As he neared the end of his life, Impressionist master Claude Monet filled a large canvas with his interpretation of flowers swaying by the pond at his home in Giverny, France. Now, more than a century later, the piece, called Iris, has sold for roughly $56.2 million, setting a record for the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction in France. Iris sold after a 42-minute telephone bidding war between at least six collectors during a Sotheby’s sale in Paris on October 22.
It ultimately went to a private buyer in Asia. Monet is believed to have painted it in 1924 or 1925, just a few years before his death in December 1926. The work is also large, measuring about five feet tall and nearly six feet wide.
Until recently, Iris belonged to the descendants of Jeanne Schlumberger, whose family made its fortune in the oil industry. The piece has never been displayed publicly, having remained on the walls of the Schlumberger family mansion in Paris for decades. Because of that, Iris is still in “miraculous” shape, Thomas Bompard, co-head of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s France told journalists last month, as reported by Bloomberg’s Angelina Rascouet.
As Monet got older, his work became increasingly abstract. He was “no longer painting landscapes, but atmosphere, space and time,” Marianne Mathieu, an art historian and former head curator at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, told the London Times’ David Chazan last month. French writer Marcel Proust described Monet’s Giverny as a “garden of tones and colors even more than of flowers.” Though critics embraced Monet’s early work, they were far less enthusiastic about his later paintings.
Schlumberger, along with Paris art dealer Katia Granoff, however, understood that Monet’s late works were “not the final chapters of Impressionism, but the opening pages of modernism and abstraction,” Bompard tells the London Times. Granoff acquired Iris and roughly 50 other Monets from the painter’s son, Michel, in the 1950s. According to Artnews’ Daniel Cassdy, Schlumberger appears to have helped finance this deal.
Though Schlumberger died in 1983, her family waited until this year—which marks the 100th anniversary of Monet’s death—to offer up Iris, several other Monet pieces and works from other artists in the family's vast collection. Their bet seems to have paid off. The auction brought in about $83.7 million, with nearly three-quarters of the pieces on offer selling for above the high end of their pre-auction estimates, per Artnews.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
