Heinrich Maria Davringhausen

Heinrich Maria Davringhausen was born on 21 October 1894 in Aachen, Germany. He studied sculpture briefly at the Dusseldorf Art Academy from 1913 to 1914, with some sources adding that he took private lessons there with Wilhelm Eckstein, but no degree or diploma is documented, and several sources describe him as largely self-taught as a painter. He developed a sharp-edged, socially observant style of figuration that placed him among the artists identified with New Objectivity and Magic Realism in interwar Germany, alongside better-known contemporaries such as Otto Dix and George Grosz.

His best-known painting, Der Schieber (The Profiteer), painted around 1920 to 1921, is now held by the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf im Ehrenhof. As Nazi cultural policy turned against modernist and socially critical art in the early 1930s, Davringhausen was branded a "degenerate" artist. He fled Germany in early 1933 and eventually settled in the south of France, where he continued to paint, working as an abstract painter under the name Henri Davring for the remainder of his career.

He died on 13 December 1970 in Nice, France. A large body of his work was deposited at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Duren in 1989, which has since served as the primary institutional custodian of his oeuvre and has organized exhibitions of his work.

Art-historical treatment of Davringhausen situates him within the New Objectivity and Magic Realism currents of interwar Germany, alongside figures such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, August Sander, and Max Beckmann. He has been described among the "lesser known artists" of that generation when placed next to those names, notably in the 2015 to 2016 LACMA exhibition New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919 to 1933, which included his painting Der Schieber. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed from the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Davringhausen's auction market is thin relative to his museum standing. His confirmed auction high is Der Akrobat (1920), which sold for EUR 580,800 including premium at VAN HAM Kunstauktionen in Cologne on 29 November 2023; MutualArt lists the same result at USD 633,453, and VAN HAM describes the sale as an international auction record for the artist. No higher price has been identified in Artprice, Artnet, Artsy, Invaluable, or the Lempertz house index.

Outside that result, his auction history sits at far more modest levels. The Lempertz artist index shows Selbstportrait mit Blume at 90,440 euros including premium and Interieur at 49,200 euros including premium, with exact sale dates not stated in the index. That gap between one outlier result and the broader body of sales is typical of an artist whose market has not been consistently tracked at scale.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Davringhausen, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been identified; provenance research should lean on institutional records, including the 1989 deposit of a large portion of his estate at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Duren. His confirmed auction record is EUR 580,800 for Der Akrobat, sold at VAN HAM Kunstauktionen in Cologne on 29 November 2023, a result the auction house describes as an international record for the artist; MutualArt separately lists the same sale at USD 633,453. Collectors should also be aware that he worked under the name Henri Davring for the second half of his career, which matters for tracing later, French-period abstract works through auction and provenance records.