On December 4, Christie’s will have the pleasure offering 60 paintings and works of art from the 20th century collected by Antoine and Simone Veil*. Illustrating their openness to the world, the works are signed by international artists who came to live and work in Paris, including Zao Wou-Ki, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Sam Szafran, and Diego Giacometti. The offering is led by Vase de Fleurs painted by Zao Wou -Ki in 1949 (€ 500,000-€ 800,000) as well as by a Greek table designed by Diego Giacometti (€ 200,000- € 300,000), the auction ’s overall estimate is € 2 million to € 3 million.
Ecole de Paris, portrait of a global city
The collection includes paintings by artists from around the world, such as Jean Hélion to Sam Szafran, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jean-Paul Riopelle and Zao Wou-Ki alongside a group of works on paper by Roger Bissière, Serge Charchoune, Maurice Estève, Simon Hantaï, Henri Michaux, Geer van Velde, Tom Wesselmann, and Ossip Zadkine.
The top lot of the auction is Untitled, a vase of flowers painted by Zao Wou-Ki in 1949, belonging to the first phase of the artist’s oeuvre. In 1935, at the age of 14 Zao Wou-Ki entered the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts. The painting’s subject and delicacy makes it a perfect example of the artist’s faithfulness in his centuries of Chinese art roots. Exhibited in 1998 and 1999 in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, the painting is estimated between € 500,000 and € 800,000. The collection will offer another painting by the artist Untitled (a Park) with an estimate of € 300,000 to € 500,000.
Simone Veil would escape her busy Saturday morning schedule to visit galleries, accompanied by her family and friends. During one of these visits, she would meet Helena Vieira da Silva. Two of the artist’s works are included in the auction, one a tempera on paper estimated at €30,000 to €50,000.
The complex work by Jean Hélion, of which the auction includes a watercolor from 1944, could stand as metaphor for the entire collection moving from abstraction to new forms of figuration – from an enigmatic seaside landscape of Gilles Aillaud (€50,000 to €70,000) to the abstract painting Untitled by Gérard Ernest Schneider dating from 1956, whose physical, unrestrained brushstrokes translated pure emotion (€70,000 to €100,000).
Decorative Arts: Spotligh on Diego Giacometti
Les Giacometti, une famille de créateurs was the title of the 2021 exhibition at the Fondation Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence which put the family of artists from the Swiss village of Stampa in the spotlight. The exhibition welcomed visitors with Chat Maître d’hôtel and the auction includes a copy of this bronze – a mischievous and elegant symbol of the sculptures Diego Giacometti assisted his elder brother in creating in a unique artistic partnership (€100,000 to €150,000). The auction also offers Table Grecque carrée [square Greek table] and Table torsade [twisted table] by Diego Giacometti (€200,000 to €300,000 each).
* Simone Veil (1927 – 2017) was a French magistrate and politician who served as Health Minister under several French governments and became President of the European Parliament in 1979, the first woman to hold this office. From 1998 to 2007, she was a member of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest legal authority. She was a firm believer in European integration as a way of guaranteeing peace. Among France’s most revered figures, Simone Veil and her husband Antoine Veil (1926-2013) were buried at the Panthéon on 1 July 2018.
