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Lot Essay
Campendonk's Der Blaue Mäher (The Blue Reaper) derives from the highpoint of the artist's involvement with Der Blaue Reiter group and, like Franz Marc's blue horses, is a powerful pictorial icon that promotes the group's millenialist spiritual belief at the dawning of a new age.
Painted in 1914, Der Blaue Mäher is one of two oil paintings depicting reapers that Campendonk made shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In the simpler and less adventurous of the two paintings, Der rote Mäher (The Red Reaper) now in the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg, the figure of a red reaper is shown at the centre of an abstracted but still recognisable pastoral landscape. With his simple dwelling depicted behind him, this painting reiterates the familiar Blaue Reiter theme of man's harmonious integration with the landscape and the Romantic notion of Nature as a pastoral idyll. In Der Blaue Mäher - a rarely seen work that has been in a private collection since its purchase in 1916 - this familiar theme becomes a dynamic cosmic vision that echoes the drama and ynamism in Marc's most abstract paintings of the period. In Der Blaue Mäher the central figure of a blue reaper becomes the organising principle of the whole semi-abstract composition, as if the figure is the central vortex of a spiralling cosmos. Using brilliant colour and raw sharply-angled forms, Campendonk has woven together the pictorial elements into a stained glass-like patterning of form that presents the figure of a reaper as cosmic being and mystical icon.
Blending the influences of both Bavarian folk art and cubo-futurism, Der Blaue Mäher can be seen as Campendonk's response to Marc's demand that artists create And@?=ist's creat "symbols for their own time… ;hat wAll take their place on the altars of a future spiritual religion,";and that they expose the "magic, sympathetic bond between the earth and the organic forms it has engendered," where "earth and object are blended together" (Franz Marc; "Geistige Güter" in Der Blue Reiter, 1965, pp.6 and 21). Marc's ideology along with his painterly work was the predominant influence on Campendonk whom he had first come to know in Sindelsdorf in Southern Bavaria in 1911. Until late 1914 when Campendonk's work increasingly drew close to that of his Rhenish friend August Macke, it was essentially under the influence of Marc that Campendonk's work had developed. It was Marc that had been the first to introduce Campendonk to Cubism and through Marc's example that he had developed an understanding of Delaunay's Orphic circles. Similarly, Campendonk also based much of the subject matter of his paintings around Marc's worldview creating a series of extraordinary jewel-like paintings of fairy-tale landscapes where man, animal and nature ;nteract in playful compositional harmony.
I; this respect, the close formal similarities between Der Blaue Mäher and Marc's relatively rare idealised portraits of men in Na;ure (such as Der Holzträger for example) can clearly be seen as representative of a shared ideology. In addition the fact Campendonk has;;hosen in Der Blaue Mäher to portray the figure wielding the scythe against a cosmic background with a deep icy blue is clearly no accident. For the artists of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) the ;olour blue stood for the spirituality of man. "Blue is the male principle, austere and spiritual," Marc wrote in a letter of 1910, ;; (is) matter, brutal and heavy, and always the colour to be fought and transcended by the two others."
Campendonk's Der Blaue Mäher with its blue male figure transcending and ordering the wild radiating red and yellow forms and ;orces of nature surrounding him clearly seems to stand as a metaphor f;r the transcendence of the Apollonian spirit over wild Dionysian nature. The muscular and alert blue figure of the reaper stands as an icon of the much idealised New Man of the mystical New Age first advocated by Nietzsche, and later taken up by Marc and the entire Expressionist generation of young German artists and poets of the pre-war period. In the top right hand corner of the painting the radiant forces of a red sun shines down like rays of life-giving blood on this dynamic and heroic cubo-futurist figure whose physical presence seems to give order and meaning to the composition as a whole. This dramatic "spiritualizing" of the subject was essentially the distinguishing feature of all the work of the artists of Der Blaue Reiter - one that Marc had been among the first to point to when the group first came together at the "New Artists Association" in Munich in 1911. "What seems so promising in the new work being done by the "New Artists Association" (NVKM)" Marc had then written, "is that in addition to their supremely spiritualised tenor, its pictures contain outstanding examples of spatial organisation rhythm and colour theory... Their logical distribution of the plane, the mysterious lines of the one and the colour harmony of the other seek to create spiritual moods which have little to do with the subject portrayed but which prepare the ground for a new highly spiritualised aesthetic... Everyone with eyes in their head must here recognise the powerful trend of new art.."(Franz Marc, Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit, Cologne, 1978, p. 126.)
Through the symbolism of its colour and its blend of figurative and abstract form Der Blaue Mäher attempts to portray life in a new dimension of the spirit. A powerful evocation of the much anticipated dawning of a new age in which man and nature would establish a symbiotic spiritual partnership, Campendonk's Der Blaue Mäher establishes itself as not only one of the artist's most striking and important early paintings but also an essential document of Der Blaue Reiter.
