Auction no. 263
on 30 November 2016, 6.00 pm
Berlin, 28 October 2016: On Wednesday, 30 November, around 200 lots of modern and contemporary photography will be auctioned at Grisebach in Berlin.
Three vintage contact prints from a French private collection documenting Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's legendary high-rise projects will be auctioned. Mies van der Rohe's designs for the "Wabe" on Berlin's Friedrichstrasse in 1921/1922 and for a "glass skyscraper" in 1922 are considered icons of architectural history. Curt Rehbein, who worked as a photographer for the architect, produced the prints, which are among the few surviving examples of these designs and all bear Mies van der Rohe's studio stamp on the reverse. The photograph of the three-dimensional model of the "Glass Skyscraper" (estimated price € 15,000/25,000) shows the interior of the radically new architectural construction in a particularly impressive way. Two vintage prints with the motif of the "honeycomb" show a famous photomontage, the original of which is now considered lost, and probably a model for the charcoal drawing by Mies van der Rohe kept in New York's Museum of Modern Art (€ 10,000/20,000 each).
In a rare pigment print, the Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol combined a female nude with a still life around 1925. The refined composition testifies to Drtikol's special position between tradition and modern forms of design (€ 40,000/50,000). Only a few years later, Albert Renger-Patzsch created a masterpiece of photographic precision and artistic staging of the landscape with his famous "Bäumchen" (1929). A particularly well-preserved vintage print from the Josef Dickerhoff Collection will be offered in the auction (€ 20,000/30,000). The Modern Photography offering also includes the portfolio "First Landing/New York" with photographs by the artist George Grosz of his arrival in New York in 1932, which were recreated by Gerd Sander from original originals in 1977 (€ 10,000/15,000), as well as works by David Bailey, Erwin Blumenfeld, Elliott Erwitt, Andreas Feininger, Rudolf Koppitz, Heinrich Kühn, Helmar Lerski, Tata Ronkholz, Otto Steinert and others.
Also up for auction are 11 photographs by Albert Renger-Patzsch from the Adalbert and Thilda Colsman Collection, intense images of landscapes and trees from the 1940s to 1960s (€ 2,000/3,000 to € 3,000/4,000). These photographs can be viewed in a special presentation at our premises at Fasanenstraße 25 until the end of November.
In the field of contemporary photography, William Wegman's bundle "Letters, Numbers, Punctuation", in which the letters of the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks of Wegman's Weimaraner dogs are depicted as surreal-looking "living images" (€ 20,000/30,000), should be emphasised. Other highlights in this segment include Elger Esser's panorama "Lyon II" (€ 12,000/15,000), Gunter Sachs' photograph "Ascot" (€ 20,000/30,000) and Steven Klein's staging of the actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in "Case Study # 30" (€ 12,000/15,000). Works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Peter Beard, Helmut Newton, Walter Niedermayr, Jörg Sasse, Reinhart Wolf, Tom Wood and others will also be on offer.