Renée Sintenis

Renée Sintenis was born Renate Alice Sintenis on 20 March 1888 in Glatz, Silesia, then part of the German Empire and now Kłodzko, Poland. She received early drawing lessons at school before moving to Berlin, around 1907, to study decorative sculpture at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Kunstgewerbemuseums, the teaching institution attached to the city's Museum of Applied Arts, under the sculptor Wilhelm Haverkamp and the painter Leo von König. She left before completing a degree, directed by her father toward secretarial work at his law office.

She began exhibiting with the Berliner Secession in 1915 and was soon represented by the Berlin dealer Alfred Flechtheim. In 1917 she married the painter, typographer, and graphic artist Emil Rudolf Weiss; the couple had no children. Through the 1920s her small bronzes of animals, boxers, and runners, together with her female nudes, brought international recognition, with her work exhibited at institutions including the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and venues in Rotterdam and Glasgow. Her 1926 bronze Der Läufer Nurmi, depicting the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, won the Olympia Prize in 1932. In 1929 she became the first woman sculptor elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. In 1932 she created the standing Berlin Bear, a design later adapted, from 1953, as the trophy of the Berlin International Film Festival and still used today, in a revised 1956 form, as the Golden Bear.

After the Second World War she taught at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin from 1947, was named professor there in 1955, and became a member of the Academy of Arts in West Berlin the same year. She received the Kunstpreis der Stadt Berlin in 1948, the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts, Peace Class, in 1952, and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1953. Renée Sintenis died in Berlin, in the Zehlendorf district, on 22 April 1965, at the age of 77, and is buried in an honorary grave at the Waldfriedhof Dahlem.

Sintenis is remembered as a pioneering figure among women sculptors of the Weimar Republic, celebrated for compact, closely observed bronzes of animals, athletes, and the female form that stood apart from the monumental classicism favored elsewhere in early twentieth-century German sculpture. Her election to the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1929, her postwar teaching career at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, and the continuing use of her Berlin Bear as the model for the Berlinale's Golden Bear have kept her name in circulation well beyond the specialist sculpture market. No verified verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile; her reputation instead rests on sustained institutional recognition, from lifetime museum acquisitions to recent group exhibitions such as Radikal! Künstlerinnen und Moderne 1910 to 1950, staged jointly by Museum Arnhem, the Saarlandmuseum, and the Belvedere in Vienna.

Sintenis's auction market is small and infrequent relative to her institutional standing. Her all-time auction high on public record is Grosse Daphne, a bronze that sold for GBP 478,800 at Christie's London on 25 October 2022, as part of The Ann & Gordon Getty Collection. Other results sit well below that level: Lempertz has sold her Großes Vollblutfohlen for EUR 210,800 and Großes stehendes Fohlen for EUR 156,250, and most of her animal bronzes and smaller figures trade in the mid five figures or below. Sladmore Gallery in London and Galerie Ludorff in Düsseldorf are among the galleries most visibly active in placing and exhibiting her work today.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Sintenis, and her estate archive, held at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, is the primary institutional resource for questions of attribution and provenance. Because her bronzes were produced in editions over an extended period, cast date and foundry marks matter to value; auction houses have specifically distinguished rare lifetime casts from later posthumous casts of the same model. Her auction supply is thin, so a single strong result, such as the 2022 Christie's sale of Grosse Daphne, should not be read as evidence of a broad market shift, since most of her works continue to sell for far more modest sums.