More than 250 lots of modern and contemporary photography will be auctioned at Villa Grisebach in Berlin on Wednesday, 3 June. Karl Blossfeldt's plant pictures, which he produced between 1915 and 1925 for the Royal Prussian School of Applied Arts in Berlin, are among the icons of photographic history. The vividly depicted "Cotula Coronopifolia, Laugenblume" is one of the rare vintage prints made by Karl Blossfeldt himself and will be auctioned (€ 22,000/32,000). The vintage photogram by the American photographer Walker Evans from around 1929 is also a real rarity: the ghostly appearance of a hand betrays a surrealist influence (€ 10,000/15,000). Examples of pictorialist photography by Heinrich Kühn ("Hans und Lotte auf der Wiese", "Blumenstilleben", € 6,000/8,000 each) and Edward Weston ("The Hand of E.M.", € 6,000/8.000) are represented, as are portraits by Nicholas Nixon ("Brown Sisters", € 7,000/9,000), Leni Riefenstahl ("Mick Jagger", € 4,000/6,000) and Herb Ritts ("Jack Nicholson II, London", € 4,000/6,000), among others. Magical landscapes can be seen in vintage prints by Ellen Auerbach ("Ain-Karim-Palestine", € 2,500/3,500), René Burri ("Kung Min-Lake. Summer Palace Beijing", € 6,000/8,000) and Herbert List ("Athens, Olympieion", € 6,000/8,000).
Eight outstanding vintage prints will come from an American private collection, including works by Jaromir Funke ("Komposition mit Flasche", c. 1925, € 25,000/30,000), Paul Citroen ("Johnson Training again", c. 1923, € 5,000/7,000), Yva ("Der Dieb", 1926, € 6,000/8,000) and Man Ray ("Adrienne mit Waschbrett", 1938, € 10,000/15,000). The Modern Photography section will also include works by Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Ilse Bing, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Andreas Feininger, Will McBride, Duane Michals, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Werner Rohde, Jaroslav Rössler and Otto Steinert, among others.
The main lot in the Contemporary Photography section is Rineke Dijkstra's large-format portrait of a Portuguese bullfighter "Villa Franca di Xira, Portugal, May 8" (€ 30,000/40,000). Other highlights include Bernd and Hilla Becher's "Grain Silo, Canton, Ohio, USA" (€ 15,000/20,000), Robert Mapplethorpe's "Melody (Shoe)" (€ 12,000/16.000) and "Lisa Lyon" (€ 10,000/15,000) as well as works by Philipp-Lorca diCorcia, Ruud van Empel, Elger Esser, Nan Goldin, Loretta Lux, Sebastiao Salgado, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Michael Wesely and others.
Franziska Schmidt