Important Work by Egon Schiele for the Tercentenary: Tercentenary Auction „Modern Art“, 29th May 2007 at the Vienna Dorotheum

Egon Schiele

Pablo Picasso

Chaim Soutine

Anton Faistauer

The "Modern Art" auction, to be held at the Vienna Dorotheum on 29th May 2007, will on this occasion feature a selection of particular quality, hardly surprising considering that this tercentenary auction is part of the events surrounding the 300th anniversary of the auction house with its long tradition.

The highlight of the modern art category will be Egon Schiele's erotically charged Reclining woman with green shoes. Coming from a European private collection, the work was created in 1917, only a year before Schiele's untimely death. Few of his works are better suited to illustrate the provocative and revolutionary quality of Schiele's art. In showing the girl with her chemise raised and her eyes averted, Schiele stresses the erotic nature of the image and thereby not only breaks with art-historical convention but also with the moral conventions of his age („Liegende Frau mit grünen Schuhen“, valuation price upon inquiry). Additional works by Schiele, such as a Winter landscape with meadows of 1907 ("Winterlandschaft mit Weiden"), or Houses in Krumau, 1908, characterise this auction's selection.
His elder artist friend and fellow protagonist of international modernism, Gustav Klimt, is likewise represented at the auction, with a sketch for his painting of Amalie Zuckerkandl.

The list of famous names continues with Pablo Picasso and his 1920 still life from the famous Galerie Beyeler, which anticipates elements of Pop Art (€ 180.000 - 200.000), and Chaim Soutine with his early House and garden near Paris which already contains the promise of his mature period („Haus und Garten bei Paris“, € 370.000 - 390.000).

Two impressive still life watercolours by Emil Nolde, show an Egyptian figure (1915/16, € 40.000 - 45.000), and an equestrian figure (1930, € 100.000 - 130.000); for the latter Nolde used a ceramic figure from his own private collection.

Anton Faistauer, who in 1909 together with Schiele and other artists founded the „Neukunstgruppe“ in opposition to academic painting, contributes the Sicilian landscape painting Taormina with a view of Mola („Taormina mit Blick auf Mola“, 1929, € 70.000 - 90.000), and his portrait of Gundl Krippel, also dating to 1929 (€ 36.000 - 50.000). The eloquent, pugnacious, and contrary artist, who died at the young age of 43, once explained his choice of subject in the following terms: "I have no desire to paint 'lifelike' portraits of lemurs in human form, nor still lifes as some kind of 'wall decoration' for snobs. (…) the dark, forested mountains are what I want to paint, where things whisper and murmur, and where it smells of resin. And jagged peaks, that's what I want to paint…". In his portraits, his main interest was not psychological or imaginative interpretation but rather "the painterly treatment of a given subject…".

	Egon Schiele
	Pablo Picasso
	Chaim Soutine
	Anton Faistauer
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