IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTIONS
Sotheby’s will present important fine art from the Krakoffs’ collection in our evening sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary Art this month. On 14 May, we sold Jean Arp’s bronze sculpture Ptolémée II for $2.2 million. Conceived in 1958 and cast in bronze in 1961, the work is a stunning example of Arp’s later sculpture where biomorphic forms and chance development contributed to the constant genesis of the artist’s production.

On 16 May, we will feature Adolph Gottlieb’s Burst II, a work that epitomizes the elemental dynamism and tremendous painterly force at the core of the artist’s celebrated body of work. A powerful union of radically opposing forms, the painting is paradigmatic of the artist’s acclaimed Burst series, which stands as his most innovative contribution to the transformation of modern post-war painting.