This June, Germany’s Ketterer Kunst auction house will mark 70 years in the auction business. To celebrate, the house has announced an evening sale of German Expressionist work, one of its specialties, along with a collection of American Pop art works on June 7.
Leading the sale will be Alexej Jawlensky’s Spanische Tänzerin (1909) with an estimate of €7 million – €10 million ($7.57 million – $10.81 million). The picture has been out of the public eye for more than 90 years and has only ever been photographed in black and white, robbing afficionados of German Expressionism that opportunity to admire its rich blue and vibrant red hues.
The sale with also feature Ernst Ludwig Kirchner‘s 1911 work Tanz im Varieté, which has been held by the same family for 80 years and carries an estimate of €2 million – €3 million ($2.16 million – $3.24 million).
The German artists in the sale will also include Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Konrad Klapheck, Georg Baselitz, and Gerhard Richter.
The sale will also highlight works by American Pop Art masters James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. A rare full set of 10 brightly colored screenprints from Andy Warhol’s Flowers series from 1970 will be included in the sale with an estimate of €800,000 – €1.2 million ($865,000 – $1.3 million), as will Rosenquist’s risqué large-format picture Playmate (1966), which carries an estimate of € 1,000,000 – €1.5 million ($1.08 million – $1.62 million).
An additional highlight of the auction is the outdoor sculpture Working Model for Sheep Piece (1971) by the British artist Henry Moore. The sculpture has an estimate of €600,000–€800,000 ($650,000–$866,00) and comes from the collection of Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr, who bought the work directly from Fischer Fine Art Ltd., London in 1977.
The anniversary auction will continue with a day sale on June 8.
