Auction no. 248 on 25 November 2015, 5.30 pm
On Wednesday, 25 November, over 200 lots of Modern and Contemporary Photography will be auctioned at Villa Grisebach in Berlin.
The auction's top lot is a positive photogram by Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. It was created in 1925, a year in which Moholy-Nagy worked particularly intensively on his "cameraless photography", which he called "photograms" for the first time. A positive photogram is the direct reversal of the original negative photogram - a unique copy on paper. Contact copying with the original negative photogram creates a variant in which the tonal values are reversed, i.e. the black shapes are reproduced on a light-coloured background. This unusually well-preserved vintage originally came from the estate of William G. Larsson, who taught at the Chicago School of Design founded by Moholy-Nagy in 1939 (EUR 80,000/120,000).
Hans Bellmer's small book "La Poupée" from 1936, in which the artist stages an almost life-size doll designed by himself in 10 photographs in different, sometimes disturbing ways, leads us into the art of Surrealism (EUR 35,000/45,000). Two of the few surviving portrait photographs by the Polish avant-garde artist Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz will also be auctioned. These impressive images are among the first portraits in the history of photography to show an "inner image" of a person: "Jadwiga Janczewska", circa 1913 (EUR 20,000/25,000) and "Janina Illukiewicz", circa 1912 (EUR 10,000/15,000). Further highlights from the field of modern photography are vintages by Walker Evans: "Frame House, Connecticut", 1933 (EUR 12,000/18,000) and Jacques Henri Lartigue: "Grand Prix de l'A.C.F., Amiens, 12", 1913 (EUR 10,000/15,000), Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia-Portfolio", 1998 (EUR 20,000/30,000) as well as works by Gertrud Arndt, Ruth Bernhard, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hugo Erfurth, André Kertész, Paul Outerbridge, Roman Vishniac and others.
There is also a wide range of contemporary photography on offer, including works by Peter Beard: "Elephant Tussle, Aberdare Forest", 1972 (EUR 9.000/12,000), Anton Corbijn: "Keith Richards, Connecticut", 1999 (EUR 10,000/15,000), Ruud van Empel: "Dawn I", 2008 (EUR 4,000/6,000), Erwin Olaf: "Grief, Irene", 2007 (EUR 8,000/12.000), Joel Meyerowitz: "Truro", 1976 (EUR 8,000/12,000), Thomas Ruff: "Substrat 2 I", 2002-2003 (EUR 4,000/6,000), Albert Watson: "Kate Moss, Marrakech", 1991 (EUR 5,000/7,000).