Press Release London For Immediate Release

London | +44 (0)20 7293 6000 | Matthew Weigman | matthew.weigman@sothebys.com

Matthew Floris | matthew.floris@sothebys.com
New York | +1 212 606 7176 | Lauren Gioia | lauren.gioia@sothebys.com | Darrell Rocha | darrell.rocha@sothebys.com

Sotheby’s To Sell Hascoe Family Collection of

Important Czech Art
--The Finest Collection of Czech Cubist Works Outside The Czech Republic--

František Kupka, Movement, painted between 1913 and 1919, estimate £500,000-700,000

LONDON, FRIDAY, 4 MARCH 2011 -- On Monday, 13 June 2011, Sotheby’s London will offer Czech Modernist
paintings, sculpture and Cubist furniture from the outstanding Hascoe Collection of Czech Modern Art. This
collection is an extraordinary testimony to the vision of its creators, Norman and Suzanne Hascoe, who over the course
of twenty-five years assembled what is now one of the most important private collections of Czech Modernist art, and
the most exciting group of Czech works to come to the market in the last decade. Together, the works in the sale –
nearly 200 lots – are estimated to realise in excess of £5 million.
The Hascoe Collection offers a remarkably complete survey of Czech painting and sculpture of the first half of the
twentieth century. The core of this collection of paintings revolves around the leading figures of Czech Modernist
painting: František Kupka, Bohumil Kubišta, František Foltýn, Emil Filla and other fellow Osma artists, such as Antonín
Prochaszka and Josef Čapek, who were at the forefront of international Cubism.

Norman and Suzanne Hascoe are remembered for their buoyant, cheerful and energetic spirit, easily inspiring
friendships all over the world, and for their shared dedication in their quest for objects of beauty and cultural
significance across a wide spectrum. Their discerning eye and passionate focus is reflected in their collection of Czech
art, which was housed in a wonderful waterfront home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in America.

The sale will feature twenty works by František Kupka, including his tour de force of early abstraction, Movement,
painted between 1913 and 1919 (estimate £500,000-700,000), pictured on the previous page. Movement is one of the
finest examples of Kupka’s paintings from this key period in his artistic career. Although the stridently red central motif
can perhaps be read as evoking a recumbent human form, Movement is essentially what its title implies: a study of
objects in dynamic shift.

Kupka settled in Paris in 1895 after completing his studies at the

Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, earning his living in the
French capital in his early years there as an illustrator for periodicals
and journals, with a strong vein of social commentary running
through his work. The stimulating environment of the French
metropolis, the ferment of modern art in the city, and the artists and
exhibitions travelling to it were all to inspire Kupka’s painting
significantly. From 1909 onwards, he increasingly turned away from
capturing external reality towards espousing a radical simplification
of pictorial composition that resonated deeply with internal realities
of emotion, of instinct, and of the spiritual as well as the cosmic and
the cosmological.
František Kupka, Disque Blanc,
estimate £300,000-500,000

Kupka’s paintings from the first two decades of the twentieth century most strongly demonstrate his interest in the
cosmological and in the interplay between the visual arts and music. Although Kupka did not go perhaps as far as
Wassily Kandinsky went in his exploration of the interplay between the visual and the aural (Kandinsky was, after all, a
synaesthete for whom precise sounds such as a single note played on a violin conjured a vividly precise colour), the
focus in Movement on a very dense, rich colour palette suggests that there is another sense-dimension at play here and
the ellipses of orange and yellow in the background plausibly echo galactic phenomena such as the rings of Saturn.

