Harvard German painting gift, Part I

The take isn’t quite the $200 million art booty from Emily Rauh Pulitzer announced last month, but the Harvard Art Museum is pleased to reveal its latest gift today: 50 to 75 works valued at about $2 million by contemporary German artists that include works by Georg Baselitz and A. R. Penck. The gift, from the Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, is expected to be followed by a second round of generosity in the spring.

I talked a bit with Peter Nisbet, the curator of the Busch-Reisinger.

Was he at all disappointed there’s no Polke, Richter or Kiefer? Not at all.

“The gift is really designed to take account of what we already have, which for museums is always the best kind of donation. There may well be Richter works in the future. This is not meant to be a representative collection of all post-modern German art but to add to what we have. And one of the strengths of the Busch-Reisinger is that we can present an extraordinary aspect of art, which is art made in Germany, in more depth.”

Nisbet estimated the take at a value of $2 million, though cautioned it’s hard to assess works in the herky-jerky climate of today’s art market.

As with the Pulitzer gift, one of the works in this donation is already on view. That’s the Baselitz self portrait (below) at the Sachler.

“He’s an artist that is relatively well known but underappreciated. He all too often is too easily dismissed as a neoexpressionist painter and I think he’s much more inventive than that.”

Georg Baselitz (German, b. 1938), Male Nude (Self-Portrait), 1973/74. Oil on canvas, 200 x 169 cm (78 3/4 x 66 9/16 in.). Harvard Art Museum/ Busch-Reisinger Museum, Friends Anniversary Collection, Gift of Siegfried Gohr, 2008.208. Photo: Friedrich Rosenstiel. [On view through January 4, 2009 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum]