Measured against his size, the stride of this little man may not be anything special, but for Alberto Giacometti it was like a great leap forward: the Swiss artist first used his famous motif of the striding one in the monument design "Projet pour un monument pour Gabriel Péri" in 1946 man out.

The two small bronze sculptures were the top lot at Lempertz's evening sale with modernism and contemporary in December, achieved their top estimate and became the fifth most expensive work of art sold at auction in Germany in 2022 with the hammer price of 2.2 million euros.

A nice success for the Cologne house, which amounted to a strong annual turnover of 50.1 million euros, which, however, remained just below the previous year's 51 million.

Lempertz had hoped to bring in eleven million euros with the wintry evening auction of modern and contemporary art;

at the end there was a turnover of 10.2 million.

Many a lot of classic modernism did not meet expectations, such as Gabriele Münter's painting "Houses in the Forest", which was created during her time in the so-called Russenhaus in Murnau am Staffelsee, where Münter lived from 1909 to 1911 with Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin lived.

Estimated at 300,000 to 350,000 euros, only 250,000 euros were approved for the impressively simple picture.

For Jawlensky's head, painted in 1913, the hammer fell at 360,000 euros (estimate up to 400,000 euros);

his “Mystic Head”, created four years later, came in at 260,000 euros, below estimate (300,000/400,000).

At 290,000 euros, Josef Albers' blue-violet “Becher” made of sandblasted glass from 1929 just missed its lower estimate (300,000/400,000).

The New York art trade was able to win over Albers' only surviving work with colored overlaid glass.

The original top work of the auction, Jean-Paul Riopelle's canvas "Automne II-Symphonie" from 1954, was sold at 460,000 euros, well below its estimate (600,000/700,000).

The auctions of paintings, drawings and sculptures from the 14th to the 19th century went better in November: they brought in 8.6 million euros compared to an expectation of 5.9 million.

The top lot – a haunting portrait of an old man by Rembrandt’s friend Jan Lievens, which was recently discovered in a Rhenish private collection and was estimated at 500,000 to 600,000 euros – remained unsold.

renegotiations are ongoing.

On the other hand, the triptych “Ecce Homo” from the early 16th century by the Antwerp Mannerist Adriaen van Overbeke triumphed at 620,000 euros, well above the estimate (400,000/450,000).

A forest floor still life by the Frankfurt painter Abraham Mignon, who died early, of which only 69 autograph works are known, came to 360,000 euros (up to 400,000),

Among the works from the 19th century, Oswald Achenbach’s veduta of the Quirinale Palace in Rome from 1892 was particularly convincing. After a long bidding war, Roman art dealers secured the imposing painting for 100,000 euros – double its upper estimate (40,000/50,000).

Carl Rottmann's "Aulis", a landscape from his 32-painting Greece cycle for King Ludwig I, was also sold far in excess of the expectation of 25,000 to 30,000 euros: an English collector only got hold of the painting from 1847 for 83,000 euros.