Antiques Trade Gazette 53

Season ‘couldn’t have started better’

Far left: Return of the Fishing Fleet by Hendrik Wilhelm Medag – €118,000 (£100,300) at Ketterer Kunst.

Left: Two Women by Otto Griebel – €130,000 (£110,500) at the same sale.

AS Robert Ketterer of Munich auctioneers

Ketterer Kunst (22% buyer’s premium)

put it after his Old Master, Modern and Contemporary sales of April 23-24: “The season couldn’t have started better.” On several occasions bidders surprised him with their determination to go way above the estimates on several works of art.

One of the first sleepers was the unsigned, 18 x 15in (46 x 38cm) canvas

Portrait of an Old Man, estimated at

€1000. Presumably French, the painting had once belonged to Alfred Stroelin, one of the most influential dealers in Paris at the turn of the century and it was obviously this provenance which convinced many bidders to join in.

At the end it was a Belgian phone bidder who emerged the winner with a bid of €49,000 (£41,650). Works by Carl Blechen (1798-1840), a contemporary of Caspar David Friedrich, were equally popular.

A pair of his tiny 3 x 4in (8 x 10cm), landscapes on panel dated 1835 swiftly went past the €12,000 estimate and

were eventually knocked down at €60,000 (£51,000) to a Berlin collector. More such surprises courtesy of strong private purses were to come. A Swiss collector went to €74,000 (£62,900) for Blechen’s 10in x 8in (26cm x

20cm) Verwitterter Baumstamm(Decayed

Tree Trunk) from 1830 which had been estimated at €12,000. A German collector beat off the

international competition to gain the top prize of the first day. He bid €118,000 (£100,300) for Hendrik Wilhelm Medag’s (1831-1915) 20 x 15in (51 x 39cm) Return of the Fishing

Fleet, which Ketterer had estimated at €30,000.

The following day, there was another major price hike. One of the few remaining works by Otto Griebel (1895-1972), his 2ft x 18in (64 x 45cm) watercolour Zwei Frauen (Two Women), had been put in the catalogue at €20,000.

Griebel was a contemporary of Otto Dix and George Grosz, but he never attained their level of recognition and fame. He was hounded by the Nazis and lost most of his works during the

After 30 years, pioneering Brussels sets tribal pace

BRUSSELS, Paris and New York are the main tribal art market centres these days. The first two cities are not only noted for auctions but also for their concentration of specialist dealers and their so-called ‘Tribal Trails’. These week-long events see participants celebrating the cities’ concentration and rich variety of tribal art with open galleries and exhibitions mounted by local dealers, plus guest exhibitors from around the world. The Paris event, Parcours des Mondes, takes place in September, but it was Brussels – which pioneered the idea back in 1981 with BRUNEAF(Brussels Non-European Art Fair) – which is first out of the blocks, next month. Since those early days almost 30 years ago, BRUNEAF’s

exhibitor numbers have grown and there are more than 50 participants in this year’s staging, from June 9-13. Tribal art is also currently much in evidence in the auction world. Sotheby’s have just sold a premium-inclusive $12.3m worth of material in New York and there are a number of major auctions scheduled to take place in Paris over the next few weeks. In next week’s International Events section, ATGturns its attention to the tribal market, with reviews and previews of events on the auction and dealing scene.

Right: Galerie Riccardo Colombo will be showing this 13in (34cm) high, late 19th/early 20th century Dayak mask from Borneo at BRUNEAF.

bombing of Dresden in 1945. All of this meant that Zwei Frauen

provided a rare opportunity to acquire one of his works and it attracted eight phone bidders from all over the world as well as several in the room. Nevertheless, they were all beaten by the commission bid of a Greek collector, who sealed the deal at €130,000 (£110,500).

This is an unprecedented price for a work by the artist and way above the previous record for Griebel at auction which – another example of the scarcity of his works on the market – was set ten years ago when his 12 x 9in (32 x 23cm)

watercolour The Naked Whorefrom 1923

took £46,000 at Sotheby’s in London in October 2000.

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