COLOGNE.- The upcoming auctions at Sotheby's Cologne in November 2024 will combine a wide range of categories, appealing to the collections and passions of collectors in Germany, Europe and beyond.

Both the live auction Modern & Contemporary Art and the online sale Modern & Contemporary Discoveries present a curated selection of outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper by national and international artists from the 20th and 21st centuries, which were previously in important private collections, as well as a group of photographs that were in a Dutch private collection.

The Modern & Contemporary Art auction features works by important Impressionists such as Max Liebermann and Alexej von Jawlensky, the unforgettable modernists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Gabriele Münter, and renowned contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Imi Knoebel, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker. The LIVE auction on 12 November 2024 begins at 4.00 PM and includes around 27 lots, which are estimated at around €3.7 million.

The online auction Modern and Contemporary Discoveries, which will take place from 5 to 13 November 2020, offers a treasure trove of attractive finds, led by a selection of photographs from the personal collection of Henri van der Tol (see below). The online auction comprises a total of 130 lots and is estimated to fetch more than €1.3 million.

Modern & Contemporary Art
Live Auction, 12 November 2024, 4 PM CET

For admirers of the works of Max Liebermann, three masterpieces by the great German Impressionist are likely to be the highlights of the auction: Two of the works have been in the same German private collection for more than three decades, and the top lot (Beergarden near the Wannsee (house on the lake)) has belonged to the same collection for twelve years. These atmospheric garden landscapes are among Max Liebermann's late works at Wannsee in Berlin and, as the top lot, they represent the modern art section of the Modern & Contemporary Art Auction. Along with Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, Max Liebermann is considered one of the most important German Impressionists.

All three masterpieces show Max Liebermann's extraordinary talent in their own way. His views of gardens reveal a deep connection with nature and the perception of man. The paintings in this auction represent an important chapter in German art history and affirm Liebermann's legacy as one of the most important figures in the development of Impressionism.

The group of three garden landscapes is headed by the oil painting Beergarden near the Wannsee (house on the lake) from 1933. It depicts one of the beer gardens at Wannsee, providing an atmospheric view of the lake bathed in warm light. The motif of the beer garden is a recurring theme in Liebermann's work, which he started in 1879 and developed over the years, albeit with long interruptions, as his series of around sixty oil paintings shows.

One of the main differences between the later and earlier beer gardens is the smaller number of trees. In addition, the colour palette in his late work is more vibrant. Despite the increasingly difficult political situation for the Jewish Liebermann and his family, his last views of beer gardens on the Wannsee were created in the summers of 1933 and 1934. The highlight of the November auctions is estimated at €700.000 –1.000.000.

Cabbage patch in the Wannsee garden, painted in 1916, shows Liebermann's kitchen garden. During the First World War, the artist had cabbages planted on the lawn of his garden to provide for his livelihood in the face of food shortages. The present work is dominated by the interplay between the rich green and the blue-green of the cabbages. The artist particularly liked this colour composition, and it is estimated at €240.000 – 350.000.

At the end of the 1920s, just one year before the artist's 80th birthday and his major exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Liebermann completed a series of paintings showing the densely blooming area in front of the gardener's house. The work Flowering shrubs by the garden shed facing north-east is characterised by a broad image detail that extends into the summer villa (estimate: €450.000 –650.000).1

Collectors of both modern and contemporary works by artists from Central and Eastern Europe are likely to focus on the 20th Century Eastern European Art section of the live auction, which places the rich artistic tradition of Central and Eastern Europe centre stage. This offer is an excellent opportunity for collectors to acquire a work by these artists, including Josep Vaništa, Alphonse Mucha, Wojciech Fangor, whose prices have risen steadily over the last 20 years, as they have a high collector's value.

The most expensive lot in this section is the powerful abstract work SU 8 by the Polish artist Wojciech Fangor. The work, created in 1971, was acquired directly from the artist in New York in 1973 and has since been in an American private collection, from which it was consigned to the auction and is estimated at €200.000 – 300.000.

On 12 November 2024, the Modern & Contemporary Art live auction in Cologne will include a number of remarkable paintings by Russian artists, including Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Ivan Chuikov, Leonid Purygin and Dimitri Krasnopevtsev. The impressive painting by the painter and conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov deserves special mention here: Olga Nikolaevna Kazmina: Whose Fly is This? was acquired directly from the artist and had been in the same German private collection for more than thirty years. Estimated at €120.000 – 180.000, the work, which is being auctioned for the first time, is likely to be well received.

In the field of contemporary art, the live auction will feature paintings and watercolours on paper by popular artists such as Martha Jungwirth,2 Günther Uecker, Anselm Kiefer, Heinz Mack, to name just a few.

Modern & Contemporary Discoveries
Online auction, 5 - 13 November 2024

The online auction will include a selection of photographs from the personal collection of Dutch aviation professional Henri van der Tol, offering works from across the full spectrum of his passion. Henri van der Tol is a dedicated collector whose passion and curiosity for photography has led him to amass an eclectic collection of photographic art over the last three decades while traveling the world. His collecting is inextricably linked to his desire for knowledge and discovery, so that his collection not only reflects his passion for discovering places, people and stories, but is also a journey through time in the history of photographic art – from 1839 to to the present day, with notable photographers in the genre, including giants of modernism such as Brassaï and Erwin Blumenfeld, and leading contemporary artists such as Rineke Dijkstra and Pieter Hugo, to name just a few. With portraiture as the main focus of the collection, van der Tol pays homage to the long tradition in Dutch art history. A total of 22 lots from his entire collection will be offered online, with estimates ranging from €4.000 to €20.000.

A well-known photograph by Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra particularly stands out from the selection. Taken in 1992, the C-print Kolobrzeg, Polen (from Beach Portraits) is often compared to Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (see editorial HERE), as it was in the exhibitions “The Botticelli Renaissance” at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie in 2015 and “Botticelli Reimagined” at the V&A in London in 2016. Other prints of this image are in major institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate Modern in London and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In 2012, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles organized a major retrospective of the artist's work entitled “Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective”, for which this work was used as the leading press image. Estimated at €15.000 – 20.000, this lot offers both young and established photography enthusiasts the opportunity to build a new collection or add a significant work to an existing one.


1 Sotheby's holds the auction record price for a garden landscape and a work with this motif by Max Liebermann: Blumenstauden am Gärtnerhäuschen nach Nordosten (Flowering shrubs by the garden shed facing north-east), 1928, realised £2.136.000 (estimate: £600.000 – 900.000) at Sotheby's in London in February 2006.

2 Martha Jungwirth is one of the emerging artists whose paper drawing Untitled set a new auction record of $336.000 at the Sotheby's Contemporary Curated auction in New York in September 2024.