Harriet Häußler

On Friday evening, March 3, 2023, Nan Goldin held an impressive, very personal speech when receiving the Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize 2022 at Akademie der Künste in central Berlin.

Nan Goldin was the last lecturer after a pathetic and warm speech by Klaus Biesenbach, now director of the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery) in Berlin, whose first exhibition was a Nan Goldin solo-show when he was only 25 years old and still a student of medicine.

Since that first commun show in 1992 Goldin and Biesenbach always kept in touch with each other. Now, Nan Goldin is one of the most influential female photographer in the world. She recounted her long relationship with Berlin where she lived for three years in the early 1990s when receiving a DAAD-scholarship. Goldin summed up that since that first stay in the German capital she had regularly a show in Berlin – every two years her work is exhibited here. In her speech the artist also informed her audience about her successfull fight against the Sackler family who initiated the biggest drug scandal in the USA in the last century. The Sackler family had earned billions of US-Dollar in selling a highly addictive drug – Nan Goldin nearly died of the drug, about half a million of Americans died. The photos Nan Goldin is taking for decades bring to the public a culture which was long hidden in American society. With a very close and intimate camera Nan Goldin keeps an eye on her friends – some of them died in the 1980s/1990s of HIV, other of drug consumption. The view is always sensitive and delicate. The portraits show the fragility of lots of her friends.

The Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize is endowed with 12.000 EUR and sponsored by the Kreissparkasse from Cologne. It is wonderful that a Cologne based bank is supporting Berlin.

A visit of the show is highly recommended! The Akademie der Künste shows a fine selection of Goldin’s work from the 1970s up to new works from 2020.

Good to know: The solo-show at Akademie der Künste has been extended to April 2023.

Which forecast can I seriously make now in the beginning of the year?

First: In the last decades the art market tend to react slighly time delayed to recessions. We saw this in 1990/1991 and in 2008/2009. Therefore, the extremely wealthy will continue to support the high-end market. The prices for a very few artists will go up and up. After the incredible records last year – Paul G. Allen, Doris and Thomas Amman, Beeple, only to name a few – I expect a further strengthening of the market this year in the high price segment. Apparently the extreme wealthy will continue to invest in art as a long-term asset.

Second: The prices for the medium price category will experience a cool down. Lots of artists, whose art ist offered between 25 k and 100 k EUR, will realise less sales.

Third: At the same time young artists, whose works are not yet established in the internationel art market, will have even more difficulties in selling their art works.The middle class with an affinity for art will have less less purchasing power.

Fourth: Prices for works by female artists will continue to reach higher price. Female art will get more acceptance and attention in all segments of the art world. I expect a further boost for exhibitions, sale prices and publications for female artists in total.

Fifth: The subject of sustainability will also become important for the art world. The awareness for our nature and climate will also influence processes in the art world.

Yesterday, the Paul G. Allen Collection achieved more than $ 1.5 billion. This is the highest amount one single auction has ever achieved at an auction house.

Christie’s New York sold masterpieces from Allen’s Collection. In 1975 Paul G. Allen founded Microsoft together with Bill Gates. After separating in 1983 Allen continued to invest in interesting assets. In 2018 he died of cancer. Yesterday only 60 out of a total of 150 works were put on auction – this part I could already break the record of more than 1 billion US-Dollar after lot number 32. Today on November 10, 2022, the other 90 works will be put on auction.

The most expensive work of yesterday’s sale was an impressionist painting by French artist Georges Seurat. His “Les Poseuses, Ensemble (petite version)” from 1888 was sold for $ 149 million. There were four more works which were sold above the limit of $ 100 million: paintings by Paul Cézanne (1888-1890), Vincent Van Gogh (1888), Paul Gauguin (1899) and Gustav Klimt (1903). The funds will all be dedicated to philanthropy as Paul G. Allen signed the Gates initiative “Giving Pledge”.

From September 12 to 18, 2022 the blockchain week takes place in Berlin. The program offers a wide range of possibilities for everybode to connect within the blockchain community. There are workshops about crypto currency and networks such as Polkadot & Kusama or symposia on themes such as the intersection of blockchain, politics and futurology

The conference “blockchain in use” is about topical questions on and around the fascinating technology: Where it is already used? In which other industries might there be possibilites to use it. There is a focus on the use of blockchain in the creative industry as well – so there is not only a focus on the world of finance.

On November 23/24, 2022 more than 100 exhibitors present their newest developments on the pitch contest of the Next Block Expo in Berlin. More than 80 speakers discuss the Web3. There are three main subjects in the centre: Defi, Blockchain Gaming and Metaverse/NFT.

