The folks at Villa Grisebach shared some details from their last auction cycle which featured a new sale of Contemprorary art:

A new chapter opened. This weekend the inaugural auction “Contemporary Art” was held at Villa Grisebach’s newly added galleries at Fasanenstrasse 27: With more than 400 guests attending and a total of 150 bidders on the telephones paintings by Anselm Kiefer (EUR 312,500*) and Georg Baselitz (EUR 250,000) fetched the highest hammer-prices.

The top-selling lot of the series of eight auctions was a work in the “19th Century Art” sale. The EUR 3,295,000 achieved for Adolf Menzel’s gouache, “Stehende Rüstungen” (estimate: EUR 100,000 / 150,000), turned into the world auction record for a work by the artist, exceeding the previous record by more than a million euros. The winning bid came form a Swiss private collector against eleven bidders on the telephones and numerous bidders in the room. Concurrently, it became the highest price in Germany ever paid at auction for a work on paper.  Another spectacular price was achieved for a rare print by Caspar David Friedrich. “Die Frau mit dem Spinnennetz (Melancholie)” brought EUR 901,000 (estimate: EUR 10,000 / 15,000).

In the “Selected Works” auction the last painting Max Beckmann painted in Germany in 1937 before emigrating was sold: Depicting dark looming clouds at a beach on the North Sea island of Wangerooge, it sold after a bidding battle for EUR 1,397,500 to a German private collector.

“Prints” was established in an inaugural auction: Here, the top-selling lot was “Der Kuss” by Edvard Munch. The hand-colored woodcut sold for EUR 500,000 (estimate: EUR 180,000 / 240,000) to a Scandinavian private collector.