DESIGN ICONS KICK OFF THE AUCTION YEAR ON MARCH 24

We will open the 2026 auction year on March 24 with the Design auction. The offering, comprising just over 500 lots, covers a wide range of 20th-century international design and combines iconic items with collector’s pieces and an extensive private collection.

Following intense bidding battles in our previous highlight auction ‘Schools of Design’, we are delighted to once again be able to offer an extraordinary object by Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) in this auction. The children’s wheelbarrow ‘Kruiwagen’ (cat. no. 157) will be up for auction, the prototype of which Rietveld designed in 1923 for the son of architect and member of the De Stijl group J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963). A drawing of the wheelbarrow can be found in a letter from Rietveld to Oud dated October 5, 1923. The model shown here, made in the 1970s by Gerard A. van de Groenekan, combines beech wood sticks and plywood in the colors yellow, red, blue, black, and white—a combination in which function, form, and play merge in pure geometry. The wheelbarrow comes from the collection of a German architect who was a close friend of van de Groenekan and was able to acquire several objects directly from the carpenter’s estate. The wheelbarrow is valued at €12,000 to €15,000.

MURANO GLASS HIGHLIGHTS ON MARCH 25

Rare designs by Ercole Barovier, early glasses by Dino Martens and five ‘Pulcini’ by Alessandro Pianon. We are delighted to present a selection of 189 glass objects designed over the last 130 years. The oldest object is a slender vase by Salviati from 1890, while the most recent work is by Luciano Vistosi, a large-format abstract sculpture entitled ‘Manichino aperto’ from 2001. You can look forward to exciting works, most of which date from the period between 1925 and 1965. This time, the highlights are mainly works by Ercole Barovier and Dino Martens.

Ercole Barovier’s vases from the Primavera series of 1929/30 are extremely rare. Due to the high technical challenges involved, the decoration was only produced for a very short time at the Fratelli Barovier factory. Objects from this series are extremely rare and have fetched by far the highest prices in the Murano glass sector in recent years – six-figure bids were not uncommon. The spherical vase offered in the auction, made of typical crackled milk glass with black applications, is in impeccable condition and valued at €60,000–90,000.

A MULTIFACETED RANGE OF ART FROM AROUND 1900 TO MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POSITIONS

Bronzes, paintings, drawings, and prints come together to form a diverse spectrum that offers both quality and stylistic variety. An impressive work from the turn of the century adds a special touch: The large-format portrait of a woman (estimated price EUR 60,000 – 80,000) is a museum-quality painting by Leo Putz. The young woman standing in an ankle-length, dark green dress appears calm and composed, her clear presence dominating the pictorial space. The painting, created in 1908, falls into a phase in which Leo Putz developed his style from decorative Art Nouveau to a freer, more relaxed painterly approach. As a member of the Munich Secession, he combined elegant lines with an increasingly flat, modern pictorial design. The portrait is exemplary of his recurring interest in contemporary women as self-confident pictorial motifs. The pronounced verticality of the format and the silhouette clearly set against the light background lend the painting a special conciseness; Putz remained faithful to the use of broad brushstrokes until the 1920s.

Other works in our offering from various genres are by Franz von Stuck, Pablo Picasso, Fritz Köthe, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, and many more.