Manina's Avere non è possedere (1963) belongs to one of the most consequential periods of her career. Born Marianne Tischler in Paris in 1918 to Expressionist painter Viktor Tischler, she became, at eighteen, a muse to photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, then fled rising antisemitism for Los Angeles in 1938. She later settled permanently in Venice in 1952 and painted this work three years after her daughter Nina's death in 1960 — a turn toward the mature language that carried her to the 1964 Venice Biennale.

The composition centers on a burnished gold orb — one of Manina's sun-and-egg motifs — set against a haze of red, feather-like brushwork reading at once as flame, plumage, and a faint mask-like face. Below it, a sharp red form fans downward into needle-thin rays, echoed by a pale crescent of white and blue-gray curling beneath like a wing. Rendered in thin, calligraphic strokes of red, gold, and ash-blue, it suits a canvas whose verso carries, in the artist's own hand, a lyrical passage on flight and fire and one of her most direct philosophical statements.

The painting comes from the collection of Albert Wolsky, the two-time Academy Award-winning costume designer behind All That Jazz, Bugsy, and Grease. Born in Paris in 1930, Wolsky fled Nazi-occupied France as a child and, like Manina, built a career translating interior experience into unforgettable images.