Christie’s specialists talk 9 standout lots at auction this May

‘Basquiat did many stretcher-bar paintings, but the subject of this makes it a real rarity. It’s particularly personal, showing Basquiat with his mother and father. Portraiture is so important within his oeuvre, and he tended to paint his heroes. In rendering his family, he lends the image unique importance.

‘Basquiat also positions Baby Boom within the canon of family portraiture, royal households and Renaissance triptychs. The inclusion of halos speaks to these figures as icons, representing something greater than themselves. He's deifying his family while reflecting on lineage and spirituality.

‘This work was part the 1982 Fun Gallery show, the most important of Basquiat's lifetime. Fun Gallery was his breakthrough show where his produced some of his most free and greatest masterpieces. Overall, this has everything you could want in a Basquiat: scale, colour, iconography and date.’

‘This majestic work comes from Monet’s famed Poplars series from the breakthrough decade of the 1890s, a pivotal moment that would see Monet produce some of his most iconic and enduring images including the Grainstacks and the Rouen Cathedral series as well as his first epic Water Lilies and London series pictures. The Poplars, by contrast with these other series, were quite limited in number. Only 23 exist and many reside within the world’s most prominent museums.

‘The present work is particularly notable for its extraordinary colour and its provenance. It spent half its life in the collection of the legendary Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who acquired and exhibited it in 1892. It now comes to us from a private family collection where it has been cherished for generations. The present owner has been generous in loaning it to museums, most recently the MFA, Boston.

‘This one-metre-high canvas utilises an innovative vertical orientation for a landscape subject, with exquisite jewel tones that are distinctively Monet — emerald, sapphire, amethyst and rose.

‘Monet was a master of atmosphere, capturing the most elusive quality of nature — he could paint the very air in all its permutations. Here, he creates a fascinating study of light at dusk, at that turning point when the sunset tips into night. It is wonderfully romantic and poetic, and uses the abstract visual principles that would be so influential on subsequent generations of artists.’

‘Standing in front of this painting is an experience; your eyes move across the surface and emotions pour forth in a way that doesn’t happen with other works of art. Getting to see this inside the Bass house, which is an architectural masterpiece, was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my career.

‘It’s a very powerful painting for its scale, which is more domestic than some of the larger examples, yet has this intensity that pulls you in. The title refers to the colours orange, plum and black. These dominating colour forms hit you immediately, yet there’s a softness around the exterior. That’s the brilliance of Rothko and what he’s able to achieve in terms of balance.

‘Rothko started this painting in 1950 and finished it in 1951, the year that the scholar David Anfam refers to as Rothko’s annus mirabilis, or ‘marvelous year’— a critical inflection point in his career. There were 18 paintings made in 1951. Four of them are in institutional collections including the National Gallery of Art.

‘The Bass family were the first owners of this work after purchasing it from Marlborough Gallery in 1980, so it’s truly fresh to market. That’s what I love as a specialist. This painting has lived with someone else for 45 years, and this is the first and perhaps only opportunity that people will have to experience or acquire the painting. There’s real excitement in that.’

‘It’s unusual for Warhol to return to a subject. He does this very few times, and it means that something is especially important to him. Three years after Little Electric Chair (1964-65), one of the defining images from the Death and Disaster series, Warhol creates 14 Big Electric Chair (1967-68) paintings.

‘Here, the image is cropped more tightly, which not only makes the chair bigger but almost abstracts it. He’s isolated the chair from the context of a room, so it becomes an everyday object that is elevated as a still life. And what could be a more ultimate still life than a chair that will take the life out of you? It becomes a traditional painting in the vein of 17th century vanitas; a memento mori of sorts.

‘And yet, the chair is also this transformative object of ending. It can end someone’s life, yet when isolated, is just a chair with electricity running through it. I think that’s the play Warhol wanted to get at. He’s putting this within the canon of still lifes, and the electric chair is the most poignant of all. That’s a very Warholian thing to do, to explore multiple meanings of an object depending on how it’s presented.

‘These Big Electric Chair works are very rare at auction because most of them are in major museum collections like the Centre Pompidou and the Art Institute of Chicago, so they have taken on an almost mythical quality within the art market.’

