Dorotheum’s Contemporary Week brings together works by renowned Austrian artists as well as international greats from 29 November to 3 December 2021. This auction week focuses on modern and contemporary art as well as jewellery and wristwatches.

With the world record price of 1.03 million euros for a work by Albin Egger-Lienz, the Dorotheum raised the standards for this artist. At the Modern Art Auction on 30 November 2021, another top work by the East Tyrolean painter will go under the hammer. It is the abstract first study for the painting “Christ’s Resurrection” from 1923, which utilises brown tones. The painting is an important late work and is preserved in the Tyrolean Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck. Egger-Lienz places the risen Christ, standing in front of a coffin, in a peasant’s parlour filled with four people. He profanes the scene. “The religious alone saves me from mannerism and decadence”, wrote the artist, whose aim was “clear, objective form” (€ 300,000 – 450,000). His radical modernity is also evident in “Field with Sower” (€ 40,000 – 60,000).

Another main representative of Austrian Modernism, Alfons Walde, impresses at this auction with the Tyrolean motif “Wilder Kaiser with Farmhouse in the Winter”. The painting, which comes from a Czech private collection, is valued at 280,000 - 450,000 euros.

“Repose”, a multi-figured, rare large format and a major work by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth was created based on observations from trips abroad to Africa, which served as a model for her personal vision of an ideal coexistence of man, nature and animals (€ 170,000 – 220,000). Bright colours and rhythmic forms characterise the painting “Two Figures Praying” by Werner Berg, the “magic realist par excellence” (€ 130,000 – 180,000).

From Léger to Miro
With top international works by Fernand Léger, Jean Arp, Andre Derain, Max Ernst, Amedeo Modigliani, Renato Guttuso and even a sculptural work by Joan Miró, the Modern Art sale also attracts attention.

Max Slevogt’s “Lady in White in a Beach Landscape” may be the scandal-ridden actress Tilla Durieux, partner and later wife of the influential art dealer Paul Cassirer. Together with his fellow artists of the Berlin Secession, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, the couple had invited the painter to the North Sea for two weeks in 1908. It was there that this beach landscape was created. This subject appears very rarely in Slevogt’s oeuvre: only six of these pictures are known, and each occupies a unique place (€ 90,000 – 140,000).

Paris Fire for Vienna
The artist of the catalogue cover of the Contemporary Auction on 1 December, Georges Mathieu, holds a fascinating connection to Vienna. Without him, there might not have been the Viennese Actionism we now know. In 1959, the French artist produced a six-meter-long painting in front of an audience at the Theater am Fleischmarkt. Speed was the motto of the Frenchman, who had been working in lyrical abstraction since 1945, and who, accompanied by avant-garde music, squeezed paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, staged and ritualised. This spectacular painting action in Vienna was, according to Mathieu, a “celebration of the rejection of all painters of the classical school”, and it paved the way for the Viennese Actionists.

The work by Georges Mathieu presented at the Dorotheum auction was created in 1953. “Uranus II” reveals the dynamic gesture of the artist, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year.  Here, the writer Henri Malraux’s eulogy of the painter also applies: “at last, an occidental calligrapher!” (€ 250,000 – 350,000).

Spontaneous gestures
The Italian Informel star Emilio Vedova is also one of the painters who appreciated spontaneous gestures. Nevertheless, his use of the brush was classical, mostly utilising black and white shades and energetic stroke storms, which early on received international attention. This time the auction holds an attractive early work by the Venetian-born painter, a contemporary vision (“visione contemporanea”) from 1952 (€ 280,000 – 360,000). In many of his paintings, Arnulf Rainer strives to cover up, condense and/or erase the subject of the picture. His “Black Overpainting” from 1953/54 represents an especially early example of this (€ 130,000 – 220,000).

The German Hans Hartung also used poetic strokes and gestures (€ 350,000 – 400,000). Significantly, Gerhard Hoehme titles his mixed media on canvas “Impuls und Empfängnis” (€ 90,000 – 120,000). 

Chance and the incidental are central in the poetic assemblages and paintings of the Viennese artist Rudolf Polanszky, whose exhibitions have recently brought him to international attention. His work “Reconstructions” from 2006 is the best example of this practice. The work had been a down payment for a car belonging to Polanszky’s friend Franz West, as an inscription on the back reveals (€ 35,000 – 60,000).  A splatter painting by Hermann Nitsch and a “sick bacchus” by Otto Muehl modelled on Caravaggio in the Pop manner are also available, as is an untitled watercolour by Martha Jungwirth, this year’s winner of the Grand Austrian State Prize for Art.

Other items in the auction include works by Tancredi Parmeggiani (€ 120,000 – 160,000), Piero Dorazio, Carla Accardi, Serge Poliakoff, Arman and Christo.

CONTEMPORARY WEEK 29th NOVEMBER - 3 DECEMBER 2021
* Live Auction with Live Bidding
Jewellery * 29 November 2021, 4 pm
Modern Art * 30 November 2021, 6 pm
Contemporary Art I *  Mittwoch, 1 December 2021, 6 pm
Contemporary Art II online auction 2 December 2021, 4 pm
Wrist and Pocket Watches * 3  December 2021, 1 pm
Viewing from 25 November 2021
Venue Palais Dorotheum, Dorotheergasse 17, 1010 Vienna