Online Only Modern & Contemporary Art, 19.12.25 – 11.1.26

Condition Report: Very fine, harmonious overall appearance. Good, intense print. The sheet edges without tears or losses. The lower right edge lightly bumped with a faint crease mark (5,5 cm). In the upper left corner, a faint diagonal crease and, in the lower right margin, a faint shell-shaped crease; both barely noticeable and mainly visible in raking light. The paper in the mat window slightly time stained. On the reverse, remnants of various paper mountings; these at the right sheet edge as well as at the upper edge slightly pressing through to the front. At the top and bottom of the right sheet edge, each mounted with brown paper tape onto the support cardboard


About Walter Bauer collection:
For decades, the collection of the entrepreneur, industrialist and art collector Walter Bauer (1901-1968) remained hidden from the public. An early adherent of the “Confessing Church” – an activist circle of Protestants who dared oppose the Nazis’ attempt to control the Evangelical Church – he was charged with treason by a so-called “People's Court” after the attempted coup of 20 July 1944. Luckily for him, the war ended before the sentence could be passed.
 
Bauer would later work hard to help rehabilitate the artists who had been ostracized during the Nazi regime, including Paula Modersohn-Becker and Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, Max Beckmann, Ernst Barlach, and Käthe Kollwitz. He found Expressionist art particularly moving and eventually developed a curiosity and passion for Modernism, as exemplified by Giuseppe Santomaso, Ernst Wilhelm Nay and others. He kept close ties to Carl Georg Heise, one of the most formative and influential figures in 20th-century art and the Director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle from 1945 to 1955. This was also a key reason why Bauer focused his collection on German drawing in the 1950s and 60s