Picasso meets Old Masters in a centuries-spanning collection exploring themes of love, mythology and more

If there’s one throughline that connects all of art history, it’s the unceasing endeavour to depict the grandest, most essential emotion we have: love. Love in all its forms, from sensual desire and passion to loss and grief, has inspired artists for centuries. As Pablo Picasso once said: ‘Ultimately, love is all there is.’

Presenting heroes and saints, gods and mortals, embracing lovers and beauteous nudes, the seven works in Heroes & Lovers: Property of a Distinguished Collector encompass these enduring and universal themes. Concepts of beauty and eroticism, adulation and intimacy, valour and passion are united in a compelling group that illustrates not only the depths of human experience, but reveals a number of artistic dialogues that continue to speak today.

The seven works will go up for auction during Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale on 17 November, held at Christie’s New York flagship at Rockefeller Center. Two further works from the collection will be sold during Classic Week in early 2027, also in New York.

Passionate devotion

Tilman Riemenschneider's depiction of Saint Catherine of Alexandria is the earliest piece in the group, dated circa 1505, and is revelatory in every sense. Renowned for the depth of emotional intensity that he conveyed in his sculpture, Riemenschneider imparted a deeply human quality to his religious figures, breathing life into their depiction in sculptural form.

The fourth-century Christian saint was martyred for refusing to renounce her faith. She is often portrayed with a wheel, the intended means of her torture, as well as a crown, sword or book. Her name, KATHERI, is emblazoned across the top of her bodice.

Saint Catherine is rendered in this sculpture with a startling lifelike quality. While the drapery of her dress is angular and more stylised, her physiognomy, as well as her pose, have a volumetric, naturalistic quality that was novel for the time. With her head slightly tilted and her long hair falling in waves down her body, she appears as if she is about to turn, her pensive gaze and pursed lips a reflection of the sculptor’s mastery of his medium.

‘Riemenschneider stands among the great masters of Late Gothic sculpture, celebrated for the extraordinary humanity and emotional intensity of his figures,’ Scarlett Walsh, Christie’s specialist in European Sculpture & Works of Art, says. ‘When Saint Catherine last came to auction in 2008 it set a world auction record for Riemenschneider that remains unbroken nearly two decades later.’

Lovers through time

Picasso also showcased devotion in his work, though his version was in the images he created of the great loves of his life. His romantic partners often ushered in a new stylistic chapter in his work, their presence inextricable from his art. ‘I paint the way some people write an autobiography,’ he once said.

Perhaps no other lover appears in his work with such a range of emotional expression as the Surrealist photographer Dora Maar. Maar was Picasso’s lover and muse throughout the turbulent close of the 1930s and the war years that followed, and he etched the emotions of an era upon her beautiful, dark-eyed face.

Enthroned and majestic, seen as a chic Parisienne with one of her signature hats, rendered both classically and in a Cubist idiom, or, perhaps most famously, portrayed with her profile distorted and reimagined, Maar inspired in Picasso myriad new ways of conveying the human form in paint.

There are two portraits of Maar in this collection, painted within a few years of each other. The earlier of the pair dates from 1939 to 1940, not long after Picasso and Maar had fled Paris for the fashionable seaside town of Royan in the southwest of France.

Tête de femme from May 1941 was part of a creative resurgence that the artist experienced at this time. Despite many offers to help him leave the country, Picasso decided to remain in Occupied Paris, working from his cavernous studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins. ‘With Maar close by, Picasso continued to scrutinise his lover’s face,’ Vanessa Fusco, Christie’s Head of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York, says, ‘painting her in this work as a jewel-like beacon of light and colour.’

Just over two decades later, Picasso was happily ensconced in a very different relationship from the one he shared with Maar. In 1952 he had met the young Jacqueline Roque, who would become his final great love and, later, his wife.

The centre of the artist’s work in his later years, Jacqueline, with her dark hair, classical profile and wide, almond-shaped eyes, peopled Picasso’s art with an almost omnipotent presence. ‘She invades everything, becomes everybody,’ Picasso’s friend Hélène Parmelin once described. ‘She takes the place of all the models of all the painters on all the canvases. All the portraits are like her, even if they are not like each other.’

In part a result of the sense of contentment and peace he had found with Jacqueline, love as a theme reemerged in Picasso’s work in the 1960s, as Le Baiser and Couple, painted within a couple of months of each other at the end of 1969, masterfully show.

Set in a verdant, Eden-like garden, Couple depicts a man and woman embracing. A modern-day Adam and Eve, this painting presents love at the dawn of time. Another kissing couple is depicted in his Le Baiser, this time in dramatic monochrome, as if in a cinematic close-up of lovers reunited at the end of a film.

Above all, this pair of paintings stands as a bold celebration of life, images of vitality and emotion as the artist raced to beat the passage of time. ‘Together these bold works encapsulate Picasso’s post-war style,’ Fusco says. ‘With their gestural, instinctive handling, they are filled with the vitality and joy that define the best of his work from this period.’

Modern beauty

For Edouard Manet, who later inspired some of Picasso’s works, female beauty and its portrayal in art also remained at the heart of his work. In Femme au tub (c. 1878-1879), a semi-nude woman appears alone in the private realm of her toilette. Leaning forward to prepare her bath, she is unaware of the viewer’s gaze, unposed and entirely uninhibited within the scene. Manet’s model for this radical composition was his friend Méry Laurent, with whom, it was rumoured, he was romantically involved.

The bather was a subject rich in art historical precedent. Manet had already explored this theme in an earlier oil, La nymphe surprise of 1861. With his pastel Femme au tub, however, Manet offered a radically new conception of this motif. Instead of veiling his nude with a mythological or historical narrative, he presented her free of any guise or costume. A contemporary woman engaged in her everyday ablutions becomes the sole subject.

This motif had an important influence on Manet’s contemporaries, particularly Edgar Degas, who created a large body of pastel bathers toward the end of his life, as well as Picasso and Henri Matisse in the following century. For the sculptor Henry Moore, one of the former owners of this exquisite pastel, the female nude would likewise occupy a central place in his work.

Myths and legends

Just like Picasso’s lovers in the throes of passion, Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem’s dramatic and monumental depiction of Hercules and Achelous from Ovid’s Metamorphoses plunges the viewer into the midst of a battle — intense passion of a different kind.

Van Haarlem was an icon of northern Baroque art and one of the most gifted Dutch Mannerist painters working in Haarlem in the late 16th century. When depicting the violent struggle between the two mythological figures, Van Haarlem chose to focus on the moment of greatest drama: just before Hercules pulls the horn from the bull’s head in an act of strength and bravery.

‘The composition captures Hercules at the brink of victory. His taut, muscular arms twist the bull’s horns, his knee presses into the bull’s flank, and that bracing intensity contrasts with the bull’s agony,’ says Jennifer Wright, Christie's head of Old Master Paintings in New York. 'Ovid’s story is partly an allegory of logic and reason over impulse: though the bull embodies a more formidable physical power, Hercules relies on strategy and cunning to overcome it. The transformation of the bull’s horn into a cornucopia is a sign of hope and abundance in addition to symbolising Hercules’ victory.’

Traversing centuries, these images of heroes and lovers encapsulate not only defining moments of art history but celebrate some of the many deep and varied emotions that constitute what it is to be human. Above all, it is love which has — and will always remain — one of the most enduring and powerful forces of artistic imagination.