Auctions
Long-Hidden Monet Heads to Auction With Record Estimate
The painting is expected to realize more than $25 million when it crosses the block at Sotheby's Paris.
In 1956, the Parisian gallerist Katia Granoff made an extremely bold move. Backed by the industrial fortune of Jeane Schlumberger, the Russian émigré acquired the studio holdings that Claude Monet had left to his son Michel. This included a clutch of his late Giverny paintings, long overlooked as the messy flourishes of a master losing his eyesight. But where critics saw chaos, Granoff spied radical modernity. She was correct, of course. Monet’s irises, ponds, and water lilies foreshadowed and inspired the coming art of the 20th century.
Now, four of those long-unseen Monets are anchoring Sotheby’s sale of the Schlumberger trove in Paris on October 22. The 28-lot sale is estimated to top €40 million ($45 million). The undoubted star is Iris (1924–25), which has never been exhibited publicly. It’s a monumental square, spanning nearly six feet across, and carries an estimate of €22 to €30 million ($25 million to $35 million), the highest for a painting consigned at a French auction.
“He painted a fragment of reality to give an idea of the immensity of the world. It’s not a description of a garden, but a world of painting,” Marianne Mathieu, a former curator at Musée Marmottan Monet and a leading expert on the painter, said over the phone. “Iris is an example of the ultimate work of Monet: to give a new definition of what painting must be.”
Monet’s attention to irises began with the onset of World War I, which forced the artist to retreat to his oasis in Giverny, leading to his now canonical investigations of color, light, and time. Forget water lilies—the iris was Monet’s favorite flower, one he depicted in around 20 canvases across two stints. This late iris is the culmination of a decade of Monet’s experiments. It dissolves the borders between objects and their reflections and uses scale to immerse the viewer, a move later echoed by the Abstract Expressionists.
According to the Artnet Price Database, the record for an iris-themed Monet is £10.8 million (roughly $24 million today) paid at Christie’s London in 2015. The highest price for a late work, however, is the €3.2 million (roughly $7.4 million today) paid for Iris Jaunes (1924 to 1925) in 2007 at Artcurial in Paris.
The other Monet gem is Saule Pleureur (1918–19), a fiery, all-over depiction of the weeping willow that stood at the north end of his water lily pond. It is, in a sense, two paintings in one: an abstraction capturing the atmospherics of his garden and a depiction of a tree amid a whirr of foliage.
It too was part of a series, one Monet considered a prime example of what contemporary art should be. In 1923, a curator at the Museum of Grenoble contacted Monet and asked for a sample of modern painting. Monet gave him Coin de l’étang à Giverny (1917), a work in the same mood and style as the Schlumberger canvas. “Standing in front of the painting, you are in shock,” Mathieu said. “You have the pure colors, put directly on the canvas without mixing on the palette, and the impasto that acts like a heavy skin. It’s an optical mix and it looks like an American abstract painting.”
Saule Pleureur arrives at Sotheby’s with an estimate of €9 million to €12 million ($10.3 million to $13.7 million). The record for a weeping willow painting is £8.9 million ($11.4 million), which was achieved at Christie’s London in 2017.
The two other Monets appearing on the block are La Maison à Travers les Roses (1925–26) and La Seine à Vernon, Arbres (1894), which carry upper estimates of €3 million ($3.44 million) and €1.8 million ($2.1 million), respectively.
With Granoff’s help, the freewheeling Schlumberger built her collection over five decades beginning in the 1950s, displaying it in her family’s private townhouse. Where she held slightly unconventional tastes, collecting only French and 19th-century artists, Granoff preferred working with contemporary artists she could meet and champion.
The auction offers a small but weighty cast of Camille Claudel’s La Valse (1895), her canonical depiction of dancers locked in an off-kilter embrace. There are several versions of the work—in some she toned down the nudity to appease social mores—this one offers more flesh and less drapery and holds an estimate of €400,000 to €600,000 ($589,000 to $688,000).
Elsewhere, three of the eight panels that once comprised a romantic sunset scene that hung on the ground floor of Paul Cézanne’s family home in Aix-en-Provence appear. Drawing off 17th-century Dutch landscape painting, the flair of Rococo, and French Realism, the panels from Paysage romantique aux pêcheurs (1862–64) are evidence of the artist’s developing style and were acquired by Schlumberger through Granoff. La Ferme carries an estimate of €600,000 to €800,000 ($688,000 to $918,000) and is the largest work by the artist ever offered at auction.
“It’s extraordinary how two women were so ahead of their time,” Thomas Bompard, senior international specialist at Sotheby’s Paris, said over the phone. “Jeane Schlumberger was a bourgeoise grand dame living on the Left Bank, but she was quite wild at heart.”