A self-portrait by Max Beckmann, a German expressionist painter who fled his country due to the rise of Nazism, sold Thursday in Berlin for the highest price to date for a work of art auctioned in Germany. The hammer price with which the Grisebach auction house awarded the oil painting Self-portrait in yellow-pink was 20 million euros, although the gross price is 23.2 million, including commissions and taxes.
Max Beckmann (Leipzig, 1884-New York, 1950), considered one of the leading modern artists of the 20th century, often cultivated the self-portrait and painted it in 1943, in exile in Amsterdam. The painter and his second wife, the singer and violinist Mathilde von Kaulbach, known as Quappi, had left for the Netherlands in 1937, after that year some of Beckmann’s works had been included in the exhibition of what Adolf Hitler called degenerate art.
The Nazis coined this expression for the works of modernity (abstract, expressionist, dadaist, surrealist and New Objectivity), or by Jewish or communist authors. Beckmann’s particular style has expressionist traits –although he ran away from the term– and also New Objectivity.
“Beckmann used to take self-portraits in dark colors, but in Self-Portrait in Yellow-Pink he departed from that habit and chose lighter colors,” explained the German specialist Micaela Kapitzky, director and partner of Grisebach, in an interview with La Vanguardia prior to the auction. . “Here he painted himself wearing a yellow robe, and his faraway gaze, his meditative posture with his arms crossed and his nearly bald head evoke a Buddhist monk; it is known that Buddhism interested him,” Kapitzky continued.
The artist portrayed himself younger than he was, since at that time he was already 59 years old. “It is interpreted that this painting is for him as a statement of what he has managed to overcome,” clarifies the expert.
The Beckmanns waited for years in Amsterdam for a visa to the United States, during which time Beckmann worked under adverse circumstances. In 1940, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, and Max and Quappi remained there until the end of the war. The visa arrived in 1947 and the painting, which Beckman had given to his wife, traveled with them to the United States. She kept it until her death in 1986 in Jacksonville. The couple had no children. In the 1990s, the painting returned to Europe when it was acquired by a Swiss collector, also through Grisebach, and the family once again turned to this auction house to sell the work.
A sale of this amount could give new impetus to the art market in Berlin and in Germany in general, which in this respect lags behind the powerful auction houses of New York, London and Paris. The absolute world record for the sale of a work of art at auction is held by Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci, awarded in 2017 for $450.3 million by Christie’s auction house.
