A small, tightly focused self-portrait by German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who was long written out of art history but who has recently come in for renewed attention, made history at Berlin’s Grisebach auction house on Thursday. Selbstbildnis nach halblinks (Self-Portrait Looking Slightly Left), from 1906, measures just 10½ inches high, but fetched €1.3 million ($1.5 million) including fees, more than quintupling its low estimate, to sell to an unnamed private collector in Europe.
The price more than doubles the artist’s previous record, established at Grisebach in 2013, when her ca. 1904 painting Auf einem Stuhl sitzendes Mädchen mit Kind auf dem Schoss vor Landschaft (A Girl Sitting on a Chair with a Child on Her Lap, In Front of a Landscape) sold for €525,000 (just under $714,000 at the time), more than doubling its low estimate. The self-portrait has hung in exhibitions at Munich’s Haus der Kunst and the Lenbachhaus; the Museum of Modern Art in Hayama, Japan; and the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, among others.
“This record hammer price is a powerful testament to the emphatic recognition of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s work,” said the auction house in an email. “It underscores the growing interest in female modernist artists, which is increasingly reflected in market valuations.”
Modersohn-Becker’s biographer, Diane Radycki, argued for her as the first modernist woman painter; she has received institutional attention recently, in the form of one of the biggest retrospectives of her work in recent memory, mounted in 2022 at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2017, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Neue Galerie jointly acquired a self-portrait from 1907, donated by ARTnews Top 200 Collectors Debra and Leon Black. It was the first self-portrait by the artist to enter a US museum collection. While she painted landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes, she was mostly devoted to portraits of women and girls, and painted many self-portraits.
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Selbstbildnis nach halblinks (Self-Portrait Looking Slightly Left), 1906.
Bauer (1901–1968) loved Expressionist art and aimed to rehabilitate the reputations of artists who had been persecuted by the Nazis, including Modersohn-Becker as well as Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Käthe Kollwitz. Bauer worked for a company that dealt in lignite, a form of coal, owned by the Petschek family, which was seized by the Nazis in 1938, at which time he started his own business. He was imprisoned between 1944 and 1945 for dissenting activities, and went on to serve the German government after the war.
Before Hitler seized art he considered “degenerate,” Bauer was able, through officially appointed dealers, to buy a number of works that had been confiscated from museums. Modersohn-Becker’s self-portrait, seized from the St. Annen Museum in Lübeck, was among them.
The Bauer sale overall far exceeded its €3 million ($3.5 million) estimate to total €5.7 million ($6.6 million) with nearly 90 per cent of lots sold. Works by Ernst Barlach, Caspar David Friedrich, and Emil Nolde also exceeded their estimates; a piece by Kollwitz rose from a starting bid of €30,000 ($34,800) to sell for €215,900 ($250,600).
