Kind mit blauen Vögeln (Child with Blue Birds) by August Macke – estimate €2m-3m at Ketterer Kunst.
The 23½in x 2ft 8in (60 x 82cm) oil on canvas is estimated at €2m-3m in the Evening Sale on June 10-11 in Munich.
The artist named the work Kind mit blauen Vögeln (Child with Blue Birds), while the catalogue raisonné mentions it as Mädchen mit blauen Vögeln (Girl with Blue Birds).
It was painted in Bonn in June and July of 1914, right after his noted Tunisian journey. Macke‘s wife Elisabeth, in her memoirs that were published in 1962, recalled: “It was like he was working in a frenzy, a fever, trying to make sure to paint as much of what he had set himself as a goal.“
A few weeks later Germany mobilised and the artist‘s creative period of only 10 years came to an abrupt ending. At the age of 27, the young soldier fell in battle in Perthes-les-Hurius in the Champagne region just a few weeks later, on September 26.
The work remained in the artist‘s estate until 1928, when it went into the collection of the Krefeld silk industrialist Erich Raemisch, who had one of the most distinguished collections of Modern art before the war.
Mädchen mit blauen Vögeln is interesting in another regard: the varnished reverse shows Macke‘s composition Drei Frauen am Tisch from 1912.
