Lempertz has sold Karl Hofer's Mädchen mit Kürbissen (Girl with Pumpkins), circa 1929/30, for €190,500. The large oil on canvas, measuring 115.2 by 105.4 centimeters, was painted at the end of the Weimar Republic, just before Hitler's rise to power ended Germany's avant-garde movement. The composition is characteristically Hofer: a young woman in a headscarf stands at the center behind a wooden table, with six pumpkins stacked in a clear triangular arrangement and a long green squash tucked under her left arm. The background is dark brown and empty, stripping away any sense of a real room or house so that attention falls entirely on the model's physical presence and the geometry of the still life. Archival research by art historian Daniela Maier has established that the painting is the final version of five similar attempts, each one progressively simplifying the image toward its essential core. The auction house's history notes trace how the work moved safely into American collections before the Second World War — a journey shaped by the Nazi defamation of Hofer's art as "degenerate" and the exile of his dealer Alfred Flechtheim. The result reflects the steady market for German modernism at the Cologne-based house, which holds a leading position in this segment. Hofer, a central figure of the Berlin Secession whose reputation was damaged under National Socialism, has seen renewed scholarly and market attention in recent years, and paintings with such well-documented histories of survival continue to attract collectors of interwar German art.