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Auction No. 77: Art Nouveau - Art Déco

Auction No. 77 - 21 October 2008
Art Nouveau & Art Déco

Post auction sale until 21 November

Post Auction Report

'Lötz - A Private West German Collection' and 'Art Nouveau - Art Deco'

Good provenance makes for high hammer prices and good sales quotas. Thus the high quality Lötz glass assembled over the last thirty years by a private west German collector was rewarded with sales quotas of 115 % in terms of estimated price and 75 % in terms of numbers of lots, with the collection grossing nearly €180,000. The highest price and largest increase was achieved by the 1902 'Cytisus' vase with its twisted handles, which soared from €9,000 to €23,000 and which will now feature in a Munich private collection. As anticipated by the auctioneer, there were numerous bidding contests and a full auction room. The last of the 88 Lötz glass lots was knocked down after one and a half hours instead of the 45 minutes budgeted. Private collections are enjoying a boom, as shown by previous auctions: at the end of 2007, a top-class Art Nouveau collection was auctioned by Quittenbaum with great success, and at the beginning of 2008, two private collections of Murano glass and African art met with great interest.

In the regular 'Art Nouveau - Art Deco' auction, the initial category French glass experienced successes above all once again by works in the pâte-de-verre technique, such as Gabriel Argy-Rousseau’s colourful 'Gerbera' vase, which made €7,000 and a handled dish of his for €4,000, both objects being acquired by a west German collector. Miniature vases by the Daum brothers of Nancy were also very successful – a vase depicting a winter landscape and ravens climbed from €2,400 to €4,000 and will grace a private Italian collection in future. Among the Gallé vase offering, numerous vases in the popular colour combination of red and yellow fetched hammer prices of between €2,000 and €4,000. The pieces from the Schneider manufactory were almost sold in their entirety.

In the French ceramics section, the large cachepot by Clément Massier went for €6,000 to a French collector, while a vase by Adrien Dalpayrat, originating from the Heuser collection in Hamburg, clambered from €1,500 to €5,600.

Figurative designs triumphed among the Austrian items: a west German collector invested €7,000 in Dina Kuhn’s expressive male head (estimated price: €4,500) while Franz Hagenauer’s brass female head went for €15,000 (estimated price €10,000) and topped the offering from the Hagenauer workshops, which nearly sold out completely

German figurative porcelain was also very popular. Thus Martin Fritzsche’s lidded vase with a putto, designed for KPM, sold for €5,200, Paul Walther’s guinea fowl group (Meißen) was worth a collector’s €4,000, and Alfred König’s 'Lady with a Fan' went for €5,500 to a German collector.

A record price was fetched by the eggshell porcelain large handled vase designed by Samuel Schellink in 1911/12 for Rozenburg. This jewel of an item, acquired by a German private collector thirty years ago, sold to a collector for € 25,000, from a starting price of €19,000. Towards the end of the auction, telephone bidders wooed the 'Butterfly Dancers' by Ferdinand Preiss and Otto Poertzel, which started at €15,000 and eventually went for €30,000 to a Swiss private collector.

Towards the end of year, Quittenbaum is auctioning around 200 'Highlights of Design History' on 10th November in Munich’s Haus der Kunst under the motto 'Illuminated'. Sales of several private collections have already been notified for 2009. As the Lötz auction has shown, even in times of financial crisis, works of art that have been collected with passion and which attract a solid following are in great demand.