Picasso painting gets more than $9M at Heffel auction
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 02:19:48 +0000
A Pablo Picasso painting sold for $9,183,250 at a Heffel auction in Toronto on Wednesday, the second highest price ever for a work of art at a Canadian auction.
The Emily Carr painting Street, Alert Bay also reached the sales stratosphere, selling for $2,401,250. Overall the auction garnered $22,379,375, including buyer’s premiums.
Femme au Chapeau is part of Picasso’s Weeping Woman series, cubist paintings that carry on the theme of loss and tragedy Picasso explored in his landmark Spanish Civil War painting, Guernica.
It was painted on date June 13, 1941, a date that is prominently displayed on the front because that was day France’s Vichy government started deporting Jews from France. It was consigned from a collector in Europe.
Street, Alert Bay was painted in 1912, after Carr returned to B.C. from studying in Europe. It’s from her Fauves period, when she was experimenting with bright colours, and depicts a First Nations scene with lots of people, a couple of longhouses, and a pair of glorious totem poles.
A second Carr painting, Spring, sold for $390,000. A Lawren Harris painting consigned by actor Steve Martin, Mountain Sketch LXX, also sold for $390,000.
The other big ticket sales were Joan Mitchell’s 1958 abstract Untitled, which sold for $950,000, and James Wilson Morrice’s 1901 painting Venice, Regatta, which sold for $750,000.
Jean Paul Riopelle’s monumental 1955 abstract Composition/Sans Titre had a pre-auction estimate of $950,000 to $1.25 million but failed to meet its minimum and went unsold.