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Lot Essay
Hubertus Wald
Art - Elixir of Life
Hubertus Wald's collection inspired amazement, admiration and delight in all those who had the immense pleasure of viewing his treasures at Hamburg's Bellevue. There, an unusually large, high-quality collection of works was presented in sophisticated, intimate surroundings. The visitor could see at once that the collector was a highly visual person, with a deep sense for the subtle aesthetic of a work of art. "Art - elixir of life": Hubertus Wald delivered his maxim convincingly.
His collection mirrors his own personal view of the 20th Century, beginning with the colour of the Fauves and the painters of Die Brücke, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, followed by New Abstraction and Informel, and finally concluding in the unique style of Cy Twombly and the Abstract Expressionism of Emil Schumacher. The Wald Collection roughly spans the lifetime of its collector (1913-2005), starting with a highly erotic drawing by Pablo Picasso from circa 1903.
Assembled with a focus on quality, and lovingly built up over decades, Hubertus Wald's expansive collection offers a fascinating tour through the seminal artistic movements of the 20th Century. His agile spirit and discerning collector's eye meant that he was enthusiastic for works ranging from the strongly figurative, to creative Surrealism, the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky and the major avant-garde movements which followed the Second World War. He saw tradition and radical change, renewal and artistic renaissance, all as part of an entirety. He was equally impressed by Henry Moore's body-landscapes, Yves Klein's monochrome works, and the Concetti spaziali of Lucio Fontana.
Samy Tarica, his long standing art consultant who had helped to form many other major collections of 20th Century art, including that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé remarked of the collector: 'Hubertus Walds collection, brought together with passion and serendipity, is remarkable as each work is of the highest quality.' Superior in a literal sense is Robert Delaunays Tour Eiffel of 1926.
Hubertus and Renate Wald's fascinating collection will now be offered to similarly discerning collectors of art. Patrons of the arts and philanthropists, it was the Wald's generous donation which led to the creation of the Hubertus Wald Forum, a major exhibition space at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The Hubertus Wald Foundation will benefit from all auction proceeds; the Foundation is devoted to supporting cultural life in Hamburg, and to funding medical research and treatment
at Hamburg's hospitals.
Professor Dr. Wilhelm Hornbostel
Member of the curatorial team of The Hubertus Wald Foundation
Longstanding Director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg
Hubertus Wald
Entrepreneur, Donor, and Collector of Art
Hubertus Wald was 33 years of age when, just after the 2nd World War, he became an entrepreneur and built one of the first new movie theatres in Germany. His main assets: a positive entrepreneurial outlook and a permit from the press officer of the British occupation forces. People were hungry for US-movies and were willing to pay the usual entrance fee in Reichsmarks of uncertain value, along with a log of fire wood or a 'Brikett', a cube of pressed soft coal, per person to fuel the cinema's furnace.
Step by step, Hubertus Wald formed what became the largest German cinema group of its time. He sold it when he foresaw that television would come to replace movie theatres and instead invested in real estate in Germany, the USA and Canada. When he passed away in 2005, aged 92, not only did he make his wife Renate, whom he had married 30 years earlier, his heir, but also the Hubertus Wald Stiftung which he had founded in 1993. This charitable organisation finances medical research and treatment in Hamburg's hospitals and is also a big donor to Hamburg's cultural institutions, such as its acclaimed museums and orchestra Hamburger Symphoniker.
To sum up his life: he earned millions and he gave away millions. He was a man of style, extremely generous, as well as a very caring host who did all he could to see his many guests happy. His dinner parties on the fashionable island of Sylt were famous. And he was a discerning collector of art. Around 1995, the Hubertus and Renate Wald Collection was almost completed. He and his wife purchased paintings, antiquities and antiques, amassing a collection that was breathtaking both in its depth and scope, as well as in its quality.
The collection is to be auctioned and all of the proceeds used to enlarge the assets of his Foundation. This means that more funds will serve the exclusively charitable purposes set by Hubertus Wald, namely research and treatment in Hamburg's hospitals and the continued enrichment of Hamburg's cultural life.
Dr. Günter Hess
Chairman of The Hubertus Wald Foundation
Hamburg, October 2011
The work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné of Cy Twombly Drawings being prepared by Nicola Del Roscio.
Executed in 1970, Cy Twombly's Untitled is a serene and beautifully realised example of the artist's celebrated gestural abstraction. Rendered in white, the work proliferates with lyrical but wordless writing, the soft indigo crayon meandering across the virgin, painted surface. Created at the same time as Twombly's landmark Blackboard series, Untitled translates onto card the period's distinctive intermingling of layers, the liberated swirls of wax crayon overlapping and interacting with one another. Washes of white paint partially obscure passages of cursive script, leaving hand-written traces like shadows of history or lost memory.
In Untitled, the freedom and sensitivity of Twombly's composition appears to reveal the ruminations of the artist's mind. Recalling the immediacy and spontaneity of Jackson Pollock's all-over action painting, the artist's writing 'has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life' (P. Restany quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 19). In spite of the work's apparent formal simplicity, it offers a morass of emotion and human sensation. Indeed the hand drawn, cursive drawings resonate with the viewer as they roam around the surface of the work. As the artist himself once declared, the line can mutate 'from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning it's more like I am having an experience than making a picture' (C. Twombly interview with D. Sylvester quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 14).
As early as 1960, Twombly had revealed his fascination with Leonardo da Vinci's studies of water referred to as the Deluge drawings. These mystical, flowing works on paper convey the energy of the tempestuous sea and it is this same feeling that is embodied in Twombly's improvised language. With its radiant white ground, Untitled also responds to the prevailing cultural climate, marrying the quiet simplicity of the white monochrome as furnished by Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman with the dynamism of the Action painters before him.
