At half past seven, when everything was over and the TV crews were already putting away their equipment, the auctioneer Markus Krause went to the microphone again and announced what this evening meant for auctions in Germany, namely an absolute record: Never before has a German auction been held Auction offered more for a picture than for Max Beckmann's "Self-Portrait yellow-pink".

An hour earlier, the painting had been traded up from 13 million euros to 20 million euros in a three-minute procedure that was quite factual for the occasion;

Only once did Krause allow himself the friendly warning "Won't come back", then the bid went to a Swiss bidder, who paid 23.2 million euros plus premium.

It was applauded

Nicholas Mak

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The self-portrait, painted in 1943 while in exile in Holland, is an enigmatic picture: what is surprising is the relatively light colors in the work compared to the gloom that characterizes many other Beckmann works of the time.

Some interpreters see the gliding, simultaneously concentrated gaze, the monalisa-like, knowing smile and the folded arms as an attempt by the artist to present himself as someone who finds a higher form of almost Buddhist calm in the horror of war.

On the other hand, the brightness makes the face, which is black in the spotlight, and the dead mirror, which is also black, stand out even more clearly.

Both could also be read as an image of a black-bilious melancholy that encompasses all bodies and things, which not only has to stand for despair,

"Six hours of self-portrait with red and yellow-pink - I think it's done.

Enormously hard," Beckmann wrote about the picture.

He gives it to his wife, who only ever haunts Beckmann literature with her nickname “Quappi” – derived from her maiden name Kaulbach – even though she had the beautiful name Mathilde.

Mathilde Beckmann kept the work until her death in 1986;

In 1996, mediated by the Pels-Leusden gallery, where Bernd Schultz, who later became a Grisebach co-founder, worked, it went to a buyer in Switzerland for “a sum in the region of a few million marks”.

So the work is now going from Switzerland via Berlin back to Switzerland.

evening full of surprises

It may also be due to the good personal contacts that the consignors trusted the German market so much that they didn't put the picture up for auction in London or New York, but rather in Berlin, which per se is not used to record records.

Grisebach then spent 300,000 euros on advertising the work alone, printed 30,000 brochures and shipped the self-portrait to New York for viewing on the international market.

In advance, when asked, a sum of 30 million euros was even given as the upper estimate;

the bidders did not go that far.

The previous Berlin auction record of 5.5 million euros - four years ago for Beckmann's "Ägypterin", also auctioned at Grisebach - was at least tripled.