Little gems for $50,000 and under

Marie Laurencin was one of the few female Cubist painters in the Parisian avant-garde. Born in 1883, she was part of the Cubist circle in the early 20th century, often exhibiting alongside painters such as Francis Picabia and Jean Metzinger in Paris’s new salons, like the Salon des Indépendants, and the Salon d’Automne.

Despite the clear influence of Cubism and Fauvism in her work, Laurencin often pursued distinctly feminine aesthetics through the use of pastel colours and soft forms. Both of these characteristics are present in Vase de fleurs, which combines her sense of abstraction with her deliberate colour palette.

Georges Lemmen was instrumental in fostering the connection between the Neo-Impressionists and his native Belgium. He actively contributed to exhibitions held at venues such as the Salon des Indépendants — alongside artists like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac — and was affiliated with the Brussels-based art community Les XX and the Parisian Société des Artistes Indépendants at the end of the 19th century.

He began exploring the pointillist style of the present Dadizele in the 1890s, making this work from 1892 one of the earlier examples of his experiments in Neo-Impressionism. Initially inspired by seeing George Seurat’s work exhibited at Les XX, he went on to develop his own style within the movement.

Despite having no formal art education, Albert Dubois-Pillet was an instrumental figure in Paris’s Société des Artistes Indépendants. Alongside artists like Georges Seurat, Odilon Redon, and Paul Signac, he helped establish a venue for exhibitions outside of the traditional French Salon near the end of the 19th century.

He is best known for his nearly photographically precise work in the Pointillist mode, clearly seen in Le quai Montebello (Vue de Paris). At a posthumous exhibition of his work in 1891 a fire broke out, causing nearly 60 of his works to be lost. As such, his extant oeuvre is small, making works like this one incredibly rare.

Few artists eschew genre constraints like Francis Picabia. Though he is best known for his participation in Dada during the years following the First World War, he also partook in abstraction, Art Informel, and Cubism, among other movements. He was the only member of the Cubist group who personally attended the Armory show in 1913, in which he also exhibited. The exhibition, also called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was one of the most important exhibitions of the early 20th century, as it formally introduced American audiences to European avant-garde movements like Cubism, and Fauvism. Nature morte, while painted in an impressionist manner with rapid and loose brushwork, appears to foreshadow the artist’s move towards cubism, with a composition pressed up against the picture plane where geometric patterns become the main focus.

Paul Klee is recognised as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century due his series of lectures on colour and form, as well as his genre-defying work. In 1911, he took part in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich, which opened his mind to modern theories of colour, and the following year he would be exposed to the radical new forms of Cubism.

Music also played a large role in his work. A gifted musician from a young age, he explored the relationship between the visual and sonic media, and this, paired with his penchant for finding new forms of visual expression, makes his work hard to classify. Indeed, Klee’s work transcends genre, standing in a league of its own. The present Rosenhag was executed in 1926 while he was teaching at the Bauhaus school, from 1921 to 1931.

Kurt Schwitters was a pioneer of collage. He is not known for any one art form — he also created films, sculptures and poetry — but rather for the way he approached art generally. Born in 1887, he would be exempted from military service in the First World War due to epilepsy. His creative powers aligned with Dada, which came into its own as a result of Europe’s precarious circumstance after the war.

Though he worked with many of the artists who were part of Dada, Schwitters adhered to what he called Merz, a kind of ‘psychological collage’ made up of a universe of sound poems and images that relied, like collage, on fragmentation.

George Grosz was amongst the most important artists to emerge from the Berlin Dada scene. Born in 1893, he grew up in a part of Pomerania that is part of present-day Poland. His life, like his art, was defined by war, and his characteristic caricature-laden style often speaks directly against German nationalism, which he witnessed first-hand.

He ‘internationalised’ his name in 1917 — ‘Georg’ became ‘George’, and he replaced the German eszett in ‘Groß’ with ‘sz’ — before briefly joining the Communist party. He was vehemently anti-Nazi, and had a number of close calls with Nazi officials, who considered his work blasphemous. The present work is a wonderful example of Grosz’s caricatures. This recto/verso ink drawing was originally created as an illustration for Adventures of Tartarin of Tarascon, a book retelling the stories of a local Southern French hero.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s artistic career spanned just over a decade but, left an indelible mark in Post-Impressionism and Modern Art. Born into French aristocracy in 1864, a series of illnesses and injuries in his adolescence stunted his growth, causing him to be physically disfigured in his adult life.

He often depicted Paris’s dance halls and brothels in his work, but his work was always derived from a personal connection, as it depicted people for who they were rather than their social status. Un Décavé is a wonderful example of the artist’s keen interest in documenting society around him.

Unlike his contemporaries Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille, Renoir showed little interest in painting still lifes at the beginning of his career. From the early 1880s onwards, however, his explorations of both nature morte, as well as scenes of life began to occupy an increasing place of importance in his oeuvre. Painted during his later years spent on the Mediterranean coast, Narcisses—Fragment (Frise du second cadre de Madame de Galéa) demonstrates the artist’s technique as one of the finest painters of his era. His characteristic ethereal glow shines through, making even a small pair of flowers appear full of life.

Camille Bombois began his life not as a painter but as a strongman part of a traveling circus. When he moved to Paris in 1907, he worked first as a railroad labourer before settling on a night job in a newspaper printing plant. Despite the long overnight hours, he spent nearly all of his time outside of work painting and showing his works on sidewalks in Montmartre.

He began gaining attention and financial success by 1922 and had his first gallery exhibition at the Galeries des Quatre Chemins in 1927. He would go on to draw inspiration from the myriad jobs he worked, painting everything from circuses to nature. His works are often compared to those of Henri Rousseau, as both artists often utilised ‘naive’ drawing and a sharp delineation of form — a connection that is clear in the present Dans la vallée de l'Orne.