NEW YORK – Christie’s is honored to announce Prints and Multiples, a series of live auctions taking place 27-28 October, and Marc Chagall, Color of Life: Prints & Artist’s Books formerly from the Artist’s Estate, on online sale open 17-30 October for bidding.

Prints and Multiples showcases a wide selection of editions from the 19th century to the present. Featuring iconic modern prints by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Henri Matisse, as well as Post-War and Contemporary editions by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and more. Leading the auction is a rare impression of Willem De Kooning’s Litho #1 (Waves #1) and a vibrant example of Pablo Picasso’s important linocut Buste de femme au chapeau.

Celebrating Marc Chagall’s life-long exploration of printmaking, Marc Chagall, Color of Life: Prints and Artist’s Books Formerly From the Artist’s Estate features prints made over a period of sixty years, offered on the market for the first time, in remarkably fine condition.

Reflecting on the artist’s exuberant palette and subject matter at liberty, the sale includes many lithographs made at the legendary Parisian printshop Imprimerie Mourlot on rue de Chabrol, as well as several rare proofs printed in Berlin, extensively hand-colored in gouache or pastel. Among the highlights are La chèvre dans la nuit, an early lithograph depicting a Wandering Jew escaping with his goat in the threatening night next to his monumental book transformed into his only shelter and to take along with him, a cockerel perched on it. Maquette pour Le petit cheval, 1974, made fifty years later, an astonishing composition which reveals the artist’s continuous research on sculptural expressions through this final sketch of a rider resting with his vivid red horse beneath a tree, with a village glimpsed in the distance.

The sale also reflects Chagall’s profound involvement in literature and poetry, including several livres d’artiste for which Chagall produced original prints as illustrations, such as his epic cycle of lithographs in two volumes for Homer’s L’Odyssée, 1974/5.