Highly Important Private Collection
This May and June, Lempertz will auction an outstanding collection of German Expressionists and Romantics. The Rhenish private collection, which had remained in family ownership for almost 90 years, testifies to great connoisseurship and includes numerous epochal key works.
The highlight of the collection is Hermann Max Pechstein’s ‘Self-portrait, reclining’ from 1909. The artist’s most important self-portrait has been exhibited many times in museums and reflects the heyday of German Expressionism. One year later, his painter friend Erich Heckel created ‘The Sleeping Pechstein’, a compositional counterpart to the portrait which is now considered the most important work in the Buchheim Collection.
The Evening Sale on 6th June offers further works from the collection by artists such as Max Ernst, Heinrich Hoerle, Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A further focus of the collection is on the German Romantics. On 20th May, Lempertz will auction drawings and paintings by the most significant artists of the Goethe period. Particularly noteworthy are the Mediterranean arcadian landscapes by Jakob Philipp Hackert, Christoph Heinrich Kniep and Friedrich Nerly. The highlight of the selection is Hackert’s ‘Eruption of Vesuvius’, which the artist witnessed in 1779, and in which he spectacularly illustrates the nocturnal Bay of Naples where the jet of fire from the eruption reaches three times the height of the volcano.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at 0221/92 57 29–30.
Edgar Abs
Press and public relations
Cologne, April 2023