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Press Release

For TEFAF Maastricht 2017, Dickinson Gallery will showcase a range of Old Master, Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary paintings, sculptures and works on paper, many of which have not been seen on the international art market in decades. Among the highlights are a rare Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder; a wild and exuberant Bacchanale by Lovis Corinth; an iconic view of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne; a Bauhaus-period still life by Paul Klee, in its original artist’s frame; and Jean Dubuffet’s Alentour la Maison, an exploration of artistic processes.

Outstanding among the old masters on view is Cranach’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes, which has remained in the same private collection since the 1960s. On the reverse of this beautifully preserved panel, a series of inscriptions indicate the work’s historic provenance in the princely collections of Waldeck-Pyrmont and subsequently Schaumburg-Lippe.

Representing the Post-Impressionist period is a watercolour view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, whose distinctive flat-topped silhouette fascinated Cézanne over the course of three decades. It features his signature ‘constructive stroke’, a technique that helped inspire the development of Cubism, and its provenance includes such historically significant names as Ambroise Vollard, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenberg and Norton Simon.

Nearly contemporary in date but worlds apart in style is Corinth’s euphoric scene of bacchic revelry, a Bacchanale considered so scandalous in its own day that it was refused for public exhibition in Munich in 1896, and only shown in more liberal Berlin in 1913. A recently restituted work, the Bacchanale is in remarkable condition, and the unlined state of the canvas preserves the fresh impasto touches of the scattered wildflowers.

The modern era is represented by Paul Klee’s 1925 composition Blumen in Glasern, one of the artist’s nocturnal still lifes, which situate brightly-coloured mechanical flowers and hourglass-shaped vases against a dark ground. Like other works from this period, it conveys a tension between otherworldliness and the practical formality of geometry and design. It remains encased in Klee’s original black-painted frame.

Moving into the contemporary period, we are offering Dubuffet’s 1957 Alentour la Maison, in which Dubuffet rejects traditional notions of finish in favour of a graffiti-like surface typical of the art brut movement he pioneered. Like other works from this period, Alentour la Maison (‘Around the House’) explores a domestic theme, conveying a mood of melancholy that may reflect post-war attitudes.