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Lot Essay
Writing in September 1916, while on active military duty in the German army, Wilhelm Morgner proclaimed the essential, all-consuming need to paint that gripped him: “Live for the sake of living and paint for the sake of painting. Paint all day long and perhaps finally make the dream visible. I don’t want to become anything, I don’t want to achieve anything, I don’t want to play a role in exhibitions, I just want to satisfy this urge to create” (letter to Georg Tappert, 6 September 1916; quoted in G. Schade and M. Ohlsen, eds., Expressionisten: die Avantgarde in Deutschland, 1905-1920, exh. cat., Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1986, p. 282). This abiding sense of passion and purpose underpinned Morgner’s brief artistic career, which was tragically cut short by his untimely death in the First World War at the age of just twenty-six.
Largely self-taught, Morgner was seventeen when he left home and moved to the artist’s colony in Worpswede, to study under the Expressionist painter Georg Tappert, who became a close friend and an important advisor to the young artist. Quickly moving beyond the naturalism of his early works, Morgner began to explore a bolder, more idiosyncratic approach to painting, rooted in expressive brushwork and pure, unmixed color. His painterly style was further influenced by his encounters with Pointillism, the art of Vincent van Gogh and the bourgeoning Blaue Reiter group, leading him to the very forefront of the avant-garde in Germany—he exhibited with the Neue Sezession in Berlin in 1910, as well as at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912, while Herwarth Walden published a number of the artist’s woodcuts and linocuts in his influential periodical Der Sturm