Included in the artist’s first retrospective in the United States, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1931, Diego Rivera’s Luna sobre el Mercado showcases the artist’s synthetic approach to modern art: stylized renderings of faces, reminiscent of pre-Columbian masks – undoubtedly a nod to the European avant-garde; and an acidic color palette that bears similarities to works by Sonia Delaunay (estimate $1.5/2 million). The work also presents a stunning visual depiction of Mexico’s Tehuantepec women and their primary roles in the economic lives of their families — cultural archetypes as emphasized by their colorful garments.

First published in the May 1933 issue of Vanity Fair, The Tree of Modern Art–Planted 60 Years Ago is Miguel Covarrubias’ most celebrated drawing (estimate $100/150,000). A didactic image, the work visualizes the historiography of the Modern Art movement over two centuries. Commissioned by Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair’s publisher and founding member of The Museum of Modern Art, Tree of Modern Art depicts exactly fifty leaves, each individually dedicated to a pioneering artist, and is built upon seven firmly grounded roots representing the foundational masters of modernity—Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Jacques-Louis David, Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Within the periphery of Modernism, emblems of the dual influences of African and Ancient Greek sculpture rest at the foot of the flourishing tree. At the root, Covarrubias places Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of MoMA, in leisurely repose, dressed in formal attire and staring pensively at an ornate yet vacant frame.

In the more than 80 years since its creation, the work has been a consistent source of inspiration: in 2012, The Museum of Modern Art created MoMA Makes a Facebook for Abstractionists, a collaboration between MoMA curators and the Columbia Business School depicting early Modernism as a vast social network. Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look at Modern Art in America (1946), part of The Spencer Museum of Art collection, is yet another contemporary example of the drawing’s impact on the American arts scene. In their description of the work, the museum acknowledges Covarrubias as the main source for Reinhardt's updated genealogy of contemporary art.

CONTEMPORARY ART DAY AUCTION
Auction 15 November

A dynamic group of kinetic works will  highlight the Day Auction of Contemporary Art, led by Carlos Cruz-Diez’s arresting Physichromie Panam  from 2015 (estimate $500/700,000), one of three works by the artist on offer this November. The large-scale piece explores the perception of color as an autonomous reality evolving in space and time, unaided by form or support. The mesmerizing structure is designed to reveal the contingency and capricious nature of color, changing according to the movement of the viewer and the intensity of the light, thus projecting color into space to create an evolutionary situation of additive, reflective, and subtractive color.

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist’s estate, Tes No. 1 from 1975 was created during a pivotal period for Jesús Rafael Soto, one that was marked by both global success and vast productivity (estimate $350/450,000). Following his acclaimed retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1974, Soto accepted a series of important commissions around the world, including for Régie Rénault and the Venezuelan state. Globally, 1975 was a year marked by conflict, turmoil, and advances; seen in context of its moment of creation, Tes No. 1 embodies the turbulence of its time, and the instability which Soto viewed as central to human existence.

In Tes No. 1, Soto makes visible the destructive and restorative power of energy. A single column of alternating black and white Ts emerge from the surface of the panel in waves that engulf those standing before it, subsuming the boundary between object and spectator. The viewer enters into a dynamic space in which static objects become dematerialized and seemingly stable masses are transfigured into pure light and energy.

An achievement of indisputable technical mastery executed during one of Olga de Amaral’s most significant periods of production, Cesta lunar 50A is representative of the foundational sources that inform her oeuvre: a synthesis of pre-Hispanic weaving traditions; the varied topography of South America’s landscape and modernist architectural principles (estimate $280/380,000). Created with a sculptural intention, the present work exists as an independent architectural structure. Installed separate from the wall, it takes on the life of a sacred, otherworldly construction — a monument of sorts that harkens the grid-composed works of Joaquín Torres-García, the pioneer of Universal Constructivism. More importantly, the underlying ethos of Amaral’s sculptural weavings reveals itself: a lifelong examination of textile at the intersection of Latin American Abstraction and the greater cannon of Post-War Contemporary Art.

Amaral’s works have been included in over 80 solo and group exhibitions worldwide and can be found in the permanent collections of prestigious institutions, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, the Museé Bellerive, Zurich, and the Denver Art Museum, among others.