LONDON, June 19. /TASS/. Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich’s Landscape will be up for auction with an estimated price of 7-10 mln pounds ($9-13 mln), Christie’s auction house said in a statement.
"Kazimir Malevich’s Landscape… will be a major highlight of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on June 20, 2018, part of ‘20th Century at Christie’s’, a series of auctions taking place from June 15 to 21, 2018," the statement reads.
According to Christie’s, "the monumental, square-format landscape is from ‘The Red Series’, a group of works characterized by gestural brush strokes and an expressive use of color, referencing both Fauvism and Cubism, and anticipating Malevich’s move towards Suprematism." "Landscape is a ‘pure’ landscape painting whose motif of peasant dwellings surrounded by stylized treetops is borrowed from Russian primitive art," the auction house noted.
"Landscape was first exhibited in the ‘Moscow Salon’ in February - March 1911. It was subsequently shown the following year in St. Petersburg as part of ‘The Union of Youth’, where Malevich represented a radical collective known as ‘Donkey’s Tail.’ In 1927, he was invited to Germany to show his work for the first time outside Russia and brought with him the best works of his career to date. Landscape was one such work and remained in Berlin after Malevich returned to Russia," the statement says, adding that "Landscape resurfaced after the war and was acquired by the Kunstmuseum Basel, where it hung for over 50 years, before being restituted to the heirs of the artist." "It is now being offered from a private collection and represents the first time that work has come to auction in two generations," Christie’s said.
On May 16, Malevich’s Suprematist Composition was sold for a record price of $85.8 mln at Christie’s auction in New York.