For decades, the collection of the entrepreneur Walter Bauer 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. 

Grisebach is proud to offer this collection, which has become a historical document of its time, for sale at the 2025 Winter Auctions.