Christie’s is honored to present this important Japanese collection of photographs. Wide-ranging in its themes, the collection covers close to a century of photographic production with impressive highlights in the areas of fashion, surrealism, and Post-War and contemporary. Thoughtfully assembled over many years, the following lots also bring together East and West, with important American and European photographs combined with a compelling collection of Post-War Japanese images, tied together through their simplicity and elegance.
The collection opens with iconic images from Brassaï and Henri Cartier- Bresson, including images of the photographers’ explorations of the cities they traversed as well as highlights from their portrait practice. The selected images in this group focus on the vibrant and rapidly-changing culture of the 1930s and 1940s that these prolific photographers captured. Followed are the surreal nudes of Bill Brandt with their stark contrast and mesmerizing sitters, as well as the exemplary Ansel Adams landscape of the New Mexico desert; images that encompass the variety of photographic achievements that occurred in first half of the 20th century.
The innovative and profound output of contemporary German photographers is also strongly represented in the collection through the works of Thomas Ruff, Thomas Demand, and Wolfgang Tillmans. The many images by Tillmans’ assembled here present the artist’s snapshots of youth and LGBTQ culture as well as his more abstract images, which together illustrate his impressive oeuvre. In contrast to Tillmans documentary style, Ruff and Demand characterize the realm of the found and created photograph, highlighting the expansive modes of production and theories of image creation that photographers explore today. Together, these works are widely recognized as some of the best of contemporary photographic production.
The final lots in this collection exemplify the surge in photographic creativity and expression that spread through Japan during the decades following World War II. A collective anguish stemming from the recent cataclysmic events at Nagasaki and Hiroshima along with the rapid political changes occurring in the country inspired an outpouring of artistic response. The innate qualities of photography – that it is intuitive, fast and flexible – made it ideally suited to broach these issues. This restless generation combined influences from European and American photography with a deep Japanese cultural sensibility; the results were at once surreal, modern and completely unique. Many of these photographers, including Kikuji Kawada, Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Ikko Narahara, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Yashuiro Ishimoto and Shoji Ueda primarily shared their work from this period through the creation of photobooks and magazines to aid in the dissemination of their avant-garde ideas within the country and beyond. Christie’s is pleased to present an offering of works from this rich and influential period of exploration and experimentation.
This truly comprehensive collection, which also features works by Robert Mapplethorpe, William Klein, Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, represents years of intense assembly by its collector. Gathered here, it weaves together unifying themes across different periods and regions of photographic production, emphasizing some of the best representations of the medium’s history, as well as the future of photography.