That puts the Paris auction house three blocks from its current location. The move is scheduled for mid-October, and is part of a larger strategy to expand Sotheby’s presence in France.

The house has previously announced plans to relocate two of its other spaces. In July, it will open a new Hong Kong location, and in 2025, Sotheby’s will move its New York space to the Marcel Breuer–designed Brutalist structure completed in 1966 for the Whitney Museum.

Sotheby’s new Paris headquarters will cover more than 10,800 square feet across five floors, offering 30 percent more exhibition space than its current location in the French capital. The venue, which is not far from the Champs-Élysées, will house a café and a wine cellar with a tasting area, and play host to year-round master classes, dining, and, of course, auctions.

The new Paris location will support Sotheby’s 15 specialist departments, covering areas such as ancient, modern, and contemporary art, as well as Asian and African art, design, luxury goods, and jewelry.

Upstairs will be a luxury showroom called “the Salon,” with items for sale at fixed prices, as well as rooms dedicated to private sales. Additional areas in the new Paris headquarters will provide spaces for concerts, parties, conferences, cocktail parties, fashion shows, and dinners. The auction house’s “state-of-the-art scenographic and technical equipment” will enable the exhibition of a wide range of works and objects.

The building was once the site of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which closed in 2019 after more than a century in business. The gallery held Van Gogh’s first retrospective and once employed famed art critic Félix Fénéon.

Mario Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France and chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said the move “underscores our commitment to France and highlights the growing importance of the French art and luxury markets to our company.”

The building will feature restored Art Deco elements, modern amenities, and sustainable lighting, and will be accessible to people with reduced mobility. Access to both exhibitions and auctions will be free to the public. According to the house’s announcement, there will be more than 15 miles of cable installed in the new space to ensure the house’s “digital prowess” and global connectivity.

Paris’s reputation as a European art market hub has grown considerably in recent years, with galleries and art fairs, including the recently rechristened Art Basel Paris, moving to the French capital. 

The mural is the tenth to have been discovered on the walls of the house, having been found last August in the Grand Salon as the home, Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, underwent renovations in preparation for a celebration of Cézanne’s connection to the city.

The nine previously uncovered murals, all painted between 1859 and 1869, were transferred to canvasses following the sale of the home to the Granel-Corsy family in 1899 and placed in museums across the globe, including the Petit Palais and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and the Nakata Museum in Onomichi in Japan.

The nine murals have also been included in the catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s works by John Rewald’s (1996). The new mural, will be added to the amended online version of the catalogue.

The newly discovered work features long pennants drifting in the breeze, what appear to be the flag topped masts of ships, and, to the right side of the wall, a row of buildings. According to The Art Newspaper, Cézanne referenced other works when composing the murals at Bastide du Jas de Bouffan. This mural, named Entrée du port (Entrance to the Port), is believed to have been influenced by Claude-Joseph Vernet or Claude Lorrain.

Experts say Cézanne painted over much of Entrée du port with the 1864 work Jeu de cache-cache (Game of Hide & Seek). After they moved in, the Granel family is thought to have covered up any parts of the Entrée that remained.

Entrée du port is the only work by Cézanne that remains in Aix-en-Orovance. “With this unexpected discovery… Aix-en-Provence [will] write the history of his affiliation with the [Cézanne],” Sophie Joissains, Aix’s mayor wrote on Facebook when she announced the discovery. “He is the emblem and ambassador of our City.

The Headlines

FRANKENTHALER LEGAL SAGA. The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation has filed motions to dismiss legal accusations by its former board president and the nephew of the artist, Frederick Iseman. The motions filed Tuesday come following allegations by Iseman of “pay to pay” schemes and attempts by the board’s current directors, Lise Motherwell, Clifford Ross, and Michael Hecht, to exploit the foundation for their benefit, threatening to ruin Frankenthaler’s legacy, reports Daniel Cassady for ARTnews.

