The November offering marks the second occasion that a work by Hammershøi will appear in Sotheby’s New York Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art: in November 2017, Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30 from 1901 established a new auction record for the Danish artist when it sold for $6.2 million.

LATIN AMERICAN ART HIGHLIGHTS

The exceptional examples of Latin American art on offer this November are highlighted by two works by Rufino Tamayo and Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

In her catalogue essay, Anna Indych-López, Professor of Latin American and Latinx Art at The City College of New York, describes Rufino Tamayo’s La Máscara roja (estimate $4/6 million) as “a breakthrough painting that signals a departure from the artist’s earlier densely packed figurative works and announces a transition to a new more sparse, yet intensely colored hieratic style focusing on isolated figures, especially the female nude… A study in form, specifically the particular seated pose associated with depictions of an enthroned Virgin Mary, La Máscara roja secularizes that venerated iconography, translating its essential elements to conjure a universal figure.”

Painted in 1938, Constructivo en blanco y negro (Inti) is one of the best-known and most-exhibited works of Joaquín Torres-García’s career (estimate $2/3 million). Created in the period following his return to Uruguay in 1934, the genesis of Inti was bracketed by the founding of the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (AAC) in 1935 and the organization of the Taller Torres-García (TTG) in 1943. From 1937 onwards, Torres-García was involved in his “Indo-American project,” concerned with separating his version of contructivist abstraction—which he called Universal Constructivism—from its European origins that included the influences of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. As a part of this program, Torres-García began incorporating motifs derived from the art and architecture of pre-Columbian civilizations, particularly those of the Andes, but also from Mexico and North America, throughout his work. The constructions of this period are rigorously geometric, with emphasis on the organizational grid, made even stronger by the use of subtle shading to create a sense of bas-relief. Another aspect of these works is the restricted palette, often monotone earth colors—a quality taken to the extreme in Inti, a grisaille composition.