Kasper KÖnig’s Collection Brings in $6.5 Million at Auction

Works from the private collection of renowned German curatorKasper König, whodiedthis past August, amassed roughly €6 million ($6.5 million) in sales taking place October 1 and 2 at the Cologne headquarters of auction houseVan Ham. A cofounder of Germany’s Skulptur Projekte Münster, the founder of Frankfurt’s Portikus, and a onetime director of Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, König was widely admired for his consistently powerful shows centering cutting-edge contemporary art. As might be expected of a person so committed to exhibition-making, he planned both the auction and its catalogue before his death, though his collection came into being through a somewhat more haphazard process, as he was wont to purchase art in the spur of the moment, and counted a number of works given to him by artists as among his trove.

Among the roughly four hundred works sold were those by artists including Richard Artschwager, Thomas Bayrle, William Copley, On Kawara, Claes Oldenburg, Sigmar Polke, and Thomas Schütte. The top hammer price was achieved by a work by Kawara, whoseMay 7, 1967fetched roughly $878,000, the most ever commanded by one of the Japanese conceptual artist’s date paintings, according to the auction house. A second date painting by Kawara,21 Nov 2003, which the artist had gifted to König to commemorate the curator’s sixtieth birthday, coincident with the work’s title, brought in about $318,000. Oldenburg’s 1967–83Ghost Wardrobe for M. M. pulled in roughly $377,000—more than double its top estimate of about $165,000—while Copley’s 1953Lady Be Good, also far exceeded its own top estimate of $99,000, hammering at $189,000. Works priced on the lower end of the spectrum also outperformed, including a 2007 work on paper by Nicole Eiseman, which brought in more than three times its expected top estimate with a roughly $22,000 bid, and Katharina Fritsch’s diminutiveMaus, 1999, whose hammer price of about $14,500 represented a pleasing uptick from its top estimate of about $5,500.