Totem and fountain: Grisebach invites you to a preview and to its anniversary auctions

This paper alone is a journey back in time, back to Berlin with the Wall. Glöckner had a permanent visa and commuted between East and West. In 1986, the then 97-year-old artist finally decided on Berlin and moved in with his partner.

Grisebach is currently celebrating his predominantly small, constructivist works from his estate in a room full of tables that exudes the atmosphere of a studio. All 104 objects will be auctioned online until mid-June. You can bid from 300 euros and end up perhaps owning a work by this solitary, now very popular, loner.

Salon-like and winding

The history of the Berlin auction house does not go back to the 1960s, when Glöckner was extremely active. But with its 40th birthday, Grisebach is currently celebrating an outstanding anniversary. In 1986, the institution, which is so important for Berlin, was opened in the Grisebach city villa by Bernd Schultz and four gallery owners, including Hans Pels-Leusden.

The impressive house, built by the architect Hans Grisebach around 1890 for himself and his family, is still the anchor point of the company today. Even though there are now other places on Fasanenstrasse where previews and auctions take place: the salon-like and winding nature of the rooms, just like the creaky wooden stairs to the second floor, still provide the perfect backdrop for pictures by Max Liebermann, Emil Nolde or Max Beckmann, who are reliably represented in every Grisebach auction.

World record with Kolbe

This time, however, the highlight of the current preview and subsequent auction can be found in the garden. Opposite the rust-red sculpture “Bearing II” (1995) by Anthony Gormley, for which the house is expecting at least 250,000 euros, stands the impressive “Dancers Fountain” by Georg Kolbe.

Last year, Grisebach was able to set a world record with Kolbe’s bronze “Standing Woman” from 1916, when the sculpture was auctioned for 1.42 million euros. This time it is a much larger object that the Berlin sculptor created in 1922 for the Jewish collector and director of Victoria Insurance, Heinrich Stahl. A patron, educated, committed and generous.

During the Nazi era in 1941, the family had to sell all of their possessions for far less than their value. Jenny and Heinrich Stahl were deported to Theresienstadt, and the entrepreneur died after a few months.

Your fountain, which has a spectacular history and, after some confusion, found its home in the garden of the Georg Kolbe Museum in Westend for decades, was only recently restituted to Stahl’s heirs after complicated negotiations as a Nazi-looted art piece. At Grisebach it should now bring in up to 1.5 million euros, maybe more. There is great interest in the nude dancer made of bronze and the three atlases that carry a heavy lotus flower made of limestone, emphasizes art historian Mario von Lüttichau, who wrote a text about steel as a collector in the accompanying booklet.

More contemporaries

The important motif also adorns the catalog of “Selected Works” for the auction on June 4th. In addition to the fountain, two works by Paula Modersohn-Becker are on offer, as well as a “Bust of the Great Sinners” (1914) by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, estimated at at least 150,000 euros, and Max Beckmann’s deep green depiction “Spring Fountain in Baden-Baden” (1936), whose upper estimate is 600,000 euros.

What is striking is that more and more contemporary works are making their way into the main auction. Seven matching vase sculptures by Thomas Schütte are asking for 90,000 euros, just like the neo-expressive large-scale painting “Moritzplatz I” by Rainer Fetting from the early 1980s.

Grisebach is asking at least 180,000 euros for a “totem” by Keith Haring from a private collection in Berlin, while bidding for Daniel Richter’s dystopian painting “The Procurement of Good” from 2003 starts at 300,000 euros. The artist Cindy Sherman, who photographed herself as a clown in a large format in 2004 and reproduced the motif six times, achieved an upper estimate of 200,000 euros.

This mix is ​​intentional. Since a younger generation, Diandra Donnecker and Daniel von Schacky, joined the management three years ago after Bernd Schultz’s long farewell, a lot has changed in the tradition-conscious company. According to von Schacky, the communicative concept differs significantly from before: a new magazine advertises the purchase of art, portrays collectors and spells out the ABCs of auctions again. Not everyone knows the regulations; new groups of buyers need to be acquired.

Uhlmann and the German Opera

The growing number of online-only auctions is also striking. They have become established since Corona and have become indispensable, especially since an international audience is increasingly taking part in Grisebach’s live auctions digitally. Digitization in general. It is making progress, explains von Schacky, but far more in the background than many other measures.

The fact that you are increasingly seeing current positions in the catalogs is due to contemporary tastes that are gradually changing. And yet: Anyone who comes away empty-handed with paintings like Daniel Richter’s or can’t keep up with them is recommended to take a careful look through all the decades.

Lot number 46 is a small sculpture by Hans Uhlmann, who lived in Berlin from 1900 to 1975. The work is estimated at 20,000 to 30,000 euros, an estimate that with a bit of luck it will stay at. Anyone who carries it home will have Uhlmann’s working model of the meter-high sculpture that reaches for the sky in front of the Deutsche Oper.