?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
WALTER SCHNAKENBERG (1880-1961) ODEON CASINO. 1911. 47 1/2x35 1/2 inches. Wolf, Munich. Condition A-: minor restored losses and restoration in top right and bottom left corners; unobtrusive vertical and horizontal folds. After studying in Munich and a period in Paris between 1908 and 1909, Schnackenberg began his career as an illustrator as well as a stage and costume designer. Today, he is largely remembered for the unique posters he created in Munich, which had a decadent and perverted, yet simultaneously unequaled, elegance. He created lithe, elaborate designs with dancing couples and performers for cabarets and music halls, four of them for the Odeon Casino. Here, an incredible beauty, dressed in a most extravagant manner, is being approached by an ugly, balding customer. Based on an oft-seen, nightclub scenario this poster is a visual variant of Reine de Joie<> by Toulouse-Lautrec. The style in which Schnackenberg draws the faces, and more specifically the hands, adds magic to this classic bar scene, radiating elegance and disdain from the tawdry call girl, and sex and desire from the rich patron. This poster must have been one of the artist's favorites, as a photograph shows it hanging in his Munich studio in 1920. DFP III 2939, Schnackenberg pl. 33.