Is it a strange coincidence that on Saturday, June 11, 2022 not only the 12th Biennale for Contemporary Art will open in Berlin but also the WTA-500 tennis tournament at the Lawn Tennis Turnier Club Rot-Weiss? There are only so few really international events in the German capital that it sounds at least mysterious to me what a tennis enthusiast might have in common with an art enthusiast.

The art world just comes back from its trip to the Bienniale in Venice to stop in Berlin before continuing its way to Switzerland where the Art Basel art fair will open for invited guest on Tuesday, June 17, 2022. What can the art market expect from the Bienniale in Berlin? The team around Kader Attia has chosen several locations for the art event, among them there are the traditional sites Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art, the Academy of Fine Arts and the KW, the Institute for Contemporary Art. A close relationship to the recent past of Berlin will be drawn by including the “Stasi-Zentrale” – the headqurters of the secret police in former East Germany – to the sites of the Biennale.

Former Biennales have not shown that the official event influenced the art market in Berlin. It seems inscrutable why even after the pandemic when the whole art world was shoken by closures for long periods the instiutions and the galleries do not aim to cooperate. Kader Attia did not approach the local galleries to invite them to an official cooperation – e. g. in organising a common opening of interesting shows. For galleries from the US or UK it is incomprehensible why the public institutions do not cooperate with the private economy. And to me it is even less comprehensible why the curatorial team chose the opening date at the same time as the tennis tournament which lasts only a week in contrast to the Bienale which will last for more than three months.

Anyway, let’s stay curious when we will wander around Berlin next week. Maybe we will find the Berlin art scene more cooperative than expected and we will discover some interesting links between art seen at the public Biennale sites and at private galleries. Hopefully, a large part of Berlin will be infected by the “Biennale fever”!

The silkscreen entitled “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” from 1964 will come to auction in May in New York. The auction house Christie’s just published the estimation which is a sensation: 200 million US-Dollar are expected for the silkscreen. Why is the estimation so high as there are several versions of Monroe’s portraits in different colours and sizes?

Andy Warhol started his portrait series of the American actress just after her death in 1962. There are four special aspects why this work got the high estimate:

1.) The work will be sold by the Swiss Foundation “Thomas-und-Doris-Ammann” in Zurich which was founded in 2021 after Dors Ammann, the legendary art dealer and Thomas Ammann’s sister, died. Thomas Ammann had founded his gallery in 1977 and quickly became one of the most known art dealers of his time. He became Andy Warhol`s friend and edited the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s paintings, silkscreens, sculptures and works on papers. It is not known to the public when the Monroe silkscreen became part of the Ammann collection. For sure is that it has not been resold since the work was bought by Thomas or Doris Amman. This “market-freshness” is one of the most important reasons for the high estimate.

2.) The silkscreen is part of the series “The Shot Marilyn” from 1964. Andy Warhol made five works for this series but only four of them were shot. How did this happen? Dorothy Prodber, a visitor at Warhol’s Factory in 1964, asked Warhol if she could shot the four Marilyns which were stacked against the wall. Warhol agreed as he thought Prodber would like to take a photo. But she took out a revolver and shot a hole in the four stacked works. The fifth (the turqouise one) was the only one remaining unshot. So the “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” is a rarity of only four silkscreens with this remarkable hole in the canvas which has finally been restored.

3) The three other “Shot Marilyns” in red, green and orange are today all in private collections. But not in any private collections: All the other works plus the unshot light blue work belonged and still belong to some of the most impressive collectors of the 20th and 21st centurey. The owners are Peter Brant, Philippe Niarchos, Steven Cohen and Kenneth Griffin – among the previous owners of the Marilyns you find Karl Ströher, Leon Kraushar, Masao Wanibuchi, Si Newhouse and Stefan Edlis. All these men have and had great impact on the development of the art market of the last decades.

4.) The last reason why the “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” got this high estimate is that the orange version of the series was publically sold at auction in 1998 for only $ 17 million, but then sold again to Kenneth Griffin for a rumored $ 250 million in 2017. Now five years later it makes sense that this price might be realised at a public auction as well – especially as the sage blue version has never been auctioned before.

Let’s see which price the sage blue Mariyn will achieve in May. Good to know is that all revenues from the sale will be donated to charitable purposes.

The painting “The Foxes” by Franz Marc from 1913 was sold in London for more than 42 million pounds on March 1, 2022. By the sale Christie’s achieved a record for Franz Marc.

Before the auction could take place, the scramble about the “Foxes” took more than three years. Only in January, 11th – two months before the auction took place in March 2022 – the city of Duesseldorf in Western German restituted the art work to the heirs of Kurt Grawi (1887-1944). Grawi who was an important entreprenuer and banker in Nazi-Germany had to suffer from the Nazi-regime as a Jewish. After being imprisoned in 1938 he could escape to Chile.

