You See Shapes and Colors, We See the Language of Abstraction: The Cox Collection | Sotheby’s

Maybe they didn’t all speak French or German or Hungarian or English. But they were all speaking the language of modernism. The Cox Collection traces the transatlantic circulation of ideas that shaped modern art in the 20th century. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers brought ideas forged in Europe to the United States, where they transformed American visual culture. Ad Reinhardt took those ideas in distinctly American directions. Alongside them: Charles Green Shaw and the Park Avenue Cubists, Theodore Roszak, Irene Rice Pereira, Burgoyne Diller, Raymond Jonson of the Transcendental Painting Group, Albert Gallatin, and Charles Biederman, whose painted wood and glass is a painting and a sculpture at once. At its center is Jean Hélion’s Composition au bain bleu, begun in Paris and finished in Virginia after the artist relocated to the United States in 1936. There is no obvious subject. That’s the whole point. Works from the Cox Collection will be offered in the Modern Day Auction on 19 November at the historic Breuer building in New York, presented in partnership with Celine. Still haven’t subscribed to Sotheby’s on YouTube? ►► https://www.youtube.com/sothebys/ Want more information about the sale? ►► https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2026/modern-day-auction-7 #modernart #abstraction #kandinsky