A famous German artist’s last known painting has sold at auction for a whopping EUR 3.7 million, beating expectations that it would go for ‘just’ EUR 1.4 million.
Max Beckmann painted ‘Large Clown with Women and Small Clown’ in 1950 and it has now been sold at an auction by the Ketterer Kunst Auction House for EUR 3.7 million (GBP 3.06 million).
According to the Ketterer auction house, the painting had been owned by Krupp manager Berthold Beitz and his family since 1965 and had been exhibited several times in special exhibitions in museums.
Beitz headed up the Krupp steel conglomerate beginning in the 1950s, he and his wife, Else, were praised for serving Jews during World War II, despite the Krupp company using slave labour, including Jews, to build submarine, warships and other weaponry for the Nazis.
The estimated price for the painting was ‘just’ EUR 1.4 million (GBP 1.16 million).
But during the auction, which had “persistent online and telephone bidders” it finally found a new owner, who has not been named, for over double the price.
Newsflash obtained a statement from the Ketterer Kunst Auction House saying that the painting was “one of Beckmann’s last paintings on which he worked until the end of November 1950; he died on December 27, 1950, on a walk in Central Park [in New York, in the US].”
A long-lost work by the painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) was also part of the auction.
Dix is famous for his horror-filled work “The War” about the First World War.
Now a children’s book illustrated by him with 14 large-format watercolours was auctioned.
An unknown bidder won the auction for EUR 368,300 (GBP 305,100). The estimated price had been between EUR 250,000 and EUR 350,000 (GBP 207,100 and GBP 290,000).
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Story By: Joseph Golder, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Newsflash
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