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 Among the Osma artists the work of both Bohumil Kubišta and Antonín
Procházka stand out, the former for his magnificent Cézannesque Still
Life with Fruits of 1909, and the latter for his exquisite Cubist
compositions such as Still Life with Vase and Flower of 1914 (estimate
£20,000-30,000). Painted in 1909, Still Life with Fruit (estimate
£300,000-500,000, pictured left) epitomises the flowering of
Modernism in Central European art, and demonstrates Kubišta’s
experimentation with perspective and colour at its most sophisticated.
Vibrant objects snake across the canvas in a tour de force of contrasting forms and textures, all depicted in
contradictory perspectives. The table top is besieged by bulbous objects, described with hints of angles that are a
premonition of the Cubism that would follow in Kubišta’s work. A generously gathered tablecloth drapes beyond the
edges of the composition, amplifying the sense that the fruits are toppling with the cloth into the foreground,
anchored only to the surface of the table by the large vase at the upper left.

Kubišta’s still-lives of this period focus on the inherent geometry of objects and explore the spatial problems of
representing three-dimensional form. The inspiration of Cézanne’s approach breathed new life into the time-honoured
tradition of still life painting at the turn of the century, and his aesthetic accomplishments had a profound impact on
Kubišta’s work of this time. While there is still a sense of three-dimensionality and recognisable form in Still Life with
Fruit, space is defined by the contrast of colour surfaces. Warm and cool tones press dynamically against each other,
allowing the warm tones to expand, and act almost as a light source within the composition. While Kubišta’s aesthetic
and ideological development passed through Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism during his life-time,
his still-lives best encapsulated his yearning for innovation and a personal departure from the academic. Much more
than a simple, representational image, Still-Life with Fruit captures mood and emotion, showing Kubišta’s process in
untangling personal and traditional methods of perception.

Reflecting the uncertainty and aggression of the

War years, Josef Čapek turned Cubism to dramatic
effect in the contrasting images of his double-sided
work Sailor and Phantomas of 1917-20 (estimate
£150,000-200,000, pictured left), while in the early
1920s František Foltýn pushed further the
boundaries of Cubism in his powerful depiction of
Dostoyevsky (pictured on following page) and the
new post-war international order in his strident
personification of Imperialism (both estimated at
£120,000-180,000).

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 The diversity of the sculpture collection that features thirteen different artists
is characterised in the two very distinct aesthetics of Jan Štursa and Otto
Gutfreund. Virtual contemporaries, the work of these two men accounts for
some fifty sculptures in the collection. Both artists expressed their shared drive
to reveal the essential vulnerability of the human form, but achieved their ends
in very different ways. Štursa conceals the psychological intensity of his work
behind a poetic lyricism that ranges from the innocence of Puberty to the
coquettish sensuality of Woman with Dolphin. In contrast Gutfreund uncovers
the inner soul of his figures through the brute physicality of the material at his
disposal, the anguished gestures of the subjects that inspired him and the
cubistic language that he made uniquely his own. The resultant force of his
work is as evident in the contraposto diagonals of The Cellist (estimate
£2,000-3,000) as in the torment of Anxiety (estimate £12,000-18,000,
pictured left), works which established Gutfreund incontrovertibly as the
foremost Czech sculptor of his generation.

František Foltýn, Dostoyevsky, estimate £120,000-180,000

Selected highlights will be shown in New York (29 April – 2 May), Vienna (4 – 6 May), Moscow (16 – 20 May) and
Prague (23 – 26 May).

# # #

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Notes to Editors:

Property from the Hascoe Family Collection is being offered in a series of sales at Sotheby’s in 2011:

Property from the Hascoe Family Collection: Important American and English Furniture, Fine & Decorative Arts – New York, 23
January 2011
Important Old Master Paintings – New York, 27 January 2011
Impressionist & Modern Art, Day – New York, 4 May 2011
19th Century European Art – New York, 5 May 2011
Old Master Paintings – Amsterdam, 10 May 2011
American Indian Art – New York, 18 May 2011
19th Century European Paintings – London, 18 May 2011
American Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture – New York, 19 May 2011
Property from the Hascoe Family Collection: Important Czech Art – London, 13 June 2011
Important 20th Century Design – New York, 15 June 2011