Auction introduction: Christie’s London will host its 20th/21st Century Evening Sale on 7 March 2024, featuring major works by some of the period’s most significant artists. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition, the Sale will feature several works by leading figures of the movement – including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro – as well as highlighting their revolutionary impact on subsequent generations of artists. David Hockney’s California (1965), a rare early masterpiece seen in public for the first time in over forty years, transposes the time-honoured subject of the bathing scene to a West Coast world of hedonism, sunlight and swimming pools. Francis Bacon’s extraordinary Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963) channels the artist’s love of Van Gogh into a poignant memorial to his great love Peter Lacy. Elsewhere, a trio of Scandinavian artists – Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and August Strindberg – explore the alternate visions of landscape that defined their time. A rich group of German Expressionist paintings, including works by Max Pechstein and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, find echoes in 1980s works by Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck and Anselm Kiefer. Portraits by Pablo Picasso complement the Pop-infused subjects of Andy Warhol and Alex Katz. A double portrait by Alice Neel captures her seminal contribution to the genre in 1960s New York. Vibrant paintings by Lynne Drexler and Bridget Riley represent the women at the vanguard of post-war abstraction. From works by Vincent van Gogh and Marc Chagall to Lucio Fontana and Eduardo Chillida, the sale offers a rich opportunity to explore Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art in dialogue.