From Marc to Freud: modern and contemporary art at Christie's
Franz Marc - The Foxes - 1913Lucian Freud - Girl With Closed Eyes 1986-8
On 1 March 2022, Christie's will host its 20th / 21st Century Art auction in London, where important paintings by Franz Marc and Lucian Freud will be auctioned.
Source: Christie's. Images: Franz Marc, "The Foxes", 1913 ·· Lucian Freud, "Girl with Closed Eyes", 1986-87.
Painted in 1913, "Die Füchse" ("The Foxes") is an excellent work by Franz Marc, halfway between Expressionism and Cubism, previously owned by the Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf until last year when German justice ordered it to be returned to the heirs of the Jewish banker Kurt Grawi, who was forced by the Nazis to sell his art collection before being sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Various sources suggest that the painting has an estimated pre-sale price of around £35 million (roughly $47 million), which would be a record for a work by Marc (currently in possession of "Weidende Pferde III", auctioned in 2008 for £12.3 million). It doesn't seem unreasonable to bet on it, as this is the most important Marc to come on the market since "Der Wasserfall", auctioned in 2007 for just over $20 million. Personally, I consider it the most beautiful work by Franz Marc to appear at auction since the sensational "Rote Rehe I" (1910), auctioned in 1998 for £3.3 million.
“Girl with Closed Eyes" is a sensual portrait of Janey Longman painted in 1986-87 by Lucian Freud, which has remained in the same private collection for the last 35 years. As with Marc's painting, Christie's has not published an estimated pre-sale price, although some sources indicate that it is in the region of £15 million (around $20 million). "Girl with Closed Eyes" was one of the most recent paintings to be included in the major Lucian Freud retrospective of 1987-88. It is, all in all, a very good Lucian Freud, and surprisingly beautiful for an artist who never made the pursuit of beauty one of his goals.
In addition to these two remarkable paintings, Christie's has also announced that the auction will include David Hockney's "David Graves in a Harlequin Shirt" (1982), as well as works by Giacometti, Macke, Pechstein, and Dubuffet.

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