One of my favorite art-viewing activities when I lived in New York City was to visit the public exhibitions of works soon to be auctioned at Christie's and Sotheby's. These shows offered the rare opportunity to see paintings held in private collections, many of which had long been out of public view.
Thanks to the internet I can continue this activity online, 200 hundred miles away from Manhattan. And although a virtual viewing can never sufficiently substitute for seeing a work in person, the websites of Christie's, Sotheby's, and other auction houses offer great tools that allow one to examine closely the lots for sale.
The purpose of this blog is to highlight paintings up for auction that are of particular interest to me, paintings like Gustave Courbet's Neige, seen above. Neige will be sold on November 4, 2011, as part of the 19th Century European Art auction at Sotheby's.
There will be 109 lots auctioned, which means a lot of thumbnail images to look through on Sotheby's website. This can be an especially daunting task when many of the works are portraits of women in fancy 19th-century clothing. That fashion seems stuffy and stifling to me. It's also tough to get through 109 paintings when many others are equestrian or naval scenes.
Among this dull crowd, Courbet's winter scene stands out like a brisk, visual breath of fresh air and grabs my attention. The painting's composition also intrigues me. Courbet has arranged the trees so that they act like a window, framing the mountain peaks in the upper left, a clever allusion to an interior scene in a landscape painting.
This "window" also mimics the shape of the painting, so that the composition consists of a square within a square and creates a sense of recession away from the foreground toward the mountains in the distance.
That receding sensation is underscored by the characteristics of the paint in the foreground. Thanks to the zoom tool on Sotheby's site, we can see that Courbet has applied the white paint with a knife, giving it a tactility that makes the snow feel immediate. The mountains are a long way away from this substance that seems almost a part of the viewers' realm rather than the space of the painting.
Neige also caught my eye because its dull hues contrast strongly with the bright colors used in many of the other paintings in the auction. Such a color scheme in the hands of many other painters might produce a profoundly grim work. But in Courbet's clever and deft hands these hues result in a remarkable painting that may be quiet but is hardly dull.
Sotheby's has set the pre-auction estimate at $200,000 to 300,000. If I had that kind of money, I'd buy it.
