In 1986, five art dealers decided to jointly found a new auction house in Berlin: Grisebach, named for the stately villa in which it has now been located for 35 years. On the occasion of this anniversary, Grisebach has peppered its auctions from 1-3 December with many exciting highlights.
Since it was founded, Grisebach has focused on art from the 19th century to the present. This is also the case on 2 December, when the 39 lots in the catalogue 'From Emil Nolde to Kenneth Noland - Selected Works' will be offered.
First of all, two works of German Expressionism must be pointed out, each with a seven-figure estimate and both of which have a sea theme. Emil Nolde captured the North Sea dramatically under a glowing red sky in 1947. He then gave the result, Meer (I), to his late love and second wife Jolanthe for Christmas, who owned it until her death in 2010. It is now being offered on the art market for the first time.
Max Beckmann's Bathers with a green cabin and boatmen in red trousers also hits the art market for the first time with the this auction. The painting from 1 July 1934 was created during the artist's vacation in the Dutch seaside resort of Zandvoort. Beckmann found himself in the midst of a difficult time: the year before he had been dismissed from his professorship because of the new government, and in 1937 he was defamed as a 'degenerate artist', whereupon he left Germany.
Although Otto Dix's extensive oeuvre includes around 500 self-portraits, these are rarely offered on the art market. However, this sale offers a self-portrait from 1913, when the moody and determined artist looks out from the canvas aged 22.
The second artist named in the title of this auction is Kenneth Noland, one of the main exponents of American colour field painting. The present work Sun Dried: Japanese Space was one of the earliest examples of a 'shaped canvas' in 1963 and was exhibited in 1977 at the Noland retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
On the basis of this work carried out on rice paper in 1998, we can observe Christopher Wool as he left the path that he had trod ten years earlier in order to turn to something new. At the end of the 1980s, the art world became aware of Wool's works with large-format black letters. With the present work, he left these 'word paintings' behind in order to focus exclusively on works featuring abstract painting.
Wool's work comes from the collection of the Berliner Sparkasse, to which another special auction is dedicated on the same day of the auction. A total of 43 lots with works by important contemporary artists such as Neo Rauch, Rainer Fetting, So LeWtt, Maria Lassnig and Markus Lüpertz will be up for bids.
One of the highlights of this auction is a collage that Christo made as a preparatory study for the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin. The art project finally became a reality in the summer of 1995 after the artist and his wife and partner Jeanne-Claude had conceived of the idea in 1971.
The Danish artist Per Kirkeby is represented with three works in this auction, including the large-format (200 x 130 cm) Die Zeit nagt I from 1992.
Contemporary art will head to auction on 3 December with a sale of 100 lots. It is important to point out AR Penck's work SPIELEN UND BAUEN (translating to Playing and Building),which was created at a time when the artist, who melds influences from cave painting and street art, was integrating his incisive stick figures into the structure of his symbols.
The 19th century sale will be hosted on 1 December. A highlight is Max Liebermann's Der Witwer, an early masterpiece that the young painter executed the year after completing his studies at the Weimar Academy. At the time, Liebermann was heavily influenced by the French realists and the Dutch old masters. However, the critics in his homeland generally found his rather dark pictures with protagonists from rural life to be ugly.
Théodore Gudin's painting Shipwreck at Castello sul Mare in Rapallo from 1833, which was in the private apartments of the tsarist family in the Saint Petersburg Winter Palace from 1912 to 1915, takes us back to the sea. Rudin himself stayed in Russia in the mid-1830s at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas I, while he completed private commissions with the ruling family.
In 1998, Grisebach added photography to its offerings. Of course, this is also part of the anniversary auction and will be auctioned on the evening of 1 December.
In the spectacular offer 'The Art of Photography - A New York Collection', of which around 120 lots come from a US private collection, only the best artists in their field are represented, from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Dorothea Lange to Alfred Stieglitz and László Moholy-Nagy to Robert Frank and Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose personal favorite Das Bäumchen is on a print from 1929.
The top lot of the offer is an icon of fashion and nude photography par excellence: Helmut Newton's models walk towards the camera in this two-part work, dressed and unclothed. The gelatin silver prints, which come from a numbered edition of 10 each, are signed, titled and dated in pencil on the reverse.
The auctions will take place from 1-3 December in the Villa Grisebach, Fasanenstraße 27, in Berlin. The exhibition for the anniversary auction will be open there from 23-30 November.