In the winter months ski enthusiasts head to the slopes and auction houses turn to sales of ski posters. It is a popular saleroom category for the first months of the year on both sides of the Atlantic.
On March 1 Swann Galleries’ New York auction of vintage posters will include a sizeable section devoted to ski designs. Images of popular resorts such as Davos, Chamonix and Gstaad will feature, many of them the work of designers well known in this promotional field such as Georges Dorival, Roger Broders and Alex Walter Diggelmann.
Broders created this poster above from c.1930 promoting Sports d’Hiver dans les Vosges, a dynamic study of a skier racing downhill watched by an admiring crowd. It carries an estimate of $5000-7500.
Tajan is holding a sale dedicated to work of a single artist, the painter and engraver Moses Lévy, in its Paris rooms on February 8.
Lévy was born in 1885 in Tunis to a Gibraltarian father and an Italian mother. He spent part of his life in Tunisia but he also lived in Andalusia, Paris (which he left in 1939) and Italy (he died at Viareggio in 1968). His oeuvre reflects his wide-ranging travels, although Tuscany and Tunisia are the main subjects.
Lévy founded the Tunis school of painting after the Second World War with his friends Pierre Boucherie, Jules Lellouche and Antonio Corpora, and his studio on the rue de Provence in Tunis became an artistic meeting point.
Tajan is offering 49 lots, including this pre-war oil on canvas, Souvenir of Lisbon, a 4ft 4in (1.3m) square signed and dated work from 1928 which is estimated at €20,000-40,000. The sale also includes a handful of works by his son, Nello Lévy, and grandson, Marc Perez.
A large group of the distinctive ceramics created by Copenhagen-born artist and ceramicist Axel Saalto (1889-1961) will feature in Piasa’s sale devoted to Scandinavian design on February 15.
One of the largest will be this 21in (53cm) high, organic-looking glazed stoneware sculpture shown above, in what is termed Salto’s ‘germinating’ style, a 1968 version of a model created in 1956 for Royal Copenhagen. Titled The innate force things (The Core of Power), it is estimated at €40,000-60,000.
