Max Beckmann self-portrait poised to fetch record price at German auction

A moody self-portrait of the 20th-century expressionist Max Beckmann painted during his Dutch exile from the Nazis is predicted to break the record for a price secured at auction inArt lovers have been flocking first to New York and then to Berlin to see the painting in preview showings, which have offered a rare opportunity to view a masterpiece that has always been in private hands.

The Villa Grisebach auction house has for years been in the shadow of its better-known New York and London competitors such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Grisebach’s director, Micaela Kapitzky, said she welcomed the long overdue attention that the sale – the result, she said, of years of building trust with the painting’s owner – was now bringing to Germany’s art market.

Beckmann left Germany for Amsterdam in 1937 a day after hearing Adolf Hitler deliver a speech condemning “degenerate” artists. Authorities subsequently confiscated 500 of his works from museums. Beckmann and his wife, Mathilde, known as Quappi, would never return, emigrating to the US a decade later, where he died in 1950.

“Beckmann had to watch helplessly as the German occupiers interned Dutch Jews, among them personal friends of his, at the Westerbork concentration camp,” according to Blume. Beckmann narrowly avoided being called up himself owing to heart disease, but he lived in constant fear that he might be arrested or his paintings confiscated. “Withdrawing into his atelier … became a self-imposed obligation that protected him from breaking down,” Blume said.

🔻Despite the intervention of the Polish authorities, this auction house in Berlin sold today a painting for EUR 310,000, which was stolen in 1984 from the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. WASSILY KANDINSKY WATERCOLOR Grisebach Berlin

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