From Turner to Cezanne: five remarkable works on paper

Paul Cezanne regarded drawing as a crucial part of his overall artistic ambition to give ‘concrete expression to his sensations’. Across a 45-year career, he drew almost daily.

Cezanne is among the artists represented in Radical Genius: Works on Paper from A Distinguished Private Collection, a sale taking place on 15 April 2026 at Christie’s in Paris. Others include Pablo Picasso, Alfred Kubin and J.M.W. Turner.

The drawings, watercolours and etchings being offered provide an intimate glimpse into each artist’s creative process. Some (such as George Grosz) were inspired by societal issues, some (such as Paul Klee) by spiritual preoccupations, and others (such as Jean Dubuffet) by an eagerness to explore new techniques or media.

There were other catalysts, too, and the outcome in each case is remarkable, highlighting the importance of works on paper to major artists across the ages.

‘Works on paper are sites of intense creativity, where the artist’s imagination can be fully unleashed,’ says Antoine Lebouteiller, international specialist in Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s. ‘The use of easily obtained materials allows for a degree of artistic freedom — for ideas to be captured and recorded when inspiration strikes. On paper, artists’ gestures are preserved as direct traces of their thought. Often the results are spontaneous; always they are dynamic and revelatory.’

The sale features 35 lots, all from a superb private collection of works on paper, which was built over several decades. Almost all the lots date from the 19th and 20th century. Below, we consider five of them in greater detail.

George Grosz, Pandämonium, 1914

The ink drawing Pandämonium is a searing, graphic depiction of the collapse of civilisation. George Grosz executed it in Berlin, sometime after having been invalided out of military action in the First World War. It’s a vision of metropolitan apocalypse, reflecting the artist’s experience on returning to his home city.

Berlin, he said, was being overrun by ‘possessed human animals’, its streets converted into ‘wild ravines haunted by murderers and drug peddlers’. Feeling isolated and exasperated, Grosz mounted an artistic response to what he saw.

An innately gifted draughtsman, he drew upon influences such as children’s drawings and graffiti found in public urinals to develop what he called his ‘knife-hard drawing style’. It was in this style that Grosz — now in his mid-twenties — produced a stream of satirical, sharply observed pen-and-ink drawings, of which Pandämonium is perhaps the most biting example.

It depicts the entire city of Berlin as a bubbling cauldron of mindlessness and violence. The echoes of the nightmarish visions of medieval masters such as Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel are apt, given that Grosz felt German society was descending into the chaos of a new Middle Ages.

Alfred Kubin, Der Sturm, 1902-03

Produced using a combination of ink, wash and spray, Der Sturm is a remarkable drawing of a man being blown about by the wind — almost like a kite. His tiny head contrasts with his billowing costume. He stands alone in a landscape that is empty, but for a solitary building.

We witness the inexorable pull on the man’s hands of two long reins or strings, which extend towards an unseen, unknown force beyond the picture’s right-hand side. Leaning backwards, and with his legs crossed, the man strains to slow down the momentum thrusting him forwards.

The result is a dynamic composition that suggests contradictory forces at work — as do many of the other images that Alfred Kubin created as a young man, at the very end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th.

The artist had experienced a traumatic childhood, which included witnessing his mother’s death from tuberculosis. He was also a keen reader of books by the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, who explored the notion that the world is controlled by elemental forces and drives we cannot see. Drawings such as Der Sturm suggest that Kubin had become consumed by such ideas himself.

Paul Cezanne, Femme assise (Madame Cezanne), 1902-04

Paul Cezanne’s late watercolours rank among his finest works on paper. The example coming to auction, Femme assise (Madame Cezanne), depicts a woman in an elegant black dress. She wears her hair in a soft chignon and is seated at a table outdoors.

She is brought into being by an intricately layered build-up of watercolour as well as pencil — effervescent clouds of pigment and swift lines of graphite. The sitter is Hortense, Cezanne’s wife and most frequent artistic subject other than himself.

Portraits of her were a key site of exploration and experimentation, through which he could test different approaches to the human figure. He distilled Hortense’s appearance into an array of geometric facets and flattened strokes of colour.

Here, she is viewed in profile, leaning an arm on the table in front of her and turning her torso ever so slightly towards us. Her gaze is focused on the other end of the table, though, perhaps on a companion sitting out of view.

Cezanne limited his palette to a mix of soft, subtly variegated tones of blue, green and ochre. The modulations in the density of his pigment create an impression of the folds of Hortense’s dress, the play of light across the fabric, and the volume of her form beneath it.

Piet Mondrian, Study I for Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942

In September 1940, Piet Mondrian quit war-torn Europe and boarded an ocean liner for New York City. Then aged 68, he would see out the final few years of his life there. Broadway Boogie Woogie — today part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — was the last painting he ever completed, and the Radical Genius sale includes a richly textured charcoal sketch for it.

Brimming with energy, Study I for Broadway Boogie Woogie comprises a complex network of interweaving and overlapping lines. Each of them is swiftly drawn and reflects Mondrian’s exploration of ideas for the painting to come.

The residual echoes of earlier lines, which the artist has partially erased, remain visible. Their shadowy forms coalesce to add a sense of depth and create a ghost-like under-image.

The work is one of two studies Mondrian made for Broadway Boogie Woogie. These are rare items indeed: from the 1920s onwards, few drawings that relate to his finished paintings survive.

Upon arrival in New York, Mondrian had instantly been struck by the city’s vitality — from the bright lights and towering skyscrapers to the vibrant jazz clubs. The work coming to auction, like the final canvas, takes its title from a type of high-energy, piano-based music that Mondrian had never heard before, and which now captivated him: boogie woogie.

The paintings Mondrian produced in the US are marked by a more animated form of abstraction than those he had made in Europe. His signature grid-like compositions are less tightly structured. In the case of Broadway Boogie Woogie and its studies, the pulsating tempos and energetic melodies of the eponymous music are invoked — as is the bustling sense of life in New York City at large.

J.M.W. Turner, Jerusalem from the Latin Convent

In the early 1830s, J.M.W. Turner and a trio of publisher-engravers (William Finden, Edward Finden and John Murray) conceived a project aimed at armchair tourists: to depict ‘remarkable places mentioned in the Bible as they actually exist’. The end result was a book called The Biblical Keepsake: or, landscape illustrations of the most remarkable places mentioned in the Holy Scriptures (1835-36).

Turner would produce roughly a quarter of the 100 images engraved for it, more than any other artist. Contemporaries such as David Roberts and Augustus Wall Callcott also contributed.

Many of Turner’s topographical watercolours were based on pencil sketches that had been made on the spot by the architect Charles Barry, during a visit to historic sites of the eastern Mediterranean earlier that century.

Turner selected a sketch that offered a view over the rooftops of Jerusalem, looking down onto the Christian Quarter in the Old City. In his resulting watercolour, the composition is suffused by golden morning light, prompting the viewer’s eye to squint as it moves across the cityscape of densely packed houses, towers and the domes of religious buildings (such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock).

Ultimately, the image was not chosen for inclusion in the book — probably because Jerusalem was disproportionally represented already. It remains, however, a beautiful rendering of Barry’s source material.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art auctions take place at Christie’s in Paris and online, 8-17 April 2026, and will be on view 9-16 April. Explore the preview exhibition and sales