Masters of the avant-garde: five artists who rewrote the rules

Jannis Kounellis, Sans titre, 1959

Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece, in 1936. Aged 20, he moved to Rome, to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti. By 1967, he was a key member of the burgeoning Arte Povera movement, known for its use of found materials. Newspaper, road signs, burlap, bed frames, earth and even live animals would be incorporated into his paintings, sculptures, collages and installations.

It was some years previously, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that Kounellis — then a young, unknown graduate — produced his first influential body of work: the Alfabeti (Alphabet paintings).

The series consists of large, monochrome canvases covered with a seemingly random assortment of letters, numbers and arrows painted in black enamel. ‘Kounellis’s radical idea was to try to liberate symbols from their traditional roles,’ says Renato Pennisi, an international specialist in Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art department. ‘He wanted to see if he could strip them of their contexts and meaning. He turned them into non-conforming structures, icons detached from reality. It was a groundbreaking idea.’

The two-metre-wide Sans titre is an important early work from this series, made in 1959. It was purchased from the artist in the late 1970s, and has remained in the same private Italian collection for half a century. Other Alfabeti paintings hang in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.

Alberto Giacometti, Femme debout, 1961-62

Femme debout (1961-62) by Alberto Giacometti is ‘an exciting rediscovery that hasn’t been seen in public for more than half a century, since the current owner purchased it at auction’, says Valérie Didier, head of Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art department in Paris.

Standing 80 centimetres high, the bronze represents one of the artist’s most powerful and iconic motifs: the monumental female nude — also the subject of what was arguably his most famous project, Femmes de Venise.

In 1956, Giacometti exhibited a group of nude female torsos at the 28th Venice Biennale. The works were greatly admired, and the female figure became a major feature of the final period of the artist’s career.

Following a visit to Giacometti’s studio the year after the Biennale, the writer Jean Genet recorded an account of these figures: ‘They give me this odd feeling: they are familiar, they walk in the street, yet they are in the depths of time, at the source of all being; they keep approaching and retreating in a sovereign immobility… Where are they going? Although their image remains visible, where are they?’

Giacometti would compulsively work a figure up during the course of a day, only to undo almost all of his work before retiring for the night. As a result, the form’s fundamental essence would be his starting point the next morning. Adopting this method relentlessly, he would attenuate his portraits almost to the point of erasure. The surface of Femme debout shows all the signs of this intense way of working. It was conceived between 1961 and 1962, then cast in bronze the following year in an edition of just two. The other is housed at the Fondation Giacometti in Paris.

Nicolas de Staël, Fiesole, 1953

The year 1953 was a decisive one for the painter Nicolas de Staël.

In March, the 39-year-old travelled from his home in Paris to New York, for his debut American solo show at Knoedler Galleries. The critics celebrated his unique blend of vibrant abstraction and figuration, proclaiming de Staël the most gifted French painter of his generation. Shortly afterwards, he accepted an offer from Paul Rosenberg to become his exclusive dealer in the United States, showing his work alongside that of Braque, Matisse and Picasso.

This new-found celebrity weighed heavily on the artist. Returning to France in search of respite, he retreated to the village of Lagnes in Provence, which he described as ‘quite simply paradise, with infinite horizons’. In mid-August, he returned to Paris to obtain his driver’s licence, before driving south again in a newly purchased Citroën van, then setting off for a month-long trip through Italy with his wife, three children and several friends.

Back in his studio, de Staël set about working his sketches of Sicily, Naples, Ravenna and Florence into what would become some of the most celebrated works of his career. Fiesole shows the Tuscan hilltop town where Fra Angelico once lived, picked out in a striking palette of electric blues, earth tones, heavy black and brilliant white, applied in thick layers using a palette knife. The buildings’ angular forms, contrasting with a deeply saturated summer sky, teeter on the brink of abstraction.

‘Fiesole is a brilliantly expressive synthesis of how, during this period, de Staël’s palette lightens, his compositions open up, and he moves towards the luminous, planar works that define his late career,’ says Josephine Wanecq, head of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in Paris. ‘Tragically, just two years later, at the age of 41, de Staël took his own life. Fiesole passed from Paul Rosenberg to the Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler, another hugely important post-war art dealer, and hasn’t been seen in public since its last sale, at auction in 1981.’

Edouard Manet, Ambroise Adam dans le jardin à Pressagny, 1861

‘In 1984, the art historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau wrote an article for the Burlington Magazine about a small, rediscovered painting by Edouard Manet that had big implications,’ explains Léa Bloch, head of the Art Moderne sale at Christie’s in Paris.

The painting, measuring about 40 by 32 centimetres, shows an elderly man wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, steel-framed glasses, a frock coat and thick mutton chops. He is sitting pigeon-toed on a wooden chair, with his spaniel draped over his legs. The backdrop consists of freely painted vegetation.

A letter dated 19 July 1861 identifies the sitter: ‘My dear Lise, Manet left on Saturday evening. In the morning he and Ernst went to Les Andelys to see the church and the much acclaimed inn. We went to see Février in the afternoon; we got back at 4 o’clock and to pass the time until dinner Edouard made me sit for a sketch with Pyldie on my lap.’

Its author was Ambroise Adam, a relative of Manet’s uncle Edmond Fournier. Adam’s son was the same age as Manet, and the pair were close friends, so the young artist often visited the family’s home.

The art historian realised that the date of the work meant it was Manet’s first fully documented plein air painting. It represented a pivotal moment, when the 29-year-old artist turned away from academic studio pictures towards the ‘far more revolutionary statement’ of his later, outdoor scenes. This would culminate the following year in the artist’s first major image of urban life, the chaotic, dynamic and scandalous Music in the Tuileries Gardens.

According to Wilson-Bareau, the later painting ‘closely resembles the earlier picture in its treatment of figures and foliage’, meaning that this portrait ‘heralded the revolutionary principles of Impressionism, which Manet himself and his devoted band of young colleagues were to develop over the next decade’.

Jean Dubuffet, Mire G 175 (Boléro), 1983

In 1983, at the age of 81, the French artist Jean Dubuffet embarked on a new body of work that would push his art to the limits of figuration.

Called Mires, or ‘Test Patterns’, these paintings consisted of loose, gestural lines in bold colours, and were in some ways an extension of the artist’s groundbreaking Hourloupe series, which Dubuffet developed from a graphic he had impulsively drawn while on the telephone, and which came to dominate his oeuvre throughout the 1960s.

However, while the Hourloupe patterns typically coalesced into recognisable figures and objects, the Mires works were entirely wild, completely surrendering to abstraction. ‘You will no longer find any object or figure in these paintings — nothing can be named,’ the artist said. ‘However, they are not “non-figurative”. Their aim is to represent (or should we rather say “to evoke”) in an abridged and synoptic way, the world that surrounds us, of which we are a part.’

The following year — exactly two decades after Dubuffet had exhibited more than 100 Hourloupe works in Venice during the 1964 Biennale — the artist unveiled a show of his latest Mires works in the French pavilion of the 41st Venice Biennale. Less than 12 months later, he had died from emphysema.

‘The unveiling of the Mires works marked the final chapter in Dubuffet’s brilliant career, and they were met with great acclaim,’ says Alix Peronnet, head of the Art Contemporain sale in Paris. ‘This large, hypnotic Mires was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 1996. It belongs to an important subgroup called “Boléro”, which are distinguished by their white backgrounds — the Centre Pompidou has no fewer than six of them.’

Avant-Garde(s) including Thinking Italian takes place on 23 October 2025, followed by Art Moderne and Art Contemporain on 24 October. The sales are on view until 23 and 24 October at Christie’s in Paris