Museum quality collections and stars of the present day

The Evening Sale at Lempertz excites with artworks from museums, private collections and from the estates of the artists themselves.

Museum Wiesbaden is currently showing to great resonance the exhibition ‘Max Pechstein - The Sun in Black and White’, featuring the self-portrait by the Expressionist, which Lempertz auctioned very successfully last season. The upcoming auction on 4th June will now feature a double work by Max Pechstein: On one side the canvas bears a ‘Still Life with Pipe’, on the other ‘Palau Girl’, (lot 13, estimate € 600/800,000), a scene from the painter's South Seas sojourn, from which only a few works survived. Created in 1917, the work was first exhibited in 1918 and most recently in the major exhibition ‘Max Pechstein - Sein malerisches Werk’ (Brücke Museum/Kunsthalle Tübingen/Kunsthalle zu Kiel).

Reclining Nude (lot 42, estimate € 700/800,000) by Heinrich Campendonk has until now only been on show as a loan to museums. The painting from 1918, and thus from the painter's decisive time in Seeshaupt, comes from the artist's estate. After the First World War and the loss of his fallen painter friends Macke and Marc, he retreated there for personal consolidation and artistic reorientation. This painting characterises the beginning of his new creative phase, which commenced here. To this day, ‘Reclining Nude’ has remained in the possession of the Campendonk family, who have only now consigned it to Lempertz for auction.

The Max Ernst Museum in Brühl houses the largest part of the Schneppenheim Collection. The works of Max Ernst caught the attention of the Cologne doctor Peter Schneppenheim early on: ‘My enthusiasm for the unusual, previously unseen works of art, probably also fuelled by euphoria after having just passed my state examination, gave me the idea of acquiring paintings by this artist myself.’ Over the decades, he built up one of the most important private collections, which ultimately contributed to the founding of the Max Ernst Museum. Some of his favourite pieces from this collection, however, remained in the family. Lempertz will be offering a selection of these important works by Max Ernst at the auction on 4th June, including ‘Mobiles Herbarium’ from 1920 (lot 32, estimate € 250,000), ‘Les trois philosophes (The Three Philosophers)’ (lot 33, estimate € 200,000) and the bronze ‘Janus’ (lot 35, estimate € 50,000).

Emil Nolde's Dahlias (lot 39, estimate € 700,000) was previously on permanent loan to the Brücke Museum in Berlin. The work from 1948, with its blossoms presented in rich oil colours, not only stands for the power and splendour of life, but also allows a sideways glance into the artist's world. Between the flowers, the path through the beds of the garden that Nolde had laid out in his house in Seebüll is recognisable. The work comes from the estate of his widow Jolanthe Nolde.

Furthermore, the selection of lots for the Modernism section on the evening of 4th June includes important and rare works by Bauhaus masters such as Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks and Oskar Schlemmer, as well as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Klee, Alexeij von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Egon Schiele, Otto Modersohn, Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

Typical women's work? This has long since ceased to exist, and Rosemarie Trockel's artistic work has played its part in this social development. Her movable two-part wall installation ‘Reißverschlussphantom’ (lot 29, estimate € 300/400,000) stands out amongst the contemporary art on offer. Having borrowed the sewing kit motif from the field of needlework, expectations fuelled by tradition are combined here to create something unfamiliar and confusing. Soft pastel colours meet the hard Aludibond picture support, some are fully sculpted, others inserted as trompe-l'œil. The movement of the kinetic object completes the dynamic of the unexpected.

‘Ein Werktätiger’ by Georg Baselitz (lot 9, estimate € 350/450,000) also features in the auction. This early fracture painting from 1967 deconstructs a powerful, almost coarse-looking figure. Born in 1938, Baselitz thematises war, violence and their consequences in this group of works. The labourer is a motif typical of this phase of his work.

Cady Noland's work deals with a very similar subject area. Violence and media play an important role in her works; harshness is a dominant feature of the materials she chooses. In ‘Pole Distortion’ (lot 58, estimate € 120/150,000), this hardness is evident on various levels as she applies a metal coin container to an aluminium pole.

Jonas Burgert's ‘Täuschung’ (lot 50, estimate € 150/200,000) is a typical large format offered in the auction. On a 350 x 250-centimetre canvas, he stages the ‘world theatre’ around a giant in the centre of the composition.

The Contemporary Art section of the Evening Sale also offers works by Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Norbert Bisky, Candida Höfer and many more.

For questions or printable images please contact me.

Jan Bykowski
Press and Public Relations
info@lempertz.com
Tel. 0221 925729 -57