Asta: 530 / Evening Sale / The Hermann Gerlinger Collection del 10 giugno 2022 a Monaco di Baviera Lot 31

 

31
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Zwei Akte mit Negerplastik, 1913.
Watercolor and India ink
Stima:
€ 70,000 / $ 75,600
Risultato:
€ 150,000 / $ 162,000

( commissione inclusa)
Zwei Akte mit Negerplastik. 1913.
Watercolor and India ink.
Bottom right signed and dated. On firm creme wove paper. 50 x 60 cm (19.6 x 23.6 in), the full sheet.
[KT].

• Schmidt-Rottluff encountered the art of non-European cultures as early as during the years in Dresden and he began to compile an own collection in 1913 the latest.
• Objects of African or Oceanian origin became pictorial objects, as it is the case here with the leopard caryatid from Cameroon.
• These early documents of the fascination for the exotic are extremely rare on the international auction market.
• Part of the important retrospective exhbition at the Lenbachhaus
.

This watercolor is documented in the archive of the Karlaund Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Foundation, Berlin.

PROVENANCE: Collection Prof. Max Sauerlandt, Hamburg (1914-1934).
Alice Sauerlandt, neé Schmidt, Hamburg (inherited from the above in 1934, at least until 1953, presumably at least until 1965).
Collection Hermann Gerlinger, Würzburg (with the collector stamp).

EXHIBITION: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Graphik und Aquarelle. Ausstellung zum 80. Geburtstag am 1. Dezember 1964, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung, December 1, 1964 - February 14, 1965, cat. no. 31 (private property, Hamburg).
Schmidt-Rottluff. Aquarelle aus den Jahren 1909 bis 1969, 55. B.A.T. Ausstellung, B.A.T. Cigaretten Fabriken GmBH, Hamburg, June 13 - August 10, 1974, cat. no. 53 (with illu., and color illu. on p. 159).
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff zum 90. Geburtstag - Gemälde und Aquarelle, Altonaer Museum, Hamburg 1974, cat. no. 53.
Das Aquarell der Brücke, Brücke-Museum Berlin, September 5 - November 16, 1975, cat. no. 129 (no illu.).
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Retrospektive, Kunsthalle Bremen, June 16 - September 10, 1989; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, September 27 - December 3, 1989, cat. no. 135 (with illu.).
Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesmuseum Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig (permanent loan from Collection Hermann Gerlinger, 1995-2001).
Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle an der Saale (permanent loan from Collection Hermann Gerlinger, 2001-2017).
Die Brücke und die Moderne. 1904-1914, Bucerius Kunstforum, Hamburg, October 17, 2004 - May 31, 2005, cat. no. 170.
Expressiv! Die Künstler der Sammlung Hermann Gerlinger, Albertina, Vienna, June 1 - August 26, 2007, cat. no. 30 (with colro illu.).
Brückenschlag: Gerlinger - Buchheim, Buchheim Museum der Phantasie, Bernried am Starnberger See, October 28, 2017 - February 25, 2018, p. 160 (with color illu.).
Buchheim Museum, Bernried (permanent loan from Collection Hermann Gerlinger, 2017-2022).

LITERATURE: Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett, Roman Norbert Ketterer, 17th auction, May 16 and 18, 1953, lot 1859 (form Mrs Sauerlandt, not sold).
Heinz Spielmann (editor), Die Maler der Brücke. Collection Hermann Gerlinger, Stuttgart 1995, p. 366, SHG no. 608 (with illu.).
Gunther Thiem, Stephan von Wiese, Die Verwandlung der Venus. Karl Schmidt-Rottluffs Akt-zeichnungen von 1909-1913, Munich 2003, no. 74.
Hermann Gerlinger, Katja Schneider (ed.), Die Maler der Brücke. inventory catalog Collection Hermann Gerlinger, Halle (Saale) 2005, p. 66, SHG no. 119 (with illu.)
Magdalena Moeller (ed.), Starke Schnitte. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Berlin 2014, cf. cat. no. 33, no p.
Brückenschlag: Gerlinger - Buchheim! Museumsführer durch die "Brücke"-Sammlungen von Hermann Gerlinger und Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Feldafing 2017, p. 160 (with illu. on p. 161).

"I took heads - in relation to other physical features - to extremes, as a point of concentration of the psyche, of all expression.“

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff to Gustav Schiefler, around 1912

Schmidt-Rottluff was constantly in constant contact with Gustav Schiefler. And thus the artist responded to questions the Hamburg judge, art collector, patron and art critic has about his monumental nudes and their creation. "I have come to an increase in form through various paths," says Schmidt-Rottluff, "which may contradict the proportions found in natural science, but which is balanced and proportional in its spiritual relationships. In relation to other body forms, I have increased heads enormously as they are a concentration point of the psyche, of all expression. In their mental motion, all other body forms follow the head, gather in it, and so the form grows large all by itself. It is no different with the breasts. They are an erotic moment that I would like to detach from the ephemerality of the experience, to create a relationship, so to speak, between the cosmic and the earthly moment. Perhaps one could say it is an eroticism heightened into the transcendental. That sounds a bit mystical in our time, which is riddled with cynicism, but what has art history left us with over the course of time – Egypt, Michelangelo – that gives them their immortality: it is the experience of transcendental things in the earthly." (Quote from: Gerhard Wietek, Schmidt-Rottluff, Graphik, Munich 1971, p. 100).
This declaration goes hand in hand with the artist's intensive preoccupation with art from non-European cultures, which Schmidt-Rottluff had already encountered in his Dresden years. His passionate interest in primal sculpture is not only expressed in the correspondingly modified physiognomies or the bodies of his figures. Objects of African or Oceanic origin became pictorial objects themselves, such as this leopard caryatid from Cameroon, which is conspicuously staged next to the two dark-skinned women in an unusual pose. At that time, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner owned a leopard stool. This mysterious stool by the Bamileke artists, which accompanied Kirchner for a good 30 years and enlivened his world of motifs particularly in the years between 1910 and 1912, may also have had a stimulating effect on Schmidt-Rottluff to present it here in a knowledgeable and at the same time reservedly dominant manner. [MvL]



31
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Zwei Akte mit Negerplastik, 1913.
Watercolor and India ink
Stima:
€ 70,000 / $ 75,600
Risultato:
€ 150,000 / $ 162,000

( commissione inclusa)