Cesar
Compressed cars, expanded polyurethane, and a giant bronze thumb.
Cesar Baldaccini, who signed himself simply Cesar, was born in Marseille in 1921 to Italian immigrant parents and trained at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. He began welding scrap metal because he could not afford bronze, and made his reputation with three distinct operations. The Compressions, from 1960, run cars and other metal through an industrial press and present the block that comes out. The Expansions, from 1967, pour polyurethane foam that sets as it spreads. And the Empreintes, enlargements of his own body parts, produced the Pouce — a thumb, cast at every scale from desktop to six metres. He joined Nouveau Realisme in its founding year and died in 1998.
The Pouce and the other Empreintes exist in numbered editions across many sizes and materials — bronze, polished stainless, resin, crystal — so a valuation begins by fixing which size and which edition, information that is normally on the base. Compressions are unique, but scale and the source material vary enormously in desirability. Expansions were sometimes made in public and given away, and provenance for those can be thin. The Cesar estate and the archive maintained for the catalogue raisonne are the authorities on attribution.
If you own a work by Cesar
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.