MUNICH.- In its anniversary year, Ketterer Kunst – Germanys leading art auction house - concludes the second and final auction phase with a grand sale on December 6 and 7, presenting a range of artworks unrivaled on the German market, especially in higher six-figure price realms, and with a variety of works by sought-after international artists. We would like to draw your attention to a small selection of top lots from our Evening Sale on December 6 for inclusion in your coverage.

One of the last paintings Max Beckmann worked on until the end of November 1950 – he died on December 27, 1950, on a walk in New York's Central Park – “Large Clown with Women and Small Clown”. It can be seen as his legacy. “I am a silly old clown and nothing else [...],” he wrote in a diary entry from 1946. Self-reflection was probably his most important artistic driving force; the circus world was one of his core themes, and he varied motifs of masks, costumes, and acrobats, be it factually or as a metaphor. The two women are alluring and dominate over the aging clown in his bright green costume as he makes a last- ditch attempt to amuse them. In vain. Instead, Lady Liberty, with the wreath on her head, orders him out of the ring with a commanding gesture accompanied by the small clown's scornful song. The painting has been on loan to many notable exhibitions over the years. In private hands since 1965, it was on permanent loan to the Folkwang Museum in Essen (estimated price: € 1.4 - 1.8 million / $ 1,526,000 - 1,962,000.)

Emil Nolde was at one with this marshland, barren yet full of natural beauty. In 1926, he and his wife Ada acquired the manor house 'Seebüllhof' and later added a home and studio (“We wanted to call it Seebüll. We called the adjacent farm Seebüllhof”). Henceforth, he captured the view from his studio in the changing seasons and times of day, rendering artistic accounts of the spectacular variations in light and weather, creating countless watercolors imbued with the moment's sentiment. However, he rarely chose to express his sensations in oil paintings. Our painting “Landschaft mit Seebüllhof” from 1930 depicts the unique evening ambiance before night falls. A landscape bathed in twilight colors, the glow of the harvested fields, and the strong accents of the manor house's brick facade. This painting is a particularly soulful version of a motif he usually approached from a more agitated and expressive angle. A magical blue dominates the palette. In 1936, the painting went straight from Nolde's studio to his architect friend and has been part of a private collection in the Ruhr area for over fifty years (estimated price € 600,000 - 800,000 / $ 654,000 - 872,000 ).

Around 1919, when Emil Nolde and his wife spent most of their time in Berlin, he created a series of portraits of young women considered prototypes of expressionist female portraiture today. Capturing the sitters close up against the edge of the picture, he used bold colors to convey their natures, with the aim not to reproduce a person as accurately as possible but to unlock their character and environment. The identity of “Vera” remains unclear, a mysterious beauty with a highly seductive aura. Combined with Nolde's audaciously expressive color scheme, the impressive typification of the enigmatic lady fully unfolds its effect. This painting has also been part of the above-mentioned private collection in the Ruhr area for five decades (estimated price € 400,000 - 600,000 / $ 436,000 - 654,000).

Strong focus on international post-war masterpieces

Robert Ryman was not a cold minimalist. That would be far too simple. It took years of contemplation, probably also deep reflection upon the works of famous painters, for him to finally arrive at a radically conceptual approach. A quintessence he once described as follows: “I don't consider myself an artist who makes white pictures. I make pictures. I am a painter. That requires a lot of color. Not just colors like red, green, and yellow, but color in the truest sense.” For many years after his training as a teacher's assistant, Ryman worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he began to paint and made contact with Mark Rothko, Dan Flavin, and Sol Lewitt.

White dominates the aesthetic of his works, yet it is only one component in his overall concept, a material that contributes to a meticulously conceived result. He never aspired to ascribe a narrative or mystical meaning to his work. At some point, he began working in series. Our painting General 52” x 52” is a prime example from a series comprising 15 works, but also of Ryman's “calculating” approach that leads to highly intuitive and sensual results. As a first step, he primes and seals the surface of the “General” paintings with a special semi- gloss varnish. In the center, not too far from the frame – the edge remains visible – he applies a white, enamel-based square that he sands and layers several times. Despite the soft transitions, the contrast between the bright white and off-white base coat is as stark as possible.

Only in the late 1960s did he begin to enjoy international success, albeit slowly. It took the effort of the two German gallerists, Konrad Fischer and Heiner Friedrich, who acquired works from his New York studio that would lead to exhibitions in Paris and Italy. Harald Szeeman, the legendary exhibition organizer, and other contemporary experts recognized Ryman's masterful conceptual realization of painting and his analytical examination of materials, proportions, space, and light as a brilliant step beyond the approaches of European minimal art. Today, Ryman's works are among the most essential pieces in collections of major museums worldwide (estimated price: € 1- 1.5 million / $ 1,090,000 - 1,635,000).

He was aiming for perfection. Kenneth Noland described himself as a “one-shot painter”. He was no militarist, but he employed a technique, or a unique mixture of paints on unprimed canvas, that did not allow any corrections. This resulted in a minimalist approach and an unwavering confidence in design and choice of means. In addition, as Noland once said, it took strength and nerves to resist the temptation to make any changes. With his concentric circles, his “Targets,” his “Chevrons,” and his “Stripes,” he became one of the most influential representatives of Color Field Painting. Noland's first “Chevrons”, those characteristic V-shaped paintings modeled on army rank insignia, antique decors, or simple signs of any kind, were created in New York in 1963. Executed in large formats, they take on an overwhelming dynamism. Our work “Via Media (Suddenly)” was created during this early New York phase. Through the effect of the pure red and orange – an essential aspect in Nold's pictorial world – the triple arrow shape gains a power that is far superior to the gestural furor of Abstract Expressionism, which was still prevalent in those years (estimated price € 600,000 - 800,000 / $ 654,000 - 872,000).

