Christie’s had secured a significant consignment from Japan’s Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, which closed its doors in March this year. More than 80 works from the museum’s collection will be sold across the house’s marquee in November sales in New York, with the group expected to realise at least $60m.
Eight works will be staged as a dedicated section within the 20th Century Evening Sale, led by a 1907 Nymphéas by Claude Monet, carrying an estimate in excess of $40 million. Additional pieces will be offered in the Impressionist, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary day sales.
The Kawamura Museum, founded in 1990 by the chemicals conglomerate DIC Corporation, established itself as one of Japan’s most ambitious repositories of Western Modernism. Its collection has long been noted for its holdings of Monet, Chagall, Matisse and Moore, as well as its Rothko room, one of only four such dedicated spaces worldwide. The decision to deaccession marks a significant shift in strategy for DIC, which has announced plans to retain only around one quarter of the collection for display at the International House of Japan from 2030.
Christie’s highlights include two major canvases by Marc Chagall: the monumental Le songe du Roi David (1966), a vast dreamscape populated with biblical and allegorical figures, and Le soleil rouge (1949), a lyrical composition centred on an embracing couple. Renoir’s 1891 Baigneuse and Matisse’s Femme au chapeau are also among the works consigned.
Sara Friedlander, Christie’s Deputy Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, described the grouping as “a collection that charts the full arc of twentieth-century Modernism, from Impressionist landscape to post-war abstraction, each with museum-level provenance.”
The sale of Monet’s Nymphéas comes against the backdrop of strong demand for the artist’s water-lily cycle. The series has consistently set records: Nymphéas en fleur fetched $84.6m at Christie’s in 2018 from the Rockefeller collection, while Meules from 1890 holds the auction high for Monet at $110.7m, achieved at Sotheby’s in 2019.
The closure of the Kawamura Museum, despite substantial visitor numbers post-pandemic, has been linked to shareholder pressures on DIC Global, which has been restructuring under the influence of Hong Kong-based Oasis Management. A September statement confirmed that around 280 works will be liquidated through a combination of auction and private sales by 2026, aiming to generate at least ¥10bn ($67.7m).
The dispersal follows a precedent: in 2013, the museum quietly sold Barnett Newman’s monumental Anna’s Light (1968) for $105.7m. The upcoming Christie’s sales will therefore be watched closely as a barometer of both market appetite for blue-chip Modernism and the shifting landscape of corporate-owned museum collections.