Icons of Glamour & Style : The Constantiner Collection

Auction: Wednesday 19 June 2019, 4pm (Lots 1 – 92)

Viewing:
Sat 15 Jun, 10am - 6pm
Mon 17 Jun, 10am - 6pm
Tue 18 Jun, 10am - 6pm
Wed 19 Jun, 10am - 12pm

E-catalogue: www.christies.com/salelanding


Contact: Elodie Morel, Head of Department
+33 (0) 1 40 76 84 16
emorel@christies.com

On June 19th, Christie’s will offer photographs assembled by New York collector Leon Constantiner that celebrate glamour, elegance and idealised beauty. The first sale, at Christie’s New York in 2008, presenting works from his collection was a landmark event in the photography auction market, underscoring the importance of the great editorial photographers who captured so memorably our ideals of beauty in the inspirational post-war decades of fashion and style magazines.

The works now on sale – the treasures that Constantiner had kept back to enjoy just a little longer – focus again on such emblematic figures as Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts and Peter Lindbergh, whose reputations were made through the printed page, but whose work is today so highly prized by collectors in the form of spectacular prints. The Photographs department is pleased to present some of the 20th century’s most celebrated, truly iconic images of glamour and style that should attract global interest from collectors.

Helmut Newton:
Leon Constantiner discovered Newton’s work in 1991; this year was the starting point for Constantiner’s passion for photography. The sale will offer a strong selection of Newton’s signature images, well representing his unique vision, led by one of his most radical and famous works: the diptych Sie Kommen, Naked and Dressed, Paris, 1981 (€150,000-250,000).

A golden age of style

The Constantiner collection will allow collectors to rediscover images that define the elegance of the late 1940s and 1950s, highlighted by a fine selection of photographs by the fabled Vogue photographer Irving Penn, including Harlequin Dress 1950, (€200,000-300,000) and Woman in Moroccan Palace, 1951 (€200,000-300,000). The legendary fashion photographer Richard Avedon is represented by his masterpiece, Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Paris, 1955 (€250,000-350,000).

The collection offers insights into the various trends that shaped fashion and beauty photography from the 1960s to the 1980s. Among the highlights are stunning large-format works by Herb Ritts and Peter Lindbergh, notably Ritts’s graphically dramatic, natural-light composition Versace Dress, Back View, El Mirage, 1990 (€80,000-120,000), his Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood, 1989 (€80,000-120,000), or Lindbergh’s celebrated image made as a cover for American Vogue, a line-up of the ‘Supermodels’ of the day, Biker Girls, Brooklyn (€70,000-100,000).

New York

The autobiographical aspect of the collection becomes evident through a selection of pictures dedicated to New York. Leon Constantiner discovered the city at the age of 7. New York was enchanting to him; everything seemed possible. Andy Warhol’s composite piece, Statue of Liberty, 1976-1986 (€40,000-60,000), or Burt Glinn’s shot depicting the artist, his muse Edie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein embodying the myth and lure of the city (€3,000-5,000). The architecture of New York, its authority and its powerful symbolism are well expressed in the mysterious soft focus of Seagram Building, captured by the eloquent eye of Hiroshi Sugimoto, (€15,000-35,000).