A Picasso painting valued at about $140 million is the centerpiece of a new type of auction at Christie’s, combining Modern and contemporary artworks spanning 100 years, that will kick-start its postwar and contemporary sales in New York in May.
Scheduled for May 11, “Looking Forward to the Past” is an evening sale of about 25 lots organized by Loic Gouzer, of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. Mr. Gouzer was also the specialist responsible for Christie’s much-hyped “If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday” auction of 35 works by fashionable contemporary names, which raised $134.6 million last May.
Postwar and contemporary has been the biggest-grossing auction category at Christie’s since 2011. But as the prices of works by the most desirable late-20th- and early-21st-century artists rise and rise — Christie’s Nov. 12 contemporary sale in New York took in $852.9 million — certain collectors (and auction house specialists) have been looking over their shoulders at earlier art with a new appreciation of its historical importance and rarity.
“I recently went to the reopened Picasso Museum and was blown away by what I saw,” said Mr. Gouzer, 34, who has collaborated with Christie’s Impressionist and Modern specialists to create the experimental format. “In a world where your latest iPhone is out of fashion in 10 days, everything he did still looked so relevant and fresh.”
“Traditionally, people would start by collecting Impressionist and Modern art, and then trickle down to contemporary,” Mr. Gouzer added. “Recently, we’re seeing the contrary. Collectors start with contemporary, and then they start to look for other works that have quality, relevance and freshness.”
Picasso, who died at 91 in 1973, has nevertheless traditionally been included in auctions of Impressionist and Modern art. But Christie’s said that the broadening client base at the week of contemporary art sales in New York was crucial in persuading an unidentified seller to come forward with Picasso’s 1955 canvas “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’),” around which the auction house fashioned its “Looking Forward to the Past” sale. Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 Orientalist masterpiece, “Women of Algiers,” this was one of a number of works Picasso produced in the 1950s and 1960s in response to earlier artists he admired. This particular painting was last seen on the market in November 1997, when it was bought by the London dealer Libby Howie, on the behalf of a client, for $31.9 million at Christie’s auction from the collection of the Americans Victor and Sally Ganz.
Christie’s new valuation of about $140 million on this opulent Picasso ranks as one of the highest estimates ever put on an artwork at auction. Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” which sold for a record $142.4 million at Christie’s in November 2013, carried a presale estimate of more than $85 million. Christie’s has guaranteed the seller of “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” an undisclosed minimum price. It would not specify whether this guarantee had been funded by the auction house or by a third party.
The seller is a European collector who acquired the work at the Ganz auction, according to Christie’s. Other works in Mr. Gouzer’s sale include a 1950s Mark Rothko abstract, estimated at about $40 million, and a 1902 Monet series painting, at about $35 million. Works by Piet Mondrian, Egon Schiele, René Magritte and Martin Kippenberger will also be included.
“This reassessment of the importance of what’s gone before is fascinating,” said Wendy Goldsmith, an art adviser in London who was the international head of 19th-century European art at Christie’s from 2000 to ’03. Ms. Goldsmith, along with many dealers and advisers, has noted a cooling of demand for the young abstract painters. “There is a feeling that people are already saturated with the new and the young,” she said, “and so they’re looking back.”
Last week, Mr. Gouzer posted an image of a 1938 Picasso painting of Dora Maar on Instagram. That work will be in his sale with an estimate of more than $50 million. But there are still gaps, Mr. Gouzer said. “I’m still looking for a 1960s Carl Andre.”