Franz Marc, Weidende Pferde III (Grazing Horses III), 1910. Estimate: £6,000,000-8,000,000, ($12,000,000-16,000,000). © Sotheby's Images

LONDON.- Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern art in London on Tuesday, February 5 will bring to the market major works by many of the leading names in the field – among them Picasso, Jawlensky, Sisley, Monet, Cézanne, Renoir and Franz Marc. Together with the rest of the series of sales, they carry a combined estimate in excess of £100 million, making this among the highest value series of sales Sotheby’s has ever staged in Europe.

Series comprises: Impressionist and Modern Evening and Day sales (including Surrealist and German & Austrian) as well as Works on Paper. This striking portrait of Dora Maar comes to sale from the family of Heinz Berggruen, who died in 2007 and was widely recognised as one of Europe's most significant art connoisseurs, collectors and dealers. His superlative collection reflected not only his deep understanding of modern art but also his personal friendship with many of the major artists of his time including Pablo Picasso. Born in Berlin, Berggruen returned there in 1996 where a large museum near the Charlottenburg Palace was renovated by the Berlin State Museum to exhibit his collection. In 2000 the collection was acquired by the Berlin State Museum. Heinz continued to collect right up until his death and the portrait of Dora Maar hung in the museum alongside other major works in his collection by Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Giacometti. Picasso’s paintings portraying Dora Maar (his mistress and artistic companion in the late 1930s and early 1940s) are much celebrated – the most accomplished among them having realized consistently high prices at auction: Dora Maar au chat, of 1941, sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2006 for $95,216,000 (£51,560,080) – the second highest price ever achieved for any work sold at auction; while the bronze Tête de Femme (Dora Maar), sold for $29.1 million at Sotheby’s New York in November 2007 – at the time, a record for any sculpture sold at auction. Like the artist’s most accomplished portraits of Maar, Tête de femme (La Lectrice - Dora Maar) is a psychologically intense and penetrating image, conveying the sitter’s physical beauty and radiant personality, as well as a sense of the anxiety and uncertainty of the times. Also from the Berggruen collection is Picasso’s Minotaure et Femme, which is estimated at £900,000-1,200,000. During the Surrealist period of his career, Picasso often used subjects from classical mythology, and the image of minotaur, half-man, half-bull, became one of his key figures from this time. In 1933 Picasso executed another version of this subject for the cover for the first issue of Minotaure, a Surrealist periodical published by Albert Skira and Tériade in Paris.

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