The Bayer Collection

In recent years the way and the area in which companies collaborate has changed tremendously. This also affects the manner in which art is shown at the workplace. Bayer is therefore parting from classic and representative works from the extensive art collections at various companies of the group. The corporation’s modern officescapes are to continue to provide space for young art. Consequently, the works of artists Bayer has supported in recent years will remain in the group’s possession. The Leverkusen-based corporation will also retain the collection of works dealing with its rich history.

Main focal points of the Bayer Collection are German Expressionism, works of Classical Modernism and Post-War art as well as works of the École de Paris, German Art Informel, and American Abstract Expressionism. Various German works from the 1970s, Abstract and New Figurative Art from the 1980s and 1990s, as well as young contemporary art complete the broad range. The two paintings by Andy Warhol, the most important representative of American Pop Art, assume a special place in the collection, even though this art movement is no central focus of the collection.

Andy Warhol’s oeuvre is marked by the serial reproduction of motifs, especially portraits of stars, artists, actors and actresses, and politicians. Renaissance icons held a special fascination for the arguably most eminent of all Pop Art artists. The painting of the Mona Lisa, which he did 30 times in the early 1960s, has the provocative title Thirty Are Better Than One – with which the artist almost cynically postulated the significance of a work’s quantity over its quality. He reworked a number of Renaissance works, including the portrait of a young woman after Lucas Cranach the Elder (estimate: €600,000–1,000,000), which has been part of the Bayer Collection since 1984, next to the portrait of Nastassja Kinski (estimate: €300,000–500,000). Both portraits of a woman, which were supplied by Warhol’s Factory, were conceived as double portraits that were remittance works for Bayer AG. They were commissioned for an exhibition project titled “Hommage aux femmes” that accompanied a convention in Berlin in 1985. Thirty-two selected, internationally operating artists were asked to create works on the subject of “femininity” for the project, where Andy Warhol assumed the role of lead artist.

Max Beckmann was one of the most important representatives of German Expressionism. Even though pictures of people and figures are always at the centre of his oeuvre, more than 140 still lifes prove that Beckmann was also concerned about the dignity and appreciation of “simple” things. The painting Orchideen – Stillleben mit grüner Schale(Orchids – Still Life with Green Bowl) is signed “Beckmann A 43” and has been in the possession of Bayer since 1950 (estimate: €400,000–600,000). The abbreviation A signifies Amsterdam, the place where it was created and where Beckmann was in exile at the time. Beckmann’s diary contains references to the creation of the painting, e.g. on 1 February 1943: “Also worked on the 2 women in green and yellow. A draft for a still life, Orchids with Green Bowl.” Flowers are at the centre of almost all still lifes the artist painted in Amsterdam. During his years there, his painting technique clearly reveals an increasingly free application of colours with greater luminosity. The more oppressive Beckmann’s external situation became, the more intensive and livelier was his imagery. 

Ernst Wilhelm Nay was one of the few German artists who managed to join the international movement of Modernism and who significantly helped shape 20th-century art. While his pre-war works were still rooted in the figurative world, after his disconcerting experiences during the reign of the Nazis he could only pursue an abstract approach in his art. From 1945 on he devoted himself entirely to the structure and rhythm of his paintings using pure shapes of colour. It was his lifelong concern to create the “elementary picture”; to create space, rhythm, and dynamics though colour alone, the most elementary representation: “Painting means forming the picture from colours, because colour is life in art.” The painting Rot im Zentrum (Red in the Centre) (estimate: €400,000–600,000), acquired in 1980 from the artist’s widow, is from 1955 and belongs to the so-called disc paintings that were created between 1954 and 1962. Here Nay contrasts the round shape of the disc with rectangular chains of shapes or light and dark chessboard fields. He composes large and small discs and similar shapes in crystal clear, bright colours to produce a moving colour choreography on the surface, always making colour the constituent force of the painting.

Henry Moore was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. Combining figurative and abstract formal language, he had a decisive impact on the development of modern sculpture on an international scale. Crucial influences were his reception of non-European sculptures of African origin and his discussions with Surrealist artist such as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, whom he met during sojourns in Paris. In the course of his intensive collaboration with sculptor Barbara Hepworth he began to work more experimentally, breaking up closed designs and creating sculptures based on the arrangement of geometric forms. In its design, the work Three Part Object from 1960 on the one hand points to his study of non-European sculptures and on the other to the idea of bringing together different elements in a block-like form by way of a collage to make them a unit (estimate: €150,000–250,000). The three superimposed, organic forms generate the impression of a figure with the lower part of the body, torso and head. While the individual elements may also be interpreted as different forms of figurative elements, they never lose their organic-abstract character. 

Martin Kippenberger had an extraordinarily multifaceted artistic career and his creativity knew no bounds. In his works Kippenberger wove a web of references and links between the Punk generation’s everyday culture and Postmodernism which was in vogue at the time. Above all, however, he critically probed the art business by supplying a surplus of works and deliberately banalizing art, thus helping to ironize as well as deconstruct the art business. His mission was to undermine the traditional concept of art. We must also look at the mocking composition of the painting 4. Preis (Fourth Prize) from 1987 in this context, which combines incongruous objects and trigger different chains of association (estimate: €100,000–150,000). Here the eternal quest to win first prize is portrayed as a cliché and exposed as an absurdity, while winning fourth prize is celebrated with this painting. In this way he ironizes the eternal struggle for first place, satirizing the unacknowledged battle between winners and losers by erecting a monument to the fourth (undesired) prize.