Painted in 1914, Der Blaue Mäher is one of two oil paintings depicting reapers that Campendonk made shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. In the simpler and less adventurous of the two paintings, Der rote Mäher (The Red Reaper) now in the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg, the figure of a red reaper is shown at the centre of an abstracted but still recognisable pastoral landscape. With his simple dwelling depicted behind him, this painting reiterates the familiar Blaue Reiter theme of man's harmonious integration with the landscape and the Romantic notion of Nature as a pastoral idyll. In Der Blaue Mäher - a rarely seen work that has been in a private collection since its purchase in 1916 - this familiar theme becomes a dynamic cosmic vision that echoes the drama and ynamism in Marc's most abstract paintings of the period. In Der Blaue Mäher the central figure of a blue reaper becomes the organising principle of the whole semi-abstract composition, as if the figure is the central vortex of a spiralling cosmos. Using brilliant colour and raw sharply-angled forms, Campendonk has woven together the pictorial elements into a stained glass-like patterning of form that presents the figure of a reaper as cosmic being and mystical icon.
Blending the influences of both Bavarian folk art and cubo-futurism, Der Blaue Mäher can be seen as Campendonk's response to Marc's demand that artists create And@?=ist's creat "symbols for their own time… ;hat wAll take their place on the altars of a future spiritual religion,";and that they expose the "magic, sympathetic bond between the earth and the organic forms it has engendered," where "earth and object are blended together" (Franz Marc; "Geistige Güter" in Der Blue Reiter, 1965, pp.6 and 21). Marc's ideology along with his painterly work was the predominant influence on Campendonk whom he had first come to know in Sindelsdorf in Southern Bavaria in 1911. Until late 1914 when Campendonk's work increasingly drew close to that of his Rhenish friend August Macke, it was essentially under the influence of Marc that Campendonk's work had developed. It was Marc that had been the first to introduce Campendonk to Cubism and through Marc's example that he had developed an understanding of Delaunay's Orphic circles. Similarly, Campendonk also based much of the subject matter of his paintings around Marc's worldview creating a series of extraordinary jewel-like paintings of fairy-tale landscapes where man, animal and nature ;nteract in playful compositional harmony.
I; this respect, the close formal similarities between Der Blaue Mäher and Marc's relatively rare idealised portraits of men in Na;ure (such as Der Holzträger for example) can clearly be seen as representative of a shared ideology. In addition the fact Campendonk has;;hosen in Der Blaue Mäher to portray the figure wielding the scythe against a cosmic background with a deep icy blue is clearly no accident. For the artists of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) the ;olour blue stood for the spirituality of man. "Blue is the male principle, austere and spiritual," Marc wrote in a letter of 1910, ;; (is) matter, brutal and heavy, and always the colour to be fought and transcended by the two others."
Campendonk's Der Blaue Mäher with its blue male figure transcending and ordering the wild radiating red and yellow forms and ;orces of nature surrounding him clearly seems to stand as a metaphor f;r the transcendence of the Apollonian spirit over wild Dionysian nature. The muscular and alert blue figure of the reaper stands as an icon of the much idealised New Man of the mystical New Age first advocated by Nietzsche, and later taken up by Marc and the entire Expressionist generation of young German artists and poets of the pre-war period. In the top right hand corner of the painting the radiant forces of a red sun shines down like rays of life-giving blood on this dynamic and heroic cubo-futurist figure whose physical presence seems to give order and meaning to the composition as a whole. This dramatic "spiritualizing" of the subject was essentially the distinguishing feature of all the work of the artists of Der Blaue Reiter - one that Marc had been among the first to point to when the group first came together at the "New Artists Association" in Munich in 1911. "What seems so promising in the new work being done by the "New Artists Association" (NVKM)" Marc had then written, "is that in addition to their supremely spiritualised tenor, its pictures contain outstanding examples of spatial organisation rhythm and colour theory... Their logical distribution of the plane, the mysterious lines of the one and the colour harmony of the other seek to create spiritual moods which have little to do with the subject portrayed but which prepare the ground for a new highly spiritualised aesthetic... Everyone with eyes in their head must here recognise the powerful trend of new art.."(Franz Marc, Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit, Cologne, 1978, p. 126.)
Through the symbolism of its colour and its blend of figurative and abstract form Der Blaue Mäher attempts to portray life in a new dimension of the spirit. A powerful evocation of the much anticipated dawning of a new age in which man and nature would establish a symbiotic spiritual partnership, Campendonk's Der Blaue Mäher establishes itself as not only one of the artist's most striking and important early paintings but also an essential document of Der Blaue Reiter.