Christie's Online Magazine No.268

From: Christie's - Saturday May 22, 2021 09:27 am

Christie’s

The Pinault Collection’s new home, Art in post-war Germany, Zhang Daqian, How to collect fossil fish, and more |

The Pinault Collection: how Tadao Ando has reimagined this Paris landmark as its new home

The special bond between Zhang Daqian and his niece — as recalled by her daughter

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From stingrays to shrimps to sea lilies: how to collect fossilised fish (and other creatures of the deep)

‘People were amazed at what she found’: the curator who collected Richter, Boetti, Kiefer and more

More stories

Editor’s picks

Born in 1906, the Vietnamese artist Mai Trung Thu went to Paris in 1937 and stayed there for much of the rest of his life. In La Joconde (Mona Lisa), his 1974 tribute to the Louvre’s most famous painting, he makes the sitter Vietnamese and replaces Leonardo’s Italian landscapes with Halong Bay

Estimate: HK$2,500,000-3,500,000
24 May, Hong Kong

Dating from around 1940, this low table is strikingly original: the glass top is attached with bronze fittings to pearwood legs carved into dynamic repeated waves. It was made by Fontana Arte, the company founded in Milan by Gio Ponte, and its design is attributed to the architect Melchiorre Bega

Estimate: $20,000-30,000
27 May, New York

Giorgio de Chirico was in his eighties when he painted the 1971 work Il gioco dei balocchi (The Game of Toys). With its dreamlike architecture and mysterious objects — toys and games, coloured balls, an equestrian statue — it recalls the early paintings that made him such a huge influence on the Surrealists

Estimate: HK$2,200,000-3,200,000
25 May, Hong Kong

As a photographer for Picture Post, Thurston Hopkins covered everything from London’s society balls to tenement life in Liverpool. Animals were a popular subject, and La Dolce Vita, Knightsbridge, from 1953, shows an imperious poodle in the passenger seat of a limousine with a chauffeur at the wheel

Estimate: €3,000-4,000
until 27 May, Online

The Bourse de Commerce, in the heart of Paris. Courtesy Pinault Collection — Bourse de Commerce. Image Timelapse Go // Daniel Richter, Untitled, 2005 (detail). Oil on canvas. 30 x 40 cm. Estimate: €12,000-18,000. Offered in The Curator’s Eye: The Collection of Professor Dr Karin von Maur, 11-25 May 2021, Online. Artwork: © Daniel Richter, DACS 2021 // An exceptionally large fossil stingray, Green River Formation, Wyoming, USA, from the Eocene (c. 50 million years ago). 43½ x 25 x 2 in (110.5 x 63.5 x 5 cm). Estimate: £20,000-30,000 / A large fossil shrimp, Solnhofen, Germany. 14 x 14 x ½ in (35.5 x 35.5 x 1.5 cm). Estimate: £1,500-2,500 / A large fossil sea lily plaque. Holzmaden, Germany, from the Jurassic (208-146 million years ago). 59 x 31.5 x 1 in (150 x 80 x 2.5 cm). Estimate: £10,000-15,000. All offered in Sculpted by Nature: Fossils, Minerals and Meteorites on 5-25 May 2021 at Christie’s Online // Zhang Daqian with his niece, Xinjia (left) and Xu Wenbo (right)

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Christie's Online Magazine No.268