Alberto Burri initially served as a military doctor and turned to art after the war. However, he did not seek to make idyllic paintings or gestural, self-referential abstractions. The Italian artist turned to Art Informel and created incomparable assemblages of materials, often collaging scorched wood with scraps of fabric and sacks; his works had welded pieces of plastic and rusty nails. He was one of the first artists, together with Lucio Fontana and Emilio Vedova, to exhibit at the avant-garde gallery Galleria Blu, which opened its doors in Milan in 1957. Our work from Burri's popular series “Legni” was also on display there and was sold to a private collection in the Rhineland before (“Legno P 1”, estimated price € 900,000 - 1.2 million / $ 981,000 - 1,308,000) was sold to an important German private collection of international post war art at an auction in London in 1993.

Piero Manzoni also rejected the mainstream in the 1950s (actually, he rejected everything and everyone) and created an extremely independent oeuvre during his short lifetime ("In total space, form, color, and dimension have no meaning”). It is the concept that counts. Together with Enrico Castellani, he opened the gallery Azimut and published a magazine of the same name, intending to merge poetry and art. He appreciated the material pictures by Alberto Burri, which were conceived entirely in line with his ideas, and created layered, cut-open canvases structured with plaster, the “Achrome.” Our copy was created in 1959, one year after Burri's “Legno P1” at the apex of Italian Informalism. Piero Manzoni spent his life in constant renewal and provocation, for example, with the “Merda d'Artista.” Living a fast-paced and restless life, he died of a heart attack in his studio in Milan in February 1963 (estimated price: € 400,000 - 600,000 / $ 436,000 - 654,000).

The New York Times once called Wojciech Fangor “The great Romantic of Op Art,” which was not necessarily how he saw himself, as he was more interested in experimenting with the perception of color in space. Concentric circles and flowing vibrant color fields evoke a sense of shimmering motion and dissolve spatial boundaries. The viewer is lost in misty color gradients. The viewer's act of perception (disturbing, exhausting, enlightening, or over- whelming) becomes an essential part of the work of art. Fangor explores the relationship between the object and its environment, focusing exclusively on physical properties and effects. Spirituality was not his concern.

After training as a commercial artist and poster designer, the self-confident, cosmopolitan son of a Warsaw industrialist family traveled Europe and lived in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and England. He had already changed his artistic orientation from Socialist Realism to abstraction shortly after Stalin's death. In 1966, he went to New York, where he would live for over thirty years.

American museums soon took notice of the Polish artist: in 1965, he participated in the legendary exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and one of his paintings was purchased subsequently; in 1970, he had a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In “M77” from 1968, Fangor addresses the pleasure principle: maximum effect through subtle colors and sensual forms (estimated price € 400,000 - 600,000 / $ 436,000 - 654,000).

Gerhard Richter's black-and-white early oeuvre from the 1960s has shaped our present-day perception of his paintings. Family photos, advertising images, and illustrations from various print media provided the basis for portraits, Alpine scenes, and cityscapes in those years. Our black-and-white “Stadtbild” (Cityscape) from 1968 is the first in a series of eight based on cut-out details. These cityscapes count among the early photo paintings that would dominate his work from the 1970s onward before he would turn to more abstract themes. He became increasingly interested in the emotionless concrete buildings symbolizing Germany's economic boom. Initially, the artist blurred the contours of the motifs that he had enlarged on the canvas, thus achieving his famous painterly vagueness. However, as in our abstracted cityscape, he began experimenting with a loose, rough, and therefore blurred painting style. The building becomes an illusion that eludes our grasp. Aiming to make figurative objects indistinct, Richter addressed the insecurities of our perception. Our cityscape (estimated price: € 350,000 - 450,000 / $ 381,500 - 490,500) is also defined by largely alienating cropping. It was created the same year as the famous “Cathedral Square, Milan,” which sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2013 for around 29 million euros and still ranks as the most expensive figurative painting by the artist.

Other works by international artists include: Edward “Ed” Ruscha's “Miracle #69.1975.” Fascinated by Hollywood, it is dedicated to the artist's enthusiasm for film. The comparable pastel “Miracle #64”, which belongs to the collection of the Tate Modern, London, was included in the major retrospective “ED RUSCHA /NOW THEN” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2023/24. (Estimate: € 180,000 – 240,000 / $ 196,200 - 261,600).

“Viking Voyage” (1975) is a monumental format by a leading figure of American Abstract Expressionism: Friedel Dzubas. At an early point, works from this period were acquired by renowned American museums such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

“Pacific Ocean B.” (2022) is an AI-generated, digital “data painting” by the acclaimed shooting star Refik Anadol. In 2022, the Turkish-American artist enjoyed great public success with the technically comparable installation "Unsupervised - Machine Hallucinations" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Serpentine Gallery showed a major solo exhibition of the artist's work in early 2024. Estimate: € 70,000 – 90,000 - $ 76,300 – 98,100. (Contemporary Art Day sale December 7)