Modern Masters: 20th Century Art — Highlights of the Autumn 2026 Auction

On Saturday 17 October 2026 at 17:00 CEST Aurora & Athena holds its autumn live sale, Modern Masters: 20th Century Art: twenty-six works that follow the century from the Lyon school of the 1890s to the Paris of the 1970s, with stops in the Himalayas, Prague, Shanghai, Johannesburg and Antananarivo. Bidding is open now for absentee bids, and the room opens online on the day.

At the heart of the catalogue are five works of museum weight: a surrealist panel by Bridget Tichenor from a Mexico City collection, a Himalayan tempera by Nicholas Roerich once owned by his patron Louis L. Horch, a night-time still life of roses by Konstantin Korovin from his Paris years, a 1974 township street by Gerard Sekoto, and Jan Zrzavý’s Městečko of 1947, signed and inscribed by the artist. Around them stand the painters of the École de Paris and the French provinces, a flower piece attributed to Pan Yuliang, a signed Joan Miró lithograph published by Maeght in 1958, and views of Venice, Saint-Tropez, Cordes-sur-Ciel and the Antananarivo flower market.

Bridget Tichenor: a woman in a crystal cube

A young woman in a red jersey floats weightless inside a block of ice standing on a green plain under a storm-blue sky; three cats and two serpents keep watch at its foot. Tichenor (1917–1990), Paris-born and raised between England, Italy and Mexico, painted in the slow, glazed manner of the Old Masters on smooth Masonite panels, and this one shows the technique at its best — the transparency of the ice, the wind in the hair, the individually painted blades of grass. It comes from a Mexico City collection and then a Brussels collection, and has never been offered at auction before. View lot 13 →

Nicholas Roerich from the Horch collection

Snow peaks lit from below by crimson cloud, a violet ridge, the deep folds of a Himalayan valley: a tempera on cardboard from the series of mountain studies Roerich painted after settling in the Kullu valley, signed with his monogram. The provenance is the point — the work was formerly in the collection of Louis L. Horch, the New York financier who built the Roerich Museum on Riverside Drive, and passed through a New York family and a German private collection before reaching the present owner. View lot 4 →

Konstantin Korovin: roses against the Paris night

Red roses and a single white one crowd a glass vase by an open window; beyond, the blue night of Paris glitters with lamps. Korovin returned again and again to this motif in his Paris years, and signed his French-period canvases, as here, ‘C. Korovine’. The picture is painted at speed and with evident joy, the flowers laid in with loaded, wet brushstrokes, and comes to us unframed on its original stretcher from a French private collection. View lot 15 →

Gerard Sekoto, 1974: the township remembered from Paris

A dusty township street under a pale sky: a man in a white hat pushes a bicycle, a woman in a blue blouse walks towards us with a bundle on her head. Painted in Paris in 1974 and signed and dated in red, this is one of Sekoto’s memory pictures of the Sophiatown and Eastwood of his youth, recalled after nearly three decades of exile — the sandy pinks and ochres, the figures reduced to strong rhythmic silhouettes, the street receding on the diagonal. Readers of our Sekoto profile will recognise the period at once. View lot 12 →

Jan Zrzavý: Městečko, 1947

White houses with roofs of red, blue and violet gather around a church with a pointed spire; a road winds up through grass scratched into the tempera stroke by stroke, under a sky of blue dots. ‘Městečko’ — the little town — is a distilled, almost toy-like vision of a Czech village by one of the founders of Czech modern art, signed and dated ‘47’ on the front and inscribed with title, medium and date on the reverse. Acquired in Prague by the family of the present owner in 2018. View lot 8 →

Attributed to Pan Yuliang, and a Miró from Maeght

Red carnations, white and pink roses and sprays of blossom burst from a blue-and-white Chinese vase against a mauve wall, in thick, rapid, directional brushwork; the canvas is signed in Chinese characters and dated ‘44’. It is offered as attributed to Pan Yuliang, the most celebrated woman painter of modern China, who painted flowers in Chinese vases constantly after her return to Paris in 1937. View lot 18 →

Two of Miró’s creatures — one with a round, staring head and a body of black bars, the other a small mask on a curling line — on tawny Arches paper: a lithograph published in Paris by Maeght Éditeur in 1958, signed ‘Miró’ in pencil and numbered 52/100. View lot 2 →

The École de Paris and the French provinces

A Montmartre street market seen from above, the crowd reduced to dashes of violet, red and black — Georges Berger, the close friend of Gen Paul, at his most Expressionist. Beside him: Jules Cavaillès’ Cordes-sur-Ciel, titled by the artist on the reverse (lot →); Willem Van Hasselt’s silvery pond in the Luxembourg Gardens (lot →); Henry Maurice D’Anty’s palette-knife village fair (lot →); and two canvases by Marcel Cramoysan of the École de Rouen, Le Tir forain (lot →) and Le Balcon fleuri (lot →), both titled on the reverse.

Harbours, canals and a flower market

Jean Rambinintsoa’s 1963 flower market under white parasols is the Analakely market of Antananarivo, the signature subject of modern Malagasy painting. Henri Laulhé paints the fishing boats of Saint-Tropez below the church tower (lot →); Venice comes twice, as Vittorio Botticini’s post-Cubist canal at sunset in gouache (lot →) and Paolo Forcella’s evening rio with a Baroque façade (lot →); Josef Syrový’s Venetian girl with a water jug (lot →) and André Lynen’s steamer entering harbour, dated 1936 (lot →), complete the group, with a pointillist marine by Paul Flaubert (lot →) and Théodore Lévigne’s river landscape with a stone bridge (lot →).

Nudes and works on paper

Three gladiators fight in a bare, box-like room while a fourth lies fallen — an engraving from the gladiator cycle, offered as attributed to Giorgio de Chirico and signed in pencil. Pierre Ernest Kohl’s seated nude of 1925 (lot →) is a watercolour study from his Paris years among Max Jacob and Picasso; Édouard Collin, Grand Prix de Rome and poster artist of the French Line, draws an avenue of plane trees in a Provençal town (lot →). Henrique Franco’s nude before the mirror (lot →) and Salvatore Rodriguez’s Nu sur le lit blanc (lot →) round off the figure painting in the sale.

How to bid

The full catalogue with estimates, condition summaries and high-resolution photographs is online at Modern Masters: 20th Century Art – Autumn 2026. Register once to bid: you can leave an absentee bid on any lot now, and join the live room from the lot or catalogue page on 17 October. Detailed condition reports are available on request before the sale; see our How to Bid page and the Terms and Conditions for the buyer’s premium and payment terms. Follow an artist on the site and we will write to you when a work by them is offered.