Kirchner portrait may reach $15M in auction
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A self-portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a German Expressionist painter, will be auctioned this month as part of a settlement deal with the descendants of its original owner.
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Ernst Kirchner, Self Portrait with a Pipe, 1907
A self-portrait by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a German Expressionist painter, will be auctioned this month as part of a settlement deal with the descendants of its original owner.
The 1907 artwork, which depicts the artist smoking a pipe and is depicted with colorful brushstrokes, will be auctioned off on June 29th at Sotheby's London headquarters. Self-Portrait with a Pipe is projected to earn between $9.8 and $14.7 million.
If the high estimate is met, it might be one of the five most expensive works by the artist ever sold at auction.
Read more: 10 little-known facts about famous works of art
Kirchner created the piece while working as a member of the avant-garde Die Brücke movement, which he helped to form in 1905. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a friend and Die Brücke co-founder, was the initial owner of the piece. Hugo Simon, a Berlin-based financier and politician, later acquired it in 1931.
The piece is being offered for public auction as part of a legal arrangement between Simon's heirs and the US-based owners, who purchased it at Sotheby's in 1981. The terms of the litigation settlement remain private. The date a claim was originally made for the work was not revealed.
The current self-portrait was last seen in public in the 2007 exhibition "Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism," which took place at the Neue Galerie in New York and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This exhibition emphasized van Gogh's effect on Kirchner, who associated with the French painter's emotional troubles.
Simon's large art collection, which included works by Edvard Munch and Camille Pissarro, was dispersed when he fled Germany through forced sales and confiscations. Many of his works have been recovered from the collection by his heirs.