Art - Elixir of Life
Hubertus Wald's collection inspired amazement, admiration and delight in all those who had the immense pleasure of viewing his treasures at Hamburg's Bellevue. There, an unusually large, high-quality collection of works was presented in sophisticated, intimate surroundings. The visitor could see at once that the collector was a highly visual person, with a deep sense for the subtle aesthetic of a work of art. "Art - elixir of life": Hubertus Wald delivered his maxim convincingly.
His collection mirrors his own personal view of the 20th Century, beginning with the colour of the Fauves and the painters of Die Brücke, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, followed by New Abstraction and Informel, and finally concluding in the unique style of Cy Twombly and the Abstract Expressionism of Emil Schumacher. The Wald Collection roughly spans the lifetime of its collector (1913-2005), starting with a highly erotic drawing by Pablo Picasso from circa 1903.
Assembled with a focus on quality, and lovingly built up over decades, Hubertus Wald's expansive collection offers a fascinating tour through the seminal artistic movements of the 20th Century. His agile spirit and discerning collector's eye meant that he was enthusiastic for works ranging from the strongly figurative, to creative Surrealism, the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky and the major avant-garde movements which followed the Second World War. He saw tradition and radical change, renewal and artistic renaissance, all as part of an entirety. He was equally impressed by Henry Moore's body-landscapes, Yves Klein's monochrome works, and the Concetti spaziali of Lucio Fontana.
Samy Tarica, his long standing art consultant who had helped to form many other major collections of 20th Century art, including that of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé remarked of the collector: 'Hubertus Walds collection, brought together with passion and serendipity, is remarkable as each work is of the highest quality.' Superior in a literal sense is Robert Delaunays Tour Eiffel of 1926.
Hubertus and Renate Wald's fascinating collection will now be offered to similarly discerning collectors of art. Patrons of the arts and philanthropists, it was the Wald's generous donation which led to the creation of the Hubertus Wald Forum, a major exhibition space at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The Hubertus Wald Foundation will benefit from all auction proceeds; the Foundation is devoted to supporting cultural life in Hamburg, and to funding medical research and treatment
at Hamburg's hospitals.
Professor Dr. Wilhelm Hornbostel
Member of the curatorial team of The Hubertus Wald Foundation
Longstanding Director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg
Hubertus Wald
Entrepreneur, Donor, and Collector of Art
Hubertus Wald was 33 years of age when, just after the 2nd World War, he became an entrepreneur and built one of the first new movie theatres in Germany. His main assets: a positive entrepreneurial outlook and a permit from the press officer of the British occupation forces. People were hungry for US-movies and were willing to pay the usual entrance fee in Reichsmarks of uncertain value, along with a log of fire wood or a 'Brikett', a cube of pressed soft coal, per person to fuel the cinema's furnace.
Step by step, Hubertus Wald formed what became the largest German cinema group of its time. He sold it when he foresaw that television would come to replace movie theatres and instead invested in real estate in Germany, the USA and Canada. When he passed away in 2005, aged 92, not only did he make his wife Renate, whom he had married 30 years earlier, his heir, but also the Hubertus Wald Stiftung which he had founded in 1993. This charitable organisation finances medical research and treatment in Hamburg's hospitals and is also a big donor to Hamburg's cultural institutions, such as its acclaimed museums and orchestra Hamburger Symphoniker.
To sum up his life: he earned millions and he gave away millions. He was a man of style, extremely generous, as well as a very caring host who did all he could to see his many guests happy. His dinner parties on the fashionable island of Sylt were famous. And he was a discerning collector of art. Around 1995, the Hubertus and Renate Wald Collection was almost completed. He and his wife purchased paintings, antiquities and antiques, amassing a collection that was breathtaking both in its depth and scope, as well as in its quality.
The collection is to be auctioned and all of the proceeds used to enlarge the assets of his Foundation. This means that more funds will serve the exclusively charitable purposes set by Hubertus Wald, namely research and treatment in Hamburg's hospitals and the continued enrichment of Hamburg's cultural life.
Dr. Günter Hess
Chairman of The Hubertus Wald Foundation
Hamburg, October 2011
The work will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné of Cy Twombly Drawings being prepared by Nicola Del Roscio.
Executed in 1970, Cy Twombly's Untitled is a serene and beautifully realised example of the artist's celebrated gestural abstraction. Rendered in white, the work proliferates with lyrical but wordless writing, the soft indigo crayon meandering across the virgin, painted surface. Created at the same time as Twombly's landmark Blackboard series, Untitled translates onto card the period's distinctive intermingling of layers, the liberated swirls of wax crayon overlapping and interacting with one another. Washes of white paint partially obscure passages of cursive script, leaving hand-written traces like shadows of history or lost memory.
In Untitled, the freedom and sensitivity of Twombly's composition appears to reveal the ruminations of the artist's mind. Recalling the immediacy and spontaneity of Jackson Pollock's all-over action painting, the artist's writing 'has neither syntax nor logic, but quivers with life' (P. Restany quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 19). In spite of the work's apparent formal simplicity, it offers a morass of emotion and human sensation. Indeed the hand drawn, cursive drawings resonate with the viewer as they roam around the surface of the work. As the artist himself once declared, the line can mutate 'from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning it's more like I am having an experience than making a picture' (C. Twombly interview with D. Sylvester quoted in N. Serota (ed.), Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2008, p. 14).
As early as 1960, Twombly had revealed his fascination with Leonardo da Vinci's studies of water referred to as the Deluge drawings. These mystical, flowing works on paper convey the energy of the tempestuous sea and it is this same feeling that is embodied in Twombly's improvised language. With its radiant white ground, Untitled also responds to the prevailing cultural climate, marrying the quiet simplicity of the white monochrome as furnished by Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman with the dynamism of the Action painters before him.