HIDDEN CÉZANNE UNCOVERED. Fragments of a previously unknown Paul Cézanne mural hidden in his childhood home were discovered during an ongoing, ambitious renovation of Bastide du Jas de Bouffan, the artist’s family home in Aix-en-Provence, France. The remaining parts of the mural were found in August under wallpaper and plaster in a large living room, and depict a landscape with architectural elements. “The discovery of this portion of a monumental landscape invites us to re-evaluate the way in which Cézanne saw himself as an artist,” said Denis Coutagne, president of the Paul Cézanne Society, speaking to Le Quotidien de l’Art.

The Digest

The Etches Collection, a museum in Kimmeridge, UK, is appealing to the public to help raise funds needed to excavate the fossil remains of a massive prehistoric sea creature before they get washed away in a rapidly eroding cliff. The well-preserved skull of the 150-million-year-old, 39-foot-long pliosaur was discovered in 2022, and the remainder is encrusted in a cliff above a beach in Dorset. [BBC]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) are facing off over the acquisition of a Romanesque ivory carving dating from 1190–1200. The Met bought the sculpture, Deposition from the Cross, from its owners for $2.5 million through a private Sotheby’s sale subject to it being exportable from the UK. However, an export license has been deferred a second time, so that the V&A can try raising the funds needed to buy the piece, which had been on loan to the institution from 1982 to 2022. [The Art Newspaper]

The Guangdong Times Museum will reopen in March with a group show organized by curator Qu Chang. The nonprofit private museum was forced to close in 2022, when its main financial backer, Times China, withdrew funding. [Artforum]

The French Resistance fighter Missak Manouchian, who was a Communist Party member and an Armenian immigrant to France, is being inducted into the Panthéon in Paris today, alongside his wife Mélinée Manouchian. He is the first foreign member of the Nazi Resistance to enter the Panthéon. An orphan of the Armenian genocide, he was executed by German soldiers along with 22 other foreign comrades, including Spaniards and Eastern European Jews. [France 24]

The UK’s Science Museum Group signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia’s ministry of culture to increase cooperation via a Museums Hub in Riyadh. The partnership expands on a Cultural Memorandum of Understanding signed by the UK’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. [Press Release]

Two colonial-era paintings of the Cuzco School, stolen form a church in Peru, were returned to Peruvian authorities in New York last week. The paintings by unidentified artists were taken over a decade ago and trafficked to Manhattan. [The Art Newspaper]

Archaeologists have discovered that the Saxon town of Lundenwic extended further than was previously thought, with its urban center thriving beneath where London’s National Gallery now stands. The discovery was made during recent excavations of the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, which revealed postholes, ditches, and other signs of urban life dating between 659 CE–774 CE. [Heritage Daily]

The UK’s tax authority, HMRC, has been cracking down on money laundering, issuing fines and closely checking the practices of art dealers following the UK’s Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. However, smaller galleries argue that some of the rigorous demands by authorities are burdensome. [The Art Newspaper]

The Kicker

MONUMENTS WOMEN, TOO. The so-called Monuments Men, a group of Allied-army art experts who found and returned millions of Nazi-looted cultural objects, were not all men. Now, the 27 women in the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section are getting overdue recognition in a new, permanent exhibition and a newly translated memoir by Rose Valland, the French art worker who spied on Nazi thefts of mostly Jewish art collections. In November, the new Monuments Men and Women Gallery was added to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, with attention paid to the story of Mary Regan Quessenberry , who investigated suspicious provenance and hunted down stolen art. “As our mission evolved and as our work developed, then it became really natural to focus more on the postwar efforts, and as a result on the women,” who were more involved with the section’s restitution efforts during that period, said Anna Bottinelli, president of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation, speaking to the Associated Press. The foundation also reportedly updated its name to include women.

The Langmatt Foundation, which oversees the museum, said the institution is close to bankruptcy and that the sale is a necessity to maintain the Villa Langmatt, which houses the museum’s collection of 50 or so Impressionist works. Markus Stegmann, the museum’s director, told the Art Newspaper that the decision took years and framed the sale as a “last resort to save the museum after alternative efforts to raise funds to keep the Langmatt Foundation afloat failed.” 

