.jpg)
A modern masterpiece by Wassily Kandinsky, Tensions calmées, will be offered at Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London on 29 June 2021, carrying an estimate of $25 million to $35 million (£18 million to £25 million). Painted in 1937, the work emerges for sale from a private collection for the first time in more than half a century.
The painting last appeared at auction in 1964, when Sotheby’s held a historic sale of 50 paintings by Kandinsky from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. It was among the works in that landmark sale and has remained in the same family collection, unseen by the public, ever since.
Solomon R. Guggenheim, to whom the painting once belonged, was an avid admirer of Kandinsky. He acquired his first work by the artist in 1929 and met him the following year at the Dessau Bauhaus. Over a friendship that lasted a lifetime, Guggenheim acquired no fewer than 150 works by the artist, displaying them initially in the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which he opened in New York in 1939. They went on to form the core of the collection of his eponymous museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Guggenheim also promoted his artist-friend with a series of exhibitions across the country, including the memorial exhibition organised after Kandinsky’s death in 1944, in which Tensions calmées was included. As the father of abstraction, Kandinsky began a line that would define twentieth-century art through artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter.
The painting reveals Kandinsky at the height of his powers. He had broken new ground with a lyrical form of abstraction infused with musicality, on his discovery that colour, when disassociated from representational concerns, could become the principal subject of a painting. After moving to Paris in 1933, he produced the complex abstract compositions that are considered the culmination of his artistic ideals, with Tensions calmées chief among them.
Ahead of the sale, Tensions calmées will be on view by appointment at Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries in New York until 12 May, before travelling to Dubai, Hong Kong and Taipei for public exhibitions, and going on view at Sotheby’s New Bond Street in London from 22 to 29 June.
(Press Release)