What about the painting? In 1928 Kurt Grawi bought the “Foxes” by Franz Mark. In 1940 Grawi sold the Franz Marc painting to William Dieterle, a German-American film director in Los Angeles. Dieterle sold the painting in 1962 to the department store chain “Merkur”, which belonged to the German entrepreneur Helmut Horten. It was finally Horten who gave the work to the city of Duesseldorf as a gift. The “Foxes” were on view to the German public from the 1960s on until last year in the Museum “Kunstpalast” in Duesseldorf.

The discussions were concentrating on the fact that the sale didn’t happen in Nazi-Germany but in the States and in Chile – Grawi was in Santiago de Chile and the painting in New York when it was sold in 1938. The legal discussions has now ended after years, so that Ingeburg Breit (90), Kurt Grawi’s daughter-in-law, could get the painting back in January 2022. The record price of more than 42 million pounds only shows that rare and high-quality expressionists from Germany can achieve millions on the international art market.

The 10th edition of the Berlin Art Week started for the second time under pandemic conditions.

As the German art market is still not back to its level from before the Corona crises this is one of the most important events in Germany for collectors, curators, galleries and art enthusiastics to talk and discuss about art as well as to deal with art works.

As it is the new standard in the art world the real part of the art week takes place in the whole area of Berlin, decentralised with lots of distance and in the majority outside. The second part of the art week takes place in the virtual world – the new platform “playlist” is ment as an addition of the presentation of the Berlin and so far of the German current art world.

The Art Week is accompanied by three further events, the Positions Berlin Art Fair, the paper positions berlin as well as the fair at Johann Koenig’s gallery in the former church St. Agnes, MISA.

With the Art Week the so called “Moabiter Werkhof L.57” opened its doors for the second time and gives insights in the studios from Katharina Grosse, Karin Sander, Anri Sala, Konstantin Grcic and Via Lewandowsky among others.

Berlin shows again its wide art scene. For the visitors always astonishing are the big distances between the individual locations. If you go from the “old” art centre around the museum Frieder Burda, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the galleries Sprüth Magers and Eigen + Art via the area in Charlottenburg with the galleries Max Hetzler and Mehdi Chouakri you could finish your trip in Dahlem in the southwest at Fluentum.

Old and new collections open their doors: you could stop at the Feuerle Collection, the Sammlung Seibert or the EAM Collection.

The events give an overview of the Berlin art scene which is still very dynamic and young. What the visitors is at the same time missing in Berlin are the big names. There are very promising new artistic positions which you can discover but there are nearly no international names. The public museums did not interact with the privately organised Art Week in an obvious way so that the exhibitions at the museums seem to stand alone, separated from the colourful program of the Art Week participants.

The German Fluxus, happenings and performance artist Joseph Beuys had great influence on the German and European art scene as an artist as well as a theorist of art. He was born 100 years ago on May 12 in 1921. In occasion of this anniversary it seems to be appropriate to take a closer look at his position in the art market.

Since the beginning of this year more than 250 works by Beuys have been offered at international auctions. Furthermore, there are and were numerous exhibitions at institutions, especially in Germany. E. g. the university of Dusseldorf has organised under the leadership of Eugen Blume and Catherine Nichols and under the title “beuys 2021” several activities in the Rheinland. In Aachen, Bonn, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Krefeld, Munster and further museums and exhibition spaces there will be works, films, concerts, book presentations and symposiums on this exceptional artist. In the Belvedere 21 in Vienna there is another exhibition on a large scale entitled “Think. Act. Convey”. In addition, since last Sunday the exhibition “Von der Sprache aus. (Starting from Language)” at the Berlin-based Hamburger Bahnhof is open and from the end of this month on there will be an interesting confrontation of Beuys and Lehmbruck on view at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn.

Does this high media presence have influence on the market development of the artist?

First of all, it is remarkable that the quantity of works which are offered at auction has sharply increased this year. In the reference period of last year 2020 there were only 129 works coming to auction in comparison to 267 works this year. Nearly 20 % of the offered lots in 2021, 24 works, were sold for more than 10.000 EUR. In the reference period in 2020 only eight lots could exceed this limit. These numbers alone indicate an upturn of Joseph Beuys in the jubilee year.

This view is supported by another sale: At Phillips in London the threedimensional edition “Sled” (an edition of 50 from 1969) was sold on Monday for even more than 150.000 EUR. The widely known object “Capri Battery” from Schellmann in an edition of 200 from 1985 was furthermore sold for the stable price of nearly 20.000 EUR at the same auction in the UK.

To sum up Joseph Beuys’ jubilee year has aroused great interest in this artist – and inspite of the limitations caused by the pandemic there is an upward trend visible in his market value, more works are offered for sale and on top, they are sold for higher prices.