While renovations of the museum are to be funded by the city of Baden and the surrounding canton of Aargau, as well as individual donations and some funds from the foundation, the foundation is seeking about $45 million to start a trust to guarantee the museum’s future.

However, Tobia Bezzola, the president of the Swiss branch of the ICOM, called the decision to sell the Cézannes “outrageous.” ICOM’s guidelines stipulate that “in no event should the potential monetary value of an object be considered as part of the motive for determining whether or not to deaccession.” Bezzola said the sale of the works is a flagrant disregard of that rule, calling it an “absolute no go” and warning that the sale could set “an enormously dangerous example” to other museums. 

The works will be offered consecutively and in an interesting fashion during Christie’s 20th Century evening sale on November 9. First up will be Fruits et pot de gingembre (between 1890 and 1893, estimate: $35-$55 million) followed by Quatre pommes et un couteau (1885, estimate: $7-$10 million) and finally La mer à l’Estaque (1878-1879, $3-$5 million). Once the total bid for one or any combination of the works reacheds$45 million, whatever remains will be removed from the auction and sent home to the museum.

Despite the museum’s dire situation, not all who support it agree with the sale. Alfred Sulzer, a former president of the board of the Langmatt Foundation told The Art Newspaper that he believes the sale “violates the deeds of the foundation.” Sulzer is so against the proposed sale that he had his lawyer issue a letter to Christie’s asking the auction house to inform potential buyers that he thinks the sale is illegal. Should the sale proceed, Sulzer said he would “pursue this [situation] to the highest court in Switzerland.”

Serena Urry was in the middle of a routine examination Cézanne’s Still Life with Bread and Eggs (1865) to see if the work needed cleaning when she discovered small cracks under which shone a bright white paint that clearly wasn’t part of the still life, according to a release from the Museum.

On a hunch, she had the painting X-rayed. The resulting digital images revealed a “well-defined portrait” hidden beneath the still life with features that suggest the subject of the newly discovered work may have been Cézanne himself.

“I think everyone’s opinion is that it’s a self-portrait … He’s posed in the way a self-portrait would be: in other words, he’s looking at us, but his body is turned,” Urry told CNN. “If it were a portrait of someone other than himself, it would probably be full frontal,” she added.

When Still Life with Bread and Eggs was painted, Cézanne was still under the spell of Realists like Gustave Courbet and Spanish Baroque paintings. But in a few years, he would be showing in the first Impressionist exhibitions in the 1870s, and would later develop his singular style that paved the way for Modern Art.

“We want to follow up in the coming months and years by conducting more imaging and analysis of the painting and research into the portrait’s subject, ideally in partnership with an institution well-equipped for technical study and with leading Cézanne scholars,” said Peter Jonathan Bell, PhD, Curator of European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

According to the museum Still Life with Bread and Eggs was acquired in 1955, a gift from the philanthropist and collector Mary E. Johnson, and is one of two Cézannes in their collection. Until now, “we went from having two Cézannes to three with this discovery,” said Urry.

The Headlines

MARCUS LEATHERDALE, A SHARP-EYED AND SENSITIVE PHOTOGRAPHER of the 1980s counterculture in Manhattan, died last month at the age of 69, of suicide, Penelope Green reports in the New York Times. Though Leatherdale’s name is not as well known as that of his onetime lover, Robert Mapplethorpe, he also produced some of the most indelible portraits of the era, shooting Madonna, Andy Warhol, himself, and countless artists, writers, and other Downtown types in perfectly pitched black and white. He later worked in India, photographing Hindu holy men and members of Adivasi tribes. “My work can be viewed as anthropological portraiture, even the vintage New York City work of the 1980s,” Green quotes him saying in a 2016 interview.

HUMAN RESOURCES. The director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany, Susanne Gaensheimer, has received a seven-year contract extension, putting her at the helm of its K20 and K21 venues through August 2031, Die Zeit reports. Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe has been named director of the Katonah Museum of Art in that Upstate New York hamlet, according to Art Daily. Yun Mapplethorpe comes from Asia Society in New York, where she was vice president for global artistic programs and director of the Asia Society Museum. And the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University has named its first-ever director of curatorial affairs: Danielle Johnson , who was previously curator of modern and contemporary art at the Vero Beach Museum of Art in Florida.

