"Max Bruckner (1836-1919)" turns out to be Max Burchartz (1887-1961)

Vanderkindere, from Brussels, sells on 22 March 2016 a "Max Bruckner (1836-1919)" cubist aquarel, dated 1919 and estimated at 200 to 300 Euro.

Max Brückner was a German Romantic painter, mainly active in theatre paintings, and was the most important theatre background painter in Germany of his time. To find a cubist aquarel from the final year of his life would be a huge surprise.

It's another example of having a partially legible signature and filling in the blanks. M is certain, Max quite likely. B, probably, but the remainder? There is a "k" in there, but it might just as well be "Bwockasky".

Looking around for possible candidates, I first thought of Max Beckmann, which would fit the time and style, and which would have been a major sleeper find. Alas, the signature has a bit more than "e" between the B and the "ck" and not really a "mann" at the end, and the style of Cubism isn't really the same either. Max Dungert wouldn't have been bad either, but no stretch of the imagination can find a "g" in the middle of the surname.

Through further searches and some luck, I arrived suddenly at Max Burchartz (1887-1961), a German photographer who first worked as a painter. Articles like the one from the German Wikipedia make it look as if he started as a post-impressionist, painting mainly landscapes until 1922, when a course with Theo Van Doesburg (of De Stijl and Mondriaan fame) suddenly changed his approach, and he then started working in a constructivist style. This is not only partially contradicted by the same article which claims that between 1912 and 1916 he worked with Kurt Schwitters, but also by the works of Burchartz one can find online.

While Cubism had been declared dead by its creators (Picasso, Braque, Gris, ...) around 1915, many younger painters still embraced it as a new, modern style away from impressionism. Burchartz was one of them.

Not many of his paintings from the period can be found online, the best one is probably this "Little dancer" from 1920, which was at auction in Cologne in 2012 for 20,000 but failed to sell.

More common are the drawings, woodcuts, and the like, which clearly show the same style as the work for sale here. He worked in this style until 1923, when he created pure De Stijl works for a while.

The value of the work for sale? Not that much, perhaps 1,000 Euro or so. But it will attract a completely different audience than a Max Brückner would do.

UPDATE: sold for 2,100 Euro or 10 times the estimate.