Record at Grisebach auction: 20 million euros for a Beckmann painting

Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait Yellow-Rose” was sold at the Berlin auction house Grisebach for 20 million euros, the highest sum ever paid at a German art auction.

The estimated price for the expressionist work from 1943 was 20 to 30 million euros, with a buyer’s premium the picture has now changed hands for 23.3 million euros. Even if the auction sum is below the maximum estimate, the painting achieved the German record price expected in the last few days.

The bidder sat at the front of the hall on Fasanenstrasse and only got on at lot number 19. That took a long time because several pictures by Edouard Gaertner or Georg Kinzer had already reached three times their estimated value. Normally that would be a case for heavy applause in the auction room at Grisebach. But everyone was waiting for Beckmann’s self-portrait, which auctioneer Markus Krause announced as an “outstanding” work – and as one of the last self-portraits by the artist that could still be purchased.

An outstanding work.

Grisebach auctioneer Markus Krause

Other portraits of Beckmann hang in the museums of New York, Munich and Berlin. This one was a gift to Beckmann’s wife Quappi, who kept it until her death in 1986. It then succeeded in private ownership until the very end – which makes it all the more valuable.

It became very quiet the moment Krause started with 13 million euros on behalf of an anonymous customer. The bids that had already been submitted ranged up to 17 million. Then a man in the hall came in at 18 million, and a second bid came back at 18.5 million. When 19 million were called, another telephone bidder got in through one of the Grisebach employees and rounded up the bid by 500,000 euros. At 20 million, however, he also gave up. Beckmann’s picture ended up going to a Swiss private collection – which was represented by an employee of the auction house sitting in the hall. The work had previously belonged to a Swiss collection.

“No comparable work has been offered on the German auction market since 1945,” said Micaela Kapitzky, director and partner of the auction house, in the run-up to the auction on the quality of Beckmann’s portrait. Private collectors, museums and institutions from all over the world had expressed an interest in buying the painting. This is also due to the fact that of Beckmann’s 35 oil self-portraits, only four or five are still in private collections. The highest hammer price at a German auction in 2018 at Grisebach was also a Beckmann, his “Egyptian”, at 5.5 million euros.

The masterpiece of German Expressionism was previously in private hands. Beckmann painted it in Amsterdam in 1943. For Kapitzky, the self-portrait is also evidence of the deep love between the painter and his wife against the backdrop of the horrors of World War II. “Quappi kept it the whole time, until her death – she never parted with it,” says Kapitzky.

Silent death and fire around me. And yet I live.

Max Beckmann in his diary, 1940.

The artist, born in 1884, was popular in Germany until the Nazi regime defamed his politically charged art as “degenerate” and had it removed from German museums in 1937. Slowed down professionally and increasingly threatened, Beckmann went to Amsterdam and ten years later to the United States.

“Silent death and fire around me. And yet I am alive,” he wrote in his diary after the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940. In Amsterdam, Beckmann, who was already a star, knew no poverty, unlike the majority of the 20,000 German emigrants there. It was a productive decade, during which he created about a third of his complete oeuvre.

But in contrast to the somber black tones of many of the paintings created there, the self-portrait now auctioned appears friendlier and sunnier, with surprisingly light colors. “When it arrived, I thought, ‘Wow, what a power this painting exudes,'” said auctioneer Markus Krause.

Beckmann, who died of a heart attack on the street in New York at the age of 66 – he was on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where his “Self-Portrait in a Blue Jacket” was on display – is now regarded as one of the most important artists of the 20th century th century.

The value and prices of his artworks have skyrocketed in recent decades. His “Self-Portrait with Trumpet” was auctioned on the international market in 2001 for the equivalent of a good 23 million euros, four years later “Self-Portrait with a Crystal Ball” for more than 17 million euros in New York. His painting “Hell of the Birds”, which is one of his most important anti-Nazi statements, was auctioned at Christie’s in London in 2017 for 41 million euros – the international record for a work of German Expressionism. (cmx, AFP, dpa)

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