The Digest

Police are searching for five people who allegedly made off with a portfolio of 27 photographs from the Fergus McCaffrey gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea art district last month. The material is reportedly worth $45,000. [PIX11]

Selling your house? Take down your explicit or obscene art, some realtors advise. “I definitely think shocking art can negatively impact the sale of a home, including driving down the price,” one broker opined. One work cited in the story is a piece by the late, great John Giorno that reads, “I want to cum in your heart.” [New York Post]

Tate Modern in London is preparing a Cézanne exhibition that it is billing as a “once-in-a-generation” affair, with some 80 pieces, including 22 paintings never before shown in the United Kingdom. One work is a still life once owned by fellow artist Paul Gauguin. It opens in October. [The Guardian and The Art Newspaper]

Amid the war in Ukraine, up to 68 buildings of “historical significance” have been damaged or destroyed in Kharkiv, according to people on the ground there. UNESCO has confirmed 27 of those. [The Guardian]

Novelist Benjamin Myers writes in defense of crop circles, which delighted and disturbed the public in the 1980s. “The esoteric designs represented freedom, trespass and never asking permission, which is why their makers were highly criticized,” Myers argues. [The Guardian]

REVELATIONS. While cataloguing the Leeds Central Library in England during lockdown, staffers found a 1911 replica of a tiny bible, under two inches tall, that required a magnifying glass to read, BBC News reports. At the other end of the size spectrum, one of the largest statues of Jesus on earth has been completed in Encantado, Brazil, Architectural Digest reports. It is 141 feet tall.

The Kicker

‘I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.’ The Bob Dylan Center is set to open next week in Tulsa, Oklahoma, showing some of the roughly 100,000 items acquired from the artist for around $20 million by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa in 2016. For the New York Times, Ben Sisario took a tour, and spoke to people involved in the project. One intriguing bit: Dylan has not been personally involved in the center, but he did create an ironwork gateway for its entrance. Will the institution help pin down some facts about the notoriously cagey figure? “I’m more interested in this as a living archive than as a museum,” architect Alan Maskin, who worked on the center, told the Times. “Museum implies a voice that everyone accepts as truth.” [NYT]

The painting is one of the more valuable works of art to be designated with an export deferral in the U.K. in the last year. The government policy gives public institutions in the U.K. time to raise funds to acquire the work. One of them must secure funding by the end of July to keep the work in the nation’s borders.

In a statement, the U.K.’s Export Reviewing Committee for Art Council England, an agency that oversees U.K. cultural property cases, said the work “marks an important moment in [Cézanne’s] career as his style and use of brushstroke developed in a new direction,” adding that the painting “forms part of the very important story of British taste.”

The oil painting is one of four works the French artist made depicting the Normandy site. It was first purchased by Victor Chocquet, a prominent impressionist collector and French government official, sometime in the late 19th century. At a later point, it passed into the hands of British industrialist and impressionist collector Samuel Courtauld in 1937. It was one of the last of a group of 12 paintings by the artist that the textile magnate, who founded the country’s Courtauld Institute of Art, ever acquired. Nearly a decade later, it sold to a private collector and passed through descent to the current owner, who remains anonymous.

The private owner of the painting has not at any point offered it as a gift to the Courtauld, where it was removed from view last year after four decades, a spokesperson for the institution told ARTnews in an email.

The university museum, which houses an art collection owned by the Samuel Courtauld Trust, “does not acquire major paintings and is not able to mount campaigns to raise funds for the purchase of significant works of art such as this,” the spokesperson added.

The U.K. agency pointed to the work’s ties to British history and its representation of “key developments in the artist’s caree,” as factors for potential buyers to consider.

“It would be a profound misfortune if this beguiling work could not be retained in this country,” said Christopher Baker, a member of the reviewing committee.

