LEMPERTZ is delighted to be auctioning works from one of the world‘s most important photography collections: Miami-based businessman and philanthropist Martin Z. Margulies is selling part of his photography collection. With a total of 154 lots (over 300 photographs), these form the main focus of the photography auction. Margulies has been listed by ARTnews Magazine in its Top 200 list of global art collectors for many years, and in 2004 the magazine named him one of the 25 most active photography collectors in the world. The Margulies Collection comprises more than 4,000 works of classic and contemporary photography from the 20th and 21st centuries and, like parts of his collection of contemporary visual art, is housed in the so-called Warehouse in Wynwood, Miami‘s trendy art district. As a study and exhibition collection, the artworks are displayed in various exhibition contexts in a space covering more than 5,000 m². Margulies has been active as a patron and collector since the mid-1980s. His collection includes masterpieces of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Arte Povera of the highest museum quality. Margulies discovered photography as an autonomous medium relatively late in the 1990s. The initial trigger was the purchase of a large-format chromogenic print by Thomas Ruff from his portrait series. The close-up bust-length portrait of a young woman with the eyes of a sphinx, which hung in his private apartment for many years, fascinated the collector so much that his interest was directed not only towards the photography of the Düsseldorf School of Photography with its main protagonists Bernd and Hilla Becher (lot 704), Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth (lots 705-708), but also to their predecessors and sources of inspiration: The photographers of New Objectivity movement in the Weimar Republic. Extensive acquisitions of works by Albert Renger-Patzsch, August Sander, Hugo Schmölz and Werner Mantz were the result of this search for photographic history. “I enjoy exploring how the early movements of the genre influenced Contemporary photography. For instance, I became fascinated with the German School of Objectivity and how the Becher’s taught a whole younger generation to view photography objectively”, Margulies told Lempertz. “Additionally, I was very moved by the American FSA photographers and enjoyed the poignant and tender stories behind the photographs.” His aesthetically trained eye and interest in social issues led Margulies from Germany back to the United States. The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was founded in 1937 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal policy and was an aid programme designed to support the rural population of the United States, which had been impoverished during the 1930s due to drought, industrialisation and the global economic crisis. THE MARGULIES COLLECTION, MIAMI Ausstellung/Exhibition „German Photography“, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse © Malcolm Varon
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