2023-11-25 11:05:07
A climate change painting from 1959? Or “just” a landscape picture? Or even the mystical representation of a soul in love? In the ZDF junk show “Bares für Rares”, “the horses” ran away with the imagination of the dealers, as one of them, Elisabeth “Lisa” Nüdling, called it…
On behalf of a friend, the married couple Karin and Rainer wanted to sell an oil painting depicting a mountainous landscape in Horst Lichter’s junk show “Bares für Rares”. Expert Colmar Schulte-Goltz was impressed by the work of the American artist Clifford Holmead Phillips (1889 to 1975), who shortened his name to “Holmead”.
Walter Lehnertz thinks about the “black hole”
“I am fascinated by the depiction,” he said, praising, among other things, the “view, which really emphasizes a center that doesn’t exactly show anything specific.”
Added to this is the idiosyncratic, expressive spatula technique, which makes the work created in 1959 something very special: “Very, very exciting!”
Holmead was a person “who painted because he had to,” explained the expert. The artist, who was born in Pennsylvania as the child of wealthy furniture manufacturers, made the first of many trips to Europe as a young man, where he came into contact with art and decided to become a painter himself. In 1938 he moved to Brussels.
Before that, from 1927, he had exhibited in renowned galleries in Paris and New York, explained Schulte-Goltz. The painting is in good condition and just needs to be cleaned. So could the seller couple hope to get their friend’s desired price? “We are not allowed to sell it for less than 1000 euros,” was the announcement.
The expert believed they were there and estimated the value at 1,500 to 2,000 euros. But Elisabeth “Lisa” Nüdling didn’t like it much: “There was a small storm on the way,” she wondered aloud, whereupon her colleague Walther “Waldi” Lehnertz interjected: “That’s what they call a black hole.”
“The longer you look at it, the more interesting it becomes”
“You have brought us current, contemporary art,” Daniel Meyer tried to be more objective, whereupon Nüdling immediately assumed that he was alluding to climate change, which is, after all, extremely topical. It remains to be seen whether Holmead had actually thought of it in 1959, but the idea was not completely absurd.
In fact, he was a big technology skeptic and nature lover who had sold the car given to him by his parents for his 21st birthday after an accident in order to use the proceeds to travel to Europe by ship. Waldi also had other associations in his head. “It’s a storm of love,” he mused.
Would this “storm” in the room find a lover? “Oh, yeah,” he initially thought, Meyer confessed, but: “The longer you look at it, the more interesting it becomes.” He offered 1,000 euros for the work. Colleague Sarah Schreiber liked the expressiveness of the picture: “You can feel the wind!” Her bid: 1,200 euros.
After Esther Ollick briefly showed interest, in the end it was Daniel Meyer who won the contract for 1,400 euros. Shortly afterwards, he explained to his colleagues that he had studied painting at the art academy. That’s why he knows that Holmead has played an important role in contemporary art. (tch)
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