Executed by Cézanne sometime between 1895 and 1900, likely while he was storing art supplies in the Château Noir, these formations are the most abstract works in the MoMA survey. Two vertically oriented sheets, both titled Rochers près des grottes au-dessus de Château Noir (Rocks near the Caves above Château Noir), record horizontal slabs above and beside a triangular element. Faint graphite strokes outline the rocks, parallel lines suggest shadows, and patches of blue, green, and brown watercolor enliven the compositions. One includes the branch of a tree; the other is just an agglomeration of geometric shapes centered on a piece of white paper. What astonishes is how these detailed pieces verge on abstraction without becoming nonrepresentational; the site is so distinctively rendered that the artist’s fervent champion, legendary art historian John Rewald, was able to locate and photograph it in the early 1930s.

It’s rare that an older artist masterfully revisits childhood haunts. Unlike the dark scene replete with a blue sky, slender trees, and massive boulders in a robust and related oil painting of the same title (ca. 1904) that Henri Matisse once owned, the gray limestone and reddish claystone limned in these drawings, set against an exposed ground, seem practically ethereal.

Leading the group is Cézanne’s Nature morte: pommes et poires, which carries an estimate of $25 million–$35 million. It is an example of one of Cézanne’s mature still lifes of apples painted in the 1880s and 1890s. The work has remained in the same private collection for almost two decades years.

The seller purchased it for $8.7 million at a Sotheby’s New York Impressionist and modern art evening sale in November 2003. Prior to that, it belonged to American publisher and French art collector Alex Hillman and his wife Rita.

Edgar Degas’s pastel drawing of a ballerina, Danseuse (ca. 1890s), will also be offered. The subject of the work is believed to be Parisian dancer Marie van Goethem, whose image Degas recreated in his bronze sculpture Little Fourteen-Year Old Dancer. For 70 years, the pastel work was in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is estimated at $10 million-$15 million.

Monet’s river scene La Seine à Lavacourt Débâcle (1880), which was once owned by industrialist George Vanderbilt II and hung at the Biltmore estate, is expected to sell for $6 million–$8 million. Another painting by Monet, a rare floral still-life titled Fleurs dans un pot (Roses et brouillard), 1880, is expected to fetch $4 million. Like the other works in the collection, it, too, boasts an impressive provenance. It was once owned by American collectors Odgen Phipps and James F. Sutton, the founder of the American Art Association.

The Courtland gallery’s renowned collection includes masterpieces like Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Its massive holdings of works on paper count pieces by artists such as Leonardo, Rembrandt and Rubens, but until now, the museum was sorely missing masterpieces from the 20th century. Aside from Cézanne, none of the artists included in the Karshan gift were previously represented in the gallery’s holdings.

Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen, head of Courtauld Gallery, told the Guardian that the gift was “important beyond its size.”

“[The Courtauld Gallery] is also one of the most active collections in terms of exhibitions and displays and loans,” said Vegelin. “Despite that, our representation of draughtsmanship in the 20th century is hesitant, so this gives us a fantastic new chapter in the collection and a great basis for future growth.”

The gift includes watercolors by Cézanne, as well as drawings by Cy Twombly, Georg Baselitz and Joseph Beuys. Also represented are drawings by less known artists which Vegelin called “astonishing and revelatory,” including two expressive finger drawings by Swiss artist and violinist Louis Soutter.

Soutter produced his most celebrated body of work while interned against his will in hospice in Ballaigues, a small village in Switzerland. The dancing ink and gouache figures, depicted on whatever he could find—notebook, envelops, fragments of wrapping papers—earned him a small but dedicated following that included his cousin Le Corbusier. The gallery will also receive a piece by the Abstract Expressionist artist Sam Francis and a series of abstract works by Belgian painter and writer Henri Michaux that were created while he was high on mescaline.

“It is not a collection that someone has put together from a reference book, it is a collection with real edge and bite and character that really gets under the skin of drawing as an art form,” Vegelin said.

The Karshan gift will go on display in late 2021, when the historic gallery reopens following a $70.5 million modernization project.