VIENNA.- The Contemporary Week auctions at Dorotheum, from 28 November (Modern Art) to 29 and 30 November 2023 (Contemporary Art), demonstrate that works of art can indeed carry social and political explosive potential.

Revolutionary art must be abstract – this was the credo of the Italian artist Emilio Vedova. With verve and full physical commitment, his raw, brutal brushstrokes and gestures bear witness to the reality of a world shaken by wars. Created in the 1950s and 1960s, his works remain relevant today. This is also the case for the black and red painting "Per la Spagna" (€ 240,000-360,000) offered in the Contemporary Art sale on 29 November 2023. Picasso’s Guernica mural, created in response to the bombing of the eponymous village during the Spanish Civil War, served as a reference point for Vedova, who had been politically engaged since his time in the Italian resistance movement. Stylistically, Vedova considered himself influenced by the frescoes in his native Venice, particularly those by Tintoretto.

Art and Revolution was the theme of a lecture-event held by the Viennese Actionists in Lecture Hall 1 of the University of Vienna in 1968. This performance has gone down in the annals of art history as “university scandal” and “university obscenity.” Günter Brus was one of the participants. An untitled gestural work from 1962, created by this artist who was later rehabilitated, is being offered for 40,000 to 70,000 euros. Arnulf Rainer also took a radical approach with his series of over-paintings. A work from 1964 depicts the almost complete obliteration of the original motif through black paint (€ 160,000-240,000).

In Maria Lassnig’sworks, turmoil and struggle are always symbolically related to her own person. In her body-state paintings, the artist, who has received worldwide acclaim over the past decade, uniquely elevates inner states of mind to a universal human condition. Sometimes she even names them: “Der rote Zorn” (red anger) is an excellent example of her multiple award-winning art, her “body sensation colours” (€ 180,000-250,000). A rare, early drawing made in 1948, a portrait of her parents, foreshadows her later work (€ 18,000-28,000).

Light plays a central role in Heinz Mack’s oeuvre. With Adolf Luther and Günther Uecker as part of the Zero group, he aimed to symbolically start anew after the world wars and revolutionise (German) art. A four-part series, Quartett, addresses the malleability of light as a medium and material by depicting the spectral colours in sequence (€ 380,000-580,000).

In Italy, artists primarily aimed to explore and expand the concept of the artwork beyond the last image, especially by means of new spatial concepts like Fontana’s Concetto spaziale. A three-dimensional Superficie Bianca by Enrico Castellani, a square large format from 1983, bears witness to these crucial artistic efforts for the development of 20th-century contemporary art (€ 250,000-500,000).

From Daniel Richter, former squatter scene art punk and current professor of painting at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, the auction features one of his expressive abstract works from the 1990s, titled “TTS (Totus Tuus Sum),” € 100,000-150,000.

Franz West fits in with the revolutionaries, opposing the authorities of his time with his art. “Mere use as a room decoration does not align with the intentions,” he wrote. His texts and titles are full of linguistic wit, as in “Die Werdung des Seienden” (The Becoming of Being), a work in five series in which he characteristically deals, among other things, with human physiognomy (€ 60,000-80,000)

The American artist William Nelson Copley’s idiosyncratic pop-surrealism exudes a sense of irreverence and self-irony, accompanied by an excess of vibrant colours. His 1969 painting “Bathing Beauties” superbly combines his trademarks: sexy and tongue-in-cheek, without moralistic undertones (€ 100,000-150,000).

The sale also features works by Stephan Balkenhol, Oscar Murillo, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Carla Accardi, Jannis Kounellis, Victor Vasarely, Hermann Nitsch, Wolfgang Hollegha, Martha Jungwirth and Brigitte Kowanz.

MODERN ART

The Spanish-French artist, writer and provocateur Francis Picabia called himself a “beautiful monster”. Two untitled paintings from his figurative creative period in the late 1930s until the beginning of World War II are the highlights of the Modern Art sale on 28 November 2023. They provide good examples of Picabia’s suggestive ‘Transparencies’ paintings characterised by superimpositions (€ 180,000-240,000 and € 240,000-320,000).

Kurt Schwitters, a word-image acrobat of equal standing with Picabia and with dadaistic tendencies, also features in the auction programme. The creator of the Dada-Ursonate, the Merz-Bau and the absurd story “Auguste Bolte” is represented with an assemblage of “c 71 falling paper pieces” (€ 150,000-200,000).

The sale includes a number of popular motifs by Alfons Walde, such as “Almen und Gletscher” (€ 350,000-400,000) and the tempera on paper skier motif “Der Aufstieg” (10 x 10 cm, € 40,000-60,000). The 1947 oil painting “Tiroler Bergdorf”, estimated at 130,000 to 250,000 euros, comes from the private collection of Otto Glaser, an Austrian who was able to move to Ireland in 1938 with the help of the Kindertransports and thus survive. The Emerald Isle became the private home for the nuclear physicist, educated in Vienna after the war, one of the pioneers of telecommunications. An early Klimt study for the municipal theatre in Carlsbad, “Tafelfreuden” (Table Pleasures), estimated between 50,000 and 70,000 euros, also comes from Glaser’s collection.

Franz Sedlacek embodies the uncanny, surreal side of modernism with his New Objectivity-fantastic works. “Der Zauberer und der Harlekin” also exudes a morbid magic, which is staged through spatial depth lighting (€ 160,000-300,000).

The sale includes works by Giacomo Balla, Renato Guttoso, Lovis Corinth and many more.

EXQUISITE JEWELS AND WATCHES

The highlight of the Exquisite Jewels auction on 30 November 2023 is a Kashmir sapphire with an impressive size of nearly 14 ct. The gemstone set in a gold bracelet comes from old European higher nobility. The report of the Swiss Gemological Institute qualifies the colour of the stone as “blue of strong saturation”, thus certifying the highest colour saturation. Its transparency is particularly enhanced by the simplicity of its cabochon cut (estimate € 200,000-400,000).

The IWC Il Destriero Scafusia is estimated between 60,000 and 90,000 euros. It is an extremely rare and fine wristwatch with perpetual calendar and moon phase, double chronograph, minute repeater, and tourbillon in a gold case. The flagship of the 1 December 2023 Watch auction was produced in 1993 to mark IWC’s 125th anniversary in a limited edition of just 125 pieces.