‘In addition to its dazzling visual attributes, Picasso’s painting of Lee Miller is a testament to the creative environment and fruitful friendships among a group of Surrealist artists, photographers and writers with whom he spent the summer of 1937 in the south of France. The poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, the British Surrealist Eileen Agar and her husband, the writer Joseph Bard, as well as Roland Penrose and his new partner, Lee Miller, found respite in Mougins, away from the bleak political realities in Paris — a carefree, creatively fertile and liberating summer spent together.

‘This freedom is seen in Picasso’s rendering of Miller, in which he boldly explores and plays with the materiality of his paints. He employs a vibrant, fantastical palette, rendering Miller’s torso in a colorful weave of linear stripes of pigment, the thick strokes of paint deliberately allowed to drip freely. The energy of Picasso’s brushstrokes embodies the exuberant vitality and vivid beauty of his sitter, undoubtedly her but with none of the conventional attributes of a portrait.’

‘Bedtime Story (1999) belongs to a series from the 1990s that represents a pivotal moment in Brown’s career. Offered as part of For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio & Ago Demirdjian, this painting was first acquired by the present owner and is being offered at auction for the very first time.

‘What I love most about her oeuvre is the push-pull between abstraction and figuration, something I think she does better than almost any other artist. This is a painting where the colours signal fleshiness and form yet it’s entirely abstract. She is singular in her ability to create that tension at every scale, which is why both her large and smaller works are equally strong.

‘These paintings from the late 1990s all have movie titles which I think is quite funny and cheeky. Bedtime Story also has a slightly playful and sensual connotation. I love when an artist can be playful and evocative yet leaves you wondering. Your eye wanders and you might see suggestions of body parts, but it keeps you guessing. I find that really intriguing and captivating.’

‘Fratino gives us incredible moments of intimacy. Queer or otherwise, we’ve all been in these situations, and they are some of the most private and perfect of our entire lives. The kinds of moments you wish would last forever. Unspoken, until now.

‘You and Your Things is intimacy at it’s absolute pinnacle — a lover resting in the most beautifully ordinary setting, puppy curled up at his feet, the breeze gently shaking the shade of the trees across his golden skin, eyes fixed upon his partner but distant, and happy. The table is filled with the remnants of a romance well shared: two cups of coffee, segments of fruit for offering, flowers for cultivating and poetry for sharing.

‘I love this painting because — in a culture full of idiosyncratic and ambiguous narratives — anyone, absolutely anyone, can understand the power of this moment. The nostalgia is palpable; it makes me feel like it’s a perfect mid-summer’s Saturday afternoon.’

‘Coming from For Art’s Sake: Selected Works by Tiqui Atencio & Ago Demirdjian, this painting is part of Ruscha’s important series of mountain paintings. What makes this particular work so strong is that the text relates to the backdrop.

‘Whereas most of his mountain paintings have no connection between the text and imagery, here the landscape is a visual metaphor for the words. Rendered in a photorealistic style, the mountain range acts as a blast curtain — those barriers that shield us from sound — and protects us from the buzz of modern life. He evokes the American West, a major theme in many of his other series, but subverts its romanticism with a bold, commercial font.

‘That strong relationship between text and image, which Ruscha is so famous for, is what makes this one of his most desirable mountain paintings to come to market in the past 20 years.’

‘This painting is from the Venezia series, an important series of paintings that Fontana produced in Venice based on the Piazza San Marco.

‘What is particularly special about this work is that it’s dedicated to his wife, Teresita, in the title. It's the only one in the series directly dedicated to her. They went to Venice on their honeymoon, and in that way it’s quite a romantic painting. Venice was also an important place for him professionally, and it was a place he really established his reputation as a pioneering Spatialist artist.

‘Fontana has also included Murano glass in the painting, which are the coloured stones you see in the centre. Murano is a Venetian glass, and what’s striking about its inclusion here is that it reflects the colours across the canvas and creates this feeling of lights at night in the street, or perhaps coloured glass windows. It sparkles.’