Modernist Collection Rich in Signac Paintings Heads to Sale at Christie’s

Christie’s will sell nearly 600 works of modernist art from the same collection under the title “Radiant Modernism.” The sale will occur across multiple dates, the first of which will take place this October during Frieze London.

The auction house did not name the seller of the works, though it did say that the pieces all belonged to a private European collection. Christie’s said the works could collectively bring in somewhere between $40 million and $60 million.

The nearly 600 works are led by several paintings by Paul Signac, the French painter who, alongside Georges Seurat, pioneered the Pointillist style of the late 19th century, in which little circles of color combine to form landscapes when seen from far away.

One of those paintings is Sainte-Anne (Saint-Tropez), a 1905 landscape showing the French port town on the Riviera. It has a high estimate of £6.5 million ($8.8 million), a sum that is far beneath Signac’s auction record. However, the painting, which will hit the block in London on October 14, may benefit from its connections to the fall’s programming. London’s Royal Academy of Arts is staging a blockbuster exhibition about the French Riviera’s influence on art-making this season; the work also happens to have been owned by Gustave Fayet, whose collecting is being surveyed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

Another Signac is headed to a different high-profile Christie’s sale, this one to be staged in New York during the marquee auction series in November. Saint-Briac, les balises, an 1890 painting of a quaint seascape, has not been publicly given an estimate by the house, which may mean Christie’s thinks it has a particularly good shot at success on the block. Asked if the work could topple Signac’s record of $39.3 million, Giovanna Bertazzoni, the chairman of European operations at Christie’s, told Artnet News, “We always hope, don’t we?”

Christie’s said in its announcement on Tuesday that “Radiant Modernism” will also include works by Josef Albers, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Odilon Redon, and Lyonel Feininger, among others.