Highlights from the contemporary art collection of Anne and Wolfgang Titze

The married couple, Anne and Wolfgang Titze, had been collecting contemporary art for almost two decades when they received a surprise call from the director of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. Up to that point, they had loaned individual works to several museum exhibitions worldwide, but otherwise kept their purchases discreet. Now, however, they were being invited to present their collection as a whole for the first time, in Prince Eugene of Savoy’s former residence.

The upshot was a show of 130 works called Love Story, which ran from June until October 2014. Revealed to the world was a carefully put-together collection, born out of intense dialogue between Anne and Wolfgang — and a healthy modicum of creative tension, too. It was particularly, though not exclusively, rich in pieces of Minimalism and contemporary abstraction, as well as pieces reflecting on what painting means in the 21st century.

On 19 October 2023, a selection of works from the couple’s collection is being offered at Christie’s in Paris in the sale, Love Stories — from the collection of Anne & Wolfgang Titze.

The auction title, like that of the Belvedere exhibition, alludes to the fact that the couple come from different backgrounds — she a French journalist, he an Austrian economist — but are united by a love of contemporary art.

Julie Mehretu — represented in the sale by a painting named Blue Magic, 2007 (illustrated top) — was born in Addis Ababa in 1970, to an Ethiopian father and an American mother. The family fled to Michigan seven years later, upon the outbreak of the Ogaden War, and Mehretu has spent most of her career in New York.

She is hailed as an abstract painter with a difference. Which is to say, she brings what might be called a postmodern or decolonial twist to the tradition of Western abstraction. Through map-like lines and architectural notations, she builds an intricate surface, evoking the complex forces of our globally networked society. Migration, war, climate change, international capitalism and information technology are all alluded to in Mehretu’s pictures — as, in the case of Blue Magic, is the drug trade (the title being the moniker for a type of heroin).

Blue Magic invites slow, extended attention. For Mehretu, abstraction is an antidote to the unrelentingly high pace of today’s world. ‘Speed is driving the momentum of the structure in which we’re all caught,’ she has said. ‘One of the most essential parts of being an artist is to make works that have the power of slowness against the deployment of speed.’

Another artwork made in this spirit is Infinity Nets [AOTWX], 2008, by Yayoi Kusama. It consists of myriad looping strokes of white paint, which create a mesh — or net — effect across a dark background. The picture forms part of a series known as ‘Infinity Nets’, begun by the Japanese artist in the late 1950s and continued well into the 21st century. She would create these paintings in long sessions, sometimes working for 50 hours straight, without interruption for sleep or meals, in a process of meditative transcendence. ‘By obliterating one’s individual self,’ Kusama has said, ‘one returns to the infinite universe.’

The brushstrokes in Infinity Nets [AOTWX] spiral out from various nodal centres across the canvas. The all-consuming surface appears to pulse, billow, shimmer and vibrate in different areas. Kusama suffered hallucinations in her childhood — apparitions of dots, nets and flowers — and she has said that making art with those motifs in adulthood has been a way of overcoming her demons.

It isn’t so much personal demons as national ones that Gerhard Richter has confronted through his career. Born in Dresden in 1932, the artist has grappled at length with his country’s Nazi legacy and the extent to which, in the decades since the Second World War, that legacy hasn’t been sufficiently addressed by German society.

In the late 1960s, he began painting landscapes in large numbers. Often these were of the German countryside — however, in the case of Waldstück (Okinawa), 1969, it was of a jungle in Japan. This canvas heralded the artist’s pivotal shift from figuration to abstraction in the 1970s. Leaves and foliage dissolve into illegible patterns. All sense of objective reality vanishes. We quickly lose our bearings, as though lost in the jungle ourselves. Waldstück (Okinawa), with its blurred grisaille surface, is only a few steps away from complete abstraction.

Okinawa had been the site of one of the bloodiest battles in the Second World War. The painting, created by Richter from a photograph he came across, gives no hint of this. The artist seems to imply that the history of the island, like so much knowledge about the war, has all but disappeared into nothingness.

Ostensibly, there’s a greater sense of order in Agnes Martin’s painting, The Lamp, 1959. It boasts 24 golden circles arranged in a grid-format on a square black background. Martin painted it in 1959, shortly after arriving in New York, following a decade living in New Mexico. She was now in her mid-forties, and The Lamp represents one of her first ever grid-based pictures, the works on which her fame rests today.

Despite appearing on first view to the contrary, none of the circles is actually pristine. Their edges are soft, and they show the slight irregularities of the artist’s touch. There’s a gentle imperfection, which became typical of Martin’s oeuvre thereafter — and which, in her opinion, was typical of the world around us.

‘I used to pay attention to the clouds in the sky,’ she once said. ‘I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don’t repeat. And I don’t think life does either. It’s continually various.’

Another painting that offers more than at first meets the eye is The Flight into Egypt I, 2008 by the Romanian painter, Adrian Ghenie. The title alludes to the New Testament story in which Joseph and Mary flee Bethlehem after an angel warns them of Herod’s massacre of the innocents — a story that occupied numerous Old Masters, from Poussin to Tintoretto.

Ghenie’s canvas echoes the dramatic scale and chiaroscuro of many a predecessor’s work. However, this is no depiction of the Holy Family. Rather, it depicts a shadowy encampment in the present day, where we can make out a makeshift tent, the rear end of a car, and the back of a man wearing a leather jacket and jeans. The narrative isn’t clear, but it evokes escape, displacement and exile.

Part of Ghenie’s success as a painter can be put down to the way he — so freely and so potently — blends figurative and abstract elements in the same picture. In the case of The Flight into Egypt I, he dragged paint across the surface with a palette knife, creating marbled blurs of turquoise and gold. Elsewhere, liquid paint drips down the canvas. Such gestures add to a sense of unease and make the viewer question what exactly it is they are looking at.

‘Anne and Wolfgang Titze have spent 30 years dedicated to collecting the finest works of contemporary art,’ says Paul Nyzam, Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in Paris. ‘The works coming to auction are blue-chip ones, fresh to the market. With this sale, Anne and Wolfgang are offering other people the chance to enjoy some truly special “love stories”.’

Explore Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions in London and Paris, throughout October 2023