With Max Beckmann's "Self-Portrait Yellow-Rose" on December 1st, the Grisebach auction house is launching its winter auctions to leap to international price levels for self-portraits by the expressionist - and to the top spot in local auction sales.

The painting from 1943 is estimated at 20 to 30 million euros.

It appeared on the art market for the first time and never again after that in 1996. At that time it came from the possession of the artist's widow, Mathilde "Quappi" Beckmann, and it was brokered by the Berlin gallery Pels-Leusden, whose director was Grisebach co-founder Bernd Schultz for a time. for "a sum in the range of a few million marks" to a private buyer.

It now leads the Selected Works auction.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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With 57 lots, it spans the spectrum from Prussian Classicism to Viennese Actionism, from three gilded bronze Nereids by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (estimate 50,000 to 70,000 euros each) to a blood-red “Stations of the Cross” with a painting shirt on canvas by Hermann Nitsch (180,000/240,000). .

Max Pechstein, Gabriele Münter, Egon Schiele and Wassily Kandinsky are the top performers.

The Berlin Impressionist Max Liebermann is well represented: Among the six works he offers, a “Flock of Sheep” painted in 1888 arouses the highest expectations (250,000/350,000);

a “Self-Portrait with a Peaked Cap” (30,000/40,000) drawn in 1923 provides an insight into the artist's self-questioning.

By Otto Dix, also represented several times, "Cats, dedicated to Theodor Däubler" from 1920 is one of the few Dadaist works by the artist still in private ownership.

The estimated price is correspondingly high: 800,000 to 1.2 million euros.

With a sharply socially critical eye, like Dix in other phases of his work, Georg Kinzer captured a “Blind Beggar (Berlin, Tauentzienstraße)” in a painting in 1930/32 that is said to bring in 30,000 to 40,000 euros.

Among the sculptures, the life-size "Sitting Figures" created by Lynn Chadwick in 1979/80, cast in bronze and starting at an upper estimate of 1.2 million, could again exceed the million mark.

By contrast, George Segal's melancholy “Woman on Park Bench” from 1998 seems frozen in time (200,000/300,000).

The following day, December 2nd, another 424 works of modern and contemporary art will go under the hammer in two auctions.

Landscapes of classical modernism and expressionism enrich the offer in a wide range.

Figures in ecstatic circular motion, on the other hand, are shown by Ludwig von Hofmann's "Reigen" (40,000/60,000), painted in oil around 1905.

Rosemarie Trockel sets a special highlight among the contemporaries: her monumental knitted picture created in 1990 is monochrome deep blue and is estimated at 300,000 to 400,000 euros.

AR Penck gutted the Temple of the Muses in a different way in 1986: he painted a temple facade in black and white with just a few strokes of the brush next to a stick figure (150,000/200,000).

The photography auction will take place exclusively online this winter.