Dali House

I’ve just signed up for online notices from Sotheby’s, which may turn out to have been a huge mistake. Right off the bat I’ve had email alerts about three upcoming shows in New York at which the jaw-dropping collection of Texas property magnate Raymond Nasher and his wife Patsy is being sold off. Not only are the pieces stunning, Sotheby’s terrific presentation suggests to me that I’ll have to use considerable restraint to avoid reproducing everything here.

But what the hell. With amiable thanks to Sotheby’s and a respectful nod to Mr Nasher, who died in March 2007 (and his wife, who predeceased him by 19 years), here are two of the items up for bids. Above, Paul Signac’s “Clipper (Opus 155)” from 1887, and here, Rene Magritte’s “l’Okapi” from 1958.

The Nasher collection is going on the block in three segments — an “Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale” on May 7, “Property from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection” on May 9 and “Contemporary Art Evening Auction” on May 14. Included are Morisot, Monet, Braque, Picasso, Miro, Leger, Munch, Giacometti and many others. The catalogue alone is a droolfest.

Nasher, who built Texas’ biggest shopping mall before he established the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina and founded the Nasher Sculpture Centre on Flora Street in Dallas in 2003 (pictured below from Google Earth), started collecting art by buying a Ben Shahn (Dali House post) painting in 1954. He and Patsy invested in pre-Columbian art, then Arp and Moore, and just kept on going.

Signac’s “Clipper”, expected to bring between $5 million and $7 million, was painted in the same vicinity as the considerably more famous “Bathers at Asnières” by the considerably more famous pointillist Georges Seurat, a work that will coincidentally be popping up again in a forthcoming post here.

As Sotheby’s notes, the northwestern Paris suburb was popular with avant-garde landscape painters in the 1880s. In 1887 both Van Gogh and Emile Bernard portrayed the same parallel bridges, but Signac had been there before them, and returned twice more afterward to capture the scene. Like Seurat, he was struck by the mingling of industry and leisure, sailboats sharing the frame with factories.

Magritte’s “l’Okapi”? Yours, perhaps, for $3 million or $4 million. Stay tuned.