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Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894): “La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage”

Offered at the Sotheby’s New York Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale of 14 May 2019 with an estimate of US $6 – $8 million, Gustave Caillebotte’s “La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage” (oil on canvas, 1878) sold for US $13,932,000 (with fees).

Hasso Plattner, co-founder of the German software company SAP, SE, is said by The Canvas to have purchased the painting. Mr. Platter founded the Barberini Museum that opened in Potsdam in 2017. A member of “The Giving Pledge” established by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, per Forbes magazine he is the 94th richest person in the world.

Gustave Caillebotte, “La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage” (oil on canvas, 1878)

Hasso Plattner’s collecting focus is the art both of the Impressionists and of the German Democratic Republic. He is said to be the buyer also of Monet’s “Meules” of 1890. “Meules” remained in the collection of Bertha Honoré Palmer and her family for nearly a century, also selling at Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale of 14 May 2019 for $97 million (hammer) / $110,747,000 (with fees).

Caillebotte (1848 – 1884) exhibited “La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage” in the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition of 1879.

Napoleon III had introduced ambitious reforms during the 1860s, charging Georges-Eugène Haussmann with a radical reconfiguration of the then medieval city.

Space was created by razing many parts of Paris, developing a grid of straight roads, avenues, boulevards, and modern apartment buildings with grand balconies and large windows that faced the street, offering views of the boulevards below.

Caillebotte – lawyer and engineer by training as well as artist – explored the modern Paris in his work, adopting viewpoints high above the busy city streets.

The elevated vantage point of “La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage” afforded Caillebotte the freedom to view and manipulate perspective, tilting the ground of the picture plane in a manner that has been considered characteristic of his work and one of his greatest contributions in the move towards Modernism.

See:

“Art Industry News: Did a German Software Billionaire Buy Monet’s $111 Million Haystacks? + Other Stories,” Artnet News, 16 May 2019

Gustave Caillebotte, “La Rue Halévy, vue du sixième étage,” Lot 17, Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, 14 May 2019, Sotheby’s New York, Catalogue Note

Kelly Crow,”Monet Sells for $110.7 Million, Setting Artist and Impressionist Records,” Wall Street Journal, 14 May 2019

Kelly Crow, @KellyCrow, Tweet, 14 May 2019;

Kelly Crow, @KellyCrowWSJ, Tweet, 15 May 2019

Katya Kazakina, @theartdetective, Tweet, 14 May 2019

Catherine Hickley, “Software billionaire plans to turn decaying Potsdam restaurant into museum for East German art,” The Art Newspaper, 2 April 2019

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The Chrysler Museum of Art … and one that got away

The Chrysler Museum of Art alongside The Hague in Norfolk, Virginia … and one that got away.

“The history of the Chrysler Museum includes stories of 19th century feminist visionaries & a mid-20th century penny drive by schoolchildren to buy a single Renoir that was about the size of a paperback book.

“Clearly, everything moved to a new level when Walter Chrysler, Jr. came to town.”

Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., born in 1909 and the son of the founder of the Chrysler Corporation, met, as a young man, leading avant-garde artists in Paris. Retiring from active business in 1956 (he served as President of New York’s Chrysler Building from 1935 to 1953), he devoted himself to the arts.

Mr. Chrysler’s wife, Jean Outland Chrysler, was born and raised in Norfolk. In part influenced by her, Walter Chrysler agreed in 1971 with the City of Norfolk to gift thousands of his works of art to the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, to be re-named the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Before he relocated his collection, however, Mr. Chrysler, “who once owned a couple hundred Picassos,” traded works – some good trades, some not so good.

He also was generous with institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Chicago’s Art Institute of Chicago.

Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day” of 1877 was for years owned by the descendants of Caillebotte.

The painting was acquired by Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. in the 1950s.

It was then acquired by and entered the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964.

C’est dommage.  🙁

Wrote The New York Times art critic John Russell:

“It would be difficult to spend time in the Chrysler Museum and not come away convinced that the most underrated American art collector of the past 50 years was the late Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.”

 

See:

  1. “Chrysler Museum of Art”
  2. “Fun Facts: Paris Street; Rainy Day,” Katie Rahn, @artinstitutechi, 22 May 2015

 

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