Berlin
Berlin’s Villa Grisebach will today (1 June) auction valuable works restituted from German and Swiss museums to the heirs of Rudolf Mosse, a newspaper magnate persecuted by the Nazis and forced to sell his collection in 1934. Works in the sale of 19th-century art include a pastel portrait by Berlin’s best-known artist of his time, Adolph Menzel, showing the artist’s sister in a red blouse (around 1850). The pastel, with a high estimate of €400,000, will be offered alongside Wilhelm Leibl’s Portrait of the Appellate Judge Stenglein (1871), and Ludwig von Hofmann’s Spring Storm (around 1894-95), a key Jugendstil work. The Mosse Foundation, set up in 2012, is seeking hundreds more works sold under duress at two auctions in Berlin 82 years ago.
Top lots in Villa Grisebach’s Selected Works sale on June 2 include a 1926 oil painting of clouds scudding across a blue sky by Emil Nolde with a high estimate of €1.6m.
Cologne
A vivid yellow-and-red abstract by Gerhard Richter (17.4.89., 1989) and a Sigmar Polke (untitled, 1986) from a private Rhineland collection, both with high estimates of €200,000, are among the highlights in Van Ham’s contemporary art exhibition on 1 and 2 June. The Brücke artist Otto Müller’s distemper work Gypsy Huts from 1928 heads the Modern art offerings, and is expected to fetch as much as €300,000. Van Ham is also offering works by the Zero artist Otto Piene, a John Chamberlain steel sculpture and a Max Liebermann drawing of two girls.
Top lots at nearby Kunsthaus Lempertz on 3 June include a 1916 self-portrait by Giovanni Giacometti showing the artist in front of a stream of light from the window and a vase of red tulips. The estimated price is €290,000.
Munich
A 1928 geometrical composition by Wassily Kandinsky, Kleines Warm, gets the top billing at Ketterer Kunst’s Modern sale on 11 June. The watercolour, with a high estimate of €600,000, will be on offer alongside works by Emil Nolde, Otto Müller and a stormy painting of the Baltic Coast by their fellow Brücke artist Max Pechstein. Ketterer’s Modern sale also includes a collection of 47 works that once adorned the offices of a German company whose identity the auction house declined to disclose, and which have never before been offered at auction. These include works on paper by the Brücke artists Marc Chagall, Georges Braque and Otto Dix and oil paintings by Otto Modersohn. Contemporary highlights at Ketterer include a blue monochrome by Yves Klein and sculptures by Anselm Kiefer and Tony Cragg.