Behan-inspired work set to make millions

A GERMAN painting “inspired” by Brendan Behan reading his poetry drunk on stage with his trouser flies open, is expected to sell for millions of euro.

Sotheby's announced yesterday that the oil-on-canvas, Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer(the big night down the drain), by artist Georg Baselitz (73), would be auctioned in London in June with an estimate of £2-3 million (€2.25-3.35 million).

The international fine art auctioneers described the painting as “the most important German work of art of the postwar period to come to the market”.

It was painted in 1962-1963 by Baselitz, one of Germany’s best-known and admired artists, when he was 24.

Baselitz achieved notoriety in Germany with the Behan image. Although the two men apparently never met, the painting was inspired by a newspaper article the artist had read about the incident involving the Irish writer.

Baselitz painted three versions of Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer. A watercolour version hangs in New York's Museum of Modern Art, while a sister painting of the one being auctioned is owned by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

When the Ludwig version was unveiled in 1963 in Berlin, it was confiscated by the director of public prosecutions on grounds of “infringement of public morality”, and the artist and gallery owners were fined.

Baselitz’s mother famously asked her son: “Why don’t you paint pretty flowers instead?”

Sotheby's said that "for the artist, Die Grosse Nacht im Eimerrepresents the ultimate provocation, which he of course considers the ultimate and inevitable purpose of his painting".

The picture is owned by a German aristocrat, Count Christian Duerckheim-Ketelhodt, who is selling his collection of contemporary art.

Sotheby’s has valued the 59 works – “the most significant and defining German Art of the 1960s and 1970s” – at £33 million and claimed the collection “demonstrates Count Duerckheim’s expert understanding, curatorial intelligence, judgment, connoisseurship and passion”.

Brendan Behan, the Dublin-born writer and IRA activist who died in 1964, frequently appeared drunk in public. He is best-known for his autobiographical novel Borstal Boyand his play The Quare Fellow. Both were based on his experiences in British and Irish jails where he served time for IRA-related offences.