"Self-Portrait with Pipe" is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's first self-portrait in oil, and it occupies a special position in his work: the Brücke painter created it in 1907, at the beginning of his artistic career, under the influence of van Gogh.
It was only rarely exhibited in public: in 1931 and 1958 at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, in 1952 at the Kunsthaus Zürich and in 2007 in the exhibition “Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism” in New York and Amsterdam.
From 1981 it was owned by an American private collector.
It is now being sold to settle the restitution claim of the heirs of the great Jewish collector Hugo Simon, who had to flee from the National Socialists from Berlin to Paris and on to Rio de Janeiro in 1941.
Kirchner's self-portrait is on 29.
One of the top lots in the Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction at Sotheby's in London in June and estimated at £8m to £12m.
It will be called with no guarantee.
A focus of the summer event with Modern and Contemporary at Christie's and Sotheby's is post-war art, especially British, in keeping with the exhibition Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965, which is just concluding at London's Barbican Centre.
Phillips relies on international female artists, who will provide a third of the lots in the evening auction.
All three companies have paintings by the trendy young painter Anna Weyant in their program as well as sculptures by Simone Leigh, who was the first African-American artist to display in the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion this year.
At Christie's 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 June, Leigh is the first lot to feature 'Untitled V (Anatomy of Architecture series)' (estimate £300,000-500,000),
a woman's head made of black terracotta with tightly rolled porcelain roses as a hairstyle.
The topless by Yves Klein and Claude Monet harmonize in their shades of blue: Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume" (22/32 million) rising from the pale haze of the Thames comes from the estate of Paul Bulova Guilden.
His "Nymphéas, temps gris" (20/30 million) were once owned by the Onassis family.
The eight imprints of naked female bodies on a blue background in Yves Klein's "Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue, (ANT 124)", which is more than three meters wide, appear as if they are floating in water. It was created in 1960. It was in the Essen collection of the architect Werner Ruhnau and is said to score "around £24million".
The topless by Yves Klein and Claude Monet harmonize in their shades of blue: Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume" (22/32 million) rising from the pale haze of the Thames comes from the estate of Paul Bulova Guilden.
His "Nymphéas, temps gris" (20/30 million) were once owned by the Onassis family.
The eight imprints of naked female bodies on a blue background in Yves Klein's "Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue, (ANT 124)", which is more than three meters wide, appear as if they are floating in water. It was created in 1960. It was in the Essen collection of the architect Werner Ruhnau and is said to score "around £24million".
The topless by Yves Klein and Claude Monet harmonize in their shades of blue: Monet's "Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume" (22/32 million) rising from the pale haze of the Thames comes from the estate of Paul Bulova Guilden.
His "Nymphéas, temps gris" (20/30 million) were once owned by the Onassis family.
The eight imprints of naked female bodies on a blue background in Yves Klein's "Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue, (ANT 124)", which is more than three meters wide, appear as if they are floating in water. It was created in 1960. It was in the Essen collection of the architect Werner Ruhnau and is said to score "around £24million".
temps gris” (20/30 million) were once owned by the Onassis family.
The eight imprints of naked female bodies on a blue background in Yves Klein's "Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue, (ANT 124)", which is more than three meters wide, appear as if they are floating in water. It was created in 1960. It was in the Essen collection of the architect Werner Ruhnau and is said to score "around £24million".
temps gris” (20/30 million) were once owned by the Onassis family.
The eight imprints of naked female bodies on a blue background in Yves Klein's "Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue, (ANT 124)", which is more than three meters wide, appear as if they are floating in water. It was created in 1960. It was in the Essen collection of the architect Werner Ruhnau and is said to score "around £24million".
Christie's is targeting sales of between £135.6m and £188.8m for the 63 lots in its evening auction.
Jeff Koons' monumental sculpture 'Balloon Monkey (Magenta)', gleaming in the sun outside in St James's Square, is expected to contribute six to ten million.
Like last summer, Sotheby's has added an evening auction of British art to its Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction.
They are expected to gross between £145.3m and £203.3m along with 81 tickets.
This roughly corresponds to the turnover in the past year.
The top lot in British Art: The Jubilee Auction - in honor of the Queen's Jubilee - is Francis Bacon's 1964 Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, which is guaranteed and irrevocably bid in a European private collection in the early 1980s, is valued at “more than” £35m.
It was only on public display in 1965.
Among sculptures by Henry Moore and Lynn Chadwick, Barbara Hepworth's elegantly carved "Elegy" (1.7/2.5 million) stands out.
The younger generation is represented by Flora Yukhnovich, among others, with her painting "Boucher's Flesh" (200,000/300,000) inspired by the Rococo.
John Constable's cloud painting "Cloud Study" (100,000/150,000), created around 1822 but very contemporary in appearance, is the prelude.
More important, however, is Gerhard Richter's interpretation in "Study for Clouds (Contre-jour)" (6/8 million) in the "Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction".
Here the top lot is a "self-portrait" (12/18 million) of Warhol from an American private collection.
Paul Klee is represented four times among the German artists, Georg Baselitz with two paintings.
The 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale at Phillips on June 30 features 35 lots with a total estimate of £16.16m to £22.13m.
The painter Antonia Showering will kick things off with “We Stray” (40,000/60,000).
She only graduated from London's Slade School of Art in 2018.
Cy Twombly tops the list with the canvas "Untitled" (3/4 million), created in Rome in 1962.
Simone Leigh's portrait sculpture “Clarendon” (800,000/1.2 million) refers to an important chapter in the history of the American civil rights movement: protests against school segregation began in Clarendon County, South Carolina in the 1940s.
Michelangelo Pistoletto's "Ragazza in minigonna/Ragazza seduta per terra" (1.8/2.2 million), printed on polished steel,