A masterpiece by Max Beckmann is expected to fetch up to £8 million sterling (€12.9 million) next Thursday at an auction of German and Austrian art at Christie's in London.
A collection of 17 drawings by Gustav Klimt is estimated at about £1 million, while six paintings owned by German collector Hans Ravenborg also feature. In 1997, Christie's sold 10 paintings from the Ravenborg collection for £6.5 million.
Matrose (Sailor), the masterpiece by Max Beckmann, was begun in 1936 and completed the following year in the Netherlands. The sailor, encapsulating freedom of spirit and adventure, is a recurring motif in German art leading up to the second World War. The Nazis branded Beckmann a "degenerate artist". Dismissed from teaching, his works were confiscated from museums and a prohibition placed on exhibitions of his paintings.
It is against this background that Matrose was painted. A full-length sailor, the bronzed, independent seafarer sports tattoos of a naked woman, a snake and an anchor. Wearing an earring and smoking a pipe, he holds a copy of Het Volk, a radical socialist journal that was shut down by the Nazis when they invaded the Netherlands in 1940. It was very unusual for Beckmann to employ any overtly political imagery in his work.
Beckmann and his wife left Germany on July 19th, 1937, the day after Adolf Hitler gave a speech threatening avant-garde artists with sterilisation or imprisonment.
Matrose was transported from Germany to Amsterdam by Beckmann's family, where the explicitly political symbol of Het Volk was added while the painting was being completed, thereby identifying the sailor with a radically free-spirited political view in an increasingly fascist world. Beckmann stayed in Amsterdam until 1947, when he emigrated to the US.
The six paintings from the Hans Ravenborg collection are by highly regarded expressionist painters Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Erich Heckel and Lyonel Feininger. They include Hafen Burgstaaken, Fehmarn (Harbour Burgstaaken, Fehmarn) by Kirchner (1880- 1938), which was painted in 1913 during a summer holiday on the remote German island of Fehmarn in the Baltic Sea.
"There, I painted my first pictures of absolute maturity," Kirchner later said. The harbour picture, which is expected to fetch between £700,000 and £1 million, is a landscape with figures, fishing boats and houses with angular roofs in yellows, blues and greens.
The collection also features Auf der Brⁿcke (On the Bridge) by Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), estimated at £300,000 to £400,000.
The 1913 oil on canvas depicts an old stone bridge over the river Ilm in Ober-Weimar - a bridge he painted three times on separate occasions, all in different styles.
A private German collector has put up for auction Dunkle Augen (Dark Eyes), an oil on board by Alexej von Jawlensky (1864- 1941) painted in 1912 at the apex of the artist's expressionist work. It portrays the head of Helene Neznakomova, whom he later married. Its strong colour contributes to a sense of the inner truth of its subject rather than an accuracy of portraiture.
This work is expected to fetch between £700,000 and £1 million.
The 17 drawings by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), which are expected to realise about £1 million, span from 1905 to close to the artist's death.
They include sketches, erotic drawings and studies for his late masterpieces. The collection exudes Klimt's obsession with women. All of the pieces seem to have been signed in one session in 1917 and are executed on fine imitation Japan paper rather than cheaper paper he had used for sketches before 1906. Christie's suggest this reflects his changed attitude to the importance of drawings and that he now regarded them as important works in their own right.
One of the sketches of the young aristocrat Ria Munk, done in pencil with red and dark blue crayon on paper, is expected to make £120,000 to £160,000.
Christie's website: www.christies.com.
jmarms@irish-times.ie
