and embryology. Kandinsky found inspiration in images of embryos and would clip photographs and diagrams from scientific articles on deep-sea life.

Executed in 1941, Etude pour 'Contrastes Réduits' (estimate $400/600,000) is an intricately executed gouache from Kandinsky's mature Parisian period. The radical change in style from the Bauhaus combined with a series of innovative technical and theoretical advances led Kandinsky to produce an extraordinarily exciting and original group of work. The practice of applying vibrant pigment to dark paper, including sheets the artist had prepared himself, began early in his career, and reveals the roots of his artistic training at the height of the Art Nouveau movement in Europe. As with La Forme Blanche, the gentler, more organic forms represented here were almost certainly informed by Kandinsky's interest in molecular biology.

The collection also features an assemblage of works on paper by Honoré Daumier, whose drawings and watercolors depicting French nobility, politicians, magistrates and lawyers are considered among the best caricature and social satire drawings of the 19th century. In addition to their cultural and political significance, Daumier's drawings also demonstrated his unrivalled skill as a draughtsman and his eye for singling out the most expressive physical details of those whom he depicted, as seen in his pen and ink drawings L'Avocat pathetique (The Lawyer) (estimate $100/150,000) and Tetes de deux Hommes (The Heads of Two Men) (estimate 12/18,000).

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CONTEMPORARY ART DAY AUCTION
Auction 15 November

Among the highlights of the Collections is Jean Dubuffet’s stunning Portrait of Jules Supervielle (estimate $70/100,000), which comes from a series of portraits by Dubuffet of important Parisian writers and intellectuals. The series was created from the summer of 1946 through the fall of 1947, when it was subsequently exhibited in October 1947 at Galerie Drohin as “People Are Much More Beautiful Than They Think: Long Live Their True Face.” The portraits are characterized by their highly depersonalized and almost caricature-like stylization, which was in part a result of the artist’s unfamiliarity with his subject and an attraction to their features from a strictly aesthetic standpoint. In a letter, Dubuffet described the portrait of poet Supervielle: “The work of this poet does not interest me very much; it is just by chance that I was induced to do his portrait, and this undertaking was not motivated by my having been particularly attracted by his work. However, I have to mention that his physical appearance (he is a tall, lean, stooping devil, whose head—tottering constantly—with the expression of a camel) seemed to lend itself to a portrait which might serve my intentions.”

There are also important early works on paper by Claes Oldenburg on offer, which showcase the artist’s technical skill and imagination that would be realized in his more well-known, large-scale sculptures. Throughout Oldenburg’s career, drawings were an especially important tool to explore  new concepts and ideas that he would later develop into his colossal sculptures. He wrote in the early 1970s that “drawings are for me the battleground for my being.” The present series of two drawings, Typewriter Erasers (estimate $30/40,000) and Soft Fans (estimate $30/40,000), depict two of Oldenburg’s most instantly recognizable subjects. The drawings of these mundane, consumer products highlight Oldenburg’s creative process and interest in subverting sculpture’s traditional subject matter and form.