Master works

Ed Lake

• Last Updated: November 15. 2009 4:58PM UAE / November 15. 2009 12:58PM GMT

Several late pieces by Marc Chagall are included in the show at Emirates Palace. Le Grand Cirque is expected to sell for Dh29 million. Courtesy Opera Gallery

A late-breaking but worthy contribution to the art festivities taking place at the Emirates Palace this week is a special charity show from Dubai’s Opera Gallery, under the patronage of Sheikh Sultan bin Khalifa. The exhibition, which is being held in support of the Make a Wish Foundation, includes works from some of the 20th century’s most important figures – 25 masterpieces, according to the organisers, and 75 contemporary works.

Marc Chagall, the best-represented artist in the show, furnishes several late paintings which together offer a window onto his dream world of multi-coloured animals, metamorphosing painters and flowers that look more substantial than the rooms that contain them. Particularly noteworthy is his large canvas Le Grand Cirque, in which angels and animals blur into one in the vaulting space of a big top. The piece is expected to sell for Dh29 million.

Picasso supplies a couple of whimsical sketches – a splashy ink painting of a musketeer and a felt-tip drawing of a painter grinning as he stares into the eyes of his model – very slight works that nonetheless reflect the humour of his late career. There’s a Renoir portrait of the artist’s son. And Monet’s Vetheuil au Soleil, a bright and serene view over the town of Vetheuil from green hills above, is likely to fetch the second-highest price in the show if it is sold: it’s valued at around Dh27.5m.

Among the most interesting pieces in the exhibition are those by second-tier masters. There are, for example, a couple of vigorous Fauvist canvases: a vase of flowers picked out in furious jabs of pigment by Maurice de Vlaminck, and a nighttime village scene by Raoul Dufy, whose jagged and boxy line-work seems to anticipate both cubism and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Alfred Sisley, one of the very few major English Impressionists, is represented by Le Long du Bois en Automne, a landscape view over country road, dry-stone wall and bare copse that achieves a wonderfully delicate sense of overcast light.

Three Salvador Dali pieces – a bronze sculpture of a horse saddled with one of his signature melted clocks and two sketches of horsemen – tap into an equestrian theme that is continued by the French Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki as well as some Opera Gallery regulars. Mauro Corda offers a vaguely Marino Marini-ish bronze horse mounted by a cubist rider. The Korean artist Sung Tae Park has a mesh relief image of a horse in flight. Several painters also tackle the same subject, which is after all a very popular one in the Emirates. Here’s hoping it proves so on this occasion: five percent of the sale price of every work in the masterpiece category, and 15 percent of each contemporary sale, will go to the Make a Wish Foundation.

It’s also to be hoped that some of the more unusual works in the show find good homes. There is, for instance, the allegorical sculpture of a hermit made by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. She seems to be included among the masters under the exhibition’s category scheme, which is a stretch: she was best known for shooting paint cans with a .22 calibre rifle. One might suggest that qualifies her more as one of art’s fascinating eccentrics than its reigning geniuses, but this brightly coloured piece is beautiful enough in its own way, a hint at the poetry beneath Saint Phalle’s prankishness.

Yves Klein is another of art history’s oddities, a quasi-conceptualist best known for inventing the deep shade of ultramarine called International Klein Blue. He introduced it in a remarkably successful show, Proposte Monochrome, Epoca Blu, which comprised 11 identical blue canvases. The Opera Gallery is going to display one of his sculptures from around the same period: a 1957 plaster globe painted in the famous hue. A monochrome globe is arguably a better joke than a blank picture, which makes this piece stand out against an oeuvre which, as you might imagine, rather blends into one. And amid the excitement at the Emirates Palace this week, fascinating curios like this should help the Opera Gallery show do just the same.

The Opera Gallery’s charity show runs at the Emirates Palace from November 20-24.