This Spring, Grisebach is set to make a mark on the German auction market by launching its most extensive summer auction season in over two decades. The Berlin auction house cordially invites you to take part in what promises to be a brilliant art event! Over 500 works (with a lower estimate totaling roughly EUR 20 million) will be coming under the hammer on 5th and 6th June 2025, at our Fasanenstrasse venues, among them icons of modern art, a rare Renaissance treasure, as well as ground-breaking contemporary works.
An iconic painting by Lyonel Feininger
Ludwig Justi, director of Berlin’s National Gallery, was among the first to be impressed by Lyonel Feininger’s Vollersroda III from 1916. Acknowledging this “darkly magnificent” painting as a visual paradigm for a new era, he acquired it in 1919 for his Galerie der Lebenden, the new modern art space he was establishing at the Kronprinzenpalais. With this painting, Feininger had found his unmistakable, Cubo-Futuristic aesthetic. Of museum quality, with an impressive provenance and exhibition history, it is a foundational early work by this later master of the Bauhaus School (EUR 1,000,000 / 1,500,000). Like a number of the other high-caliber works on offer this season (by the likes of Beckmann, Marc, Hartung, and Kandinsky), the painting was entrusted to Grisebach by a private Berlin collection which has been working with us for over forty years.
Two still lifes by Max Beckmann
Offering top-drawer works by Max Beckmann is a tradition at Grisebach. In his large-scale Orchester from 1932, Beckmann created a strikingly sonorous image of sumptuously arranged colour chords. The painting was commissioned by the Frankfurt lawyer Ernst Levi as a gift for this wife Martha, an accomplished concert violinist and music patron (EUR 1,000,000 / 1,500,000).
In his enigmatic Stillleben mit Skulptur (1942), meanwhile, Beckmann seems to make a profound, yet also humorous metaphorical comment on the weighty existential problems that hung over him like a Sword of Damocles during his self-imposed exile in Amsterdam – a work imbued with conflicting emotions and deep symbolism (EUR 600,000 / 800,000).
Classics of Modernism
In Feuerlilien und Rittersporn (1920), Emil Nolde dwells lovingly on flowers in his garden, modeling them with thick impasto and transmuting a nature-inspired motif into a radiant, polychrome symphony. He directs our gaze into the midst of thickly luxuriant flower beds practically aflame with color, with the resulting ensemble creating a fascinating “all-over” pattern (EUR 900,000 / 1,200,000).
Franz Marc’s dynamic composition Vögel über dem Dorf from 1913 numbers among the apogees of the artist’s most productive and innovative artistic period and showcases his evolution towards increasingly abstract forms (EUR 400,000 / 600,000)
An iconic work of graphic art by Picasso
La Femme au tambourin from 1939 is a seminal harbinger of 20th century graphic art. In this striking and meaningfully complex portrayal of his lover Dora Maar, Picasso once again displays his technical mastery and love of experimentation (EUR 500,000 / 700,000)
Glorious post-war art
Epsilon from 1959 is one of Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s highly sought-after “Disc Paintings,” a spectacle of contrasting colours and forms energetically moving towards dissolution (EUR 300,000 / 400,000).
Created in 1951, the larger-than-life sculpture Grosse Liegende proved to be one of Karl Hartung’s greatest works – the largest and most magnificent of his recumbent female figures. Inspired by Etruscan funerary statuary, it combines abstraction and an organic sense of rhythm to create an archetypical figure (EUR 200,000 / 300,000).
Lüpertz - West – Grosse – Förg: impressive contemporary artworks in XL format
Markus Lüpertz was creating his “brand” around the mid-1960s when he began adding the morpheme “dithyrambic” to his painting titles. The pictorial objects featured in the dithyrambic paintings, such as the impressive tree trunk in Baumstamm (dithyrambisch) from 1968, are almost entirely stripped of natural associations, serving instead as insignia of nature, neutral yet imaginative. By grossly enlarging a day-to-day object, Lüpertz achieves a distorting effect that is highly dramatic (EUR 150,000 / 200,000).
Franz West’s Flora, an oversized outdoor sculpture from 2006, heads our summer lineup of contemporary works. Dimensioned at 3 x 4 x 2 meters, its looping whorls bear the imprint of West’s characteristic and trenchant language of form. Flora also boasts an outstanding exhibition history: Initially installed on Paradeplatz in central Zurich, the work then stood before the Generali Insurance building on Munich’s Adenauer-Ring – along with two other outdoor pieces by West – from 2007 onwards (EUR 600,000 / 800,000).
The monumental “Spot Painting” Ohne Titel (2007) by Günther Förg – one of the most influential innovators of contemporary art – is another highlight of our auction. Here, Förg pays homage to the unfinished and incomplete with a confident play of muted colours such as dark pink, ochre, and green, held together by a barely visible system of lines – a stylistic signature of this celebrated painter who constantly pushed the boundaries of his medium (EUR 400,000 / 600,000).
Katharina Grosse’s sweeping, buoyant colour composition Untitled from 2014 bears the unmistakable, striking handwriting of one of the most exciting contemporary artists active today. The dynamism of her fully perfected spraying technique transmits itself directly from the canvas, harking back in highly excerpted form to the artist’s immersive compositions (EUR 180,000 / 240,000).
A marvel from the Renaissance
We are delighted to offer a museum-quality rarity: Jacopo da Pontormo‘s chalk drawing Studio di uomo che cammina (circa 1517), entrusted to us by a German private collection. This study of a walking man was rediscovered in the 1990s and presented in 2016 as part of the major exhibition at the Städel Museum: “Maniera: Pontormo, Bronzino and the Florence of the Medici.” The drawing is further proof of the boundless energy and creativity characterizing Pontormo’s oeuvre (EUR 250,000 / 350,000).
Masterworks of Romanticism from a Dresden private collection
The 20 lots on offer from a private collection in Saxony include extremely rare drawings by Caspar David Friedrich as well as key works by important artists who formed part of his circle, particularly Carl Gustav Carus and Johan Christian Dahl. Among the standouts: Caspar David Friedrich’s watercolour Gotisches Backsteingebäude und kleine Baumstudien from 1809 (EUR 200,000 – 300,000), plus two moody paintings by Carus: Elbinsel bei Mondschein from circa 1844 (EUR 150,000 – 200,000) and Ruine in Pillnitz über den Weinbergen from circa 1835 (EUR 50,000 – 70,000).
Over 500 works with a valuation totaling roughly EUR 20 million
All told, the four separate Summer Auctions to be held on 5th and 6th June 2025 will feature over 500 artworks with a lower aggregate estimate of around EUR 20 million. Grisebach’s sales will span an extraordinarily wide arc, from the Renaissance to cutting-edge contemporary art. This season’s “Selected Works” catalogue once again will be issued in conjunction with an “All-in-One” catalogue comprising all the lots of the four auctions.
The Berlin preview showing of all works will be held at our two locations on Fasanenstrasse (Nos. 25 and 27) from 29th May to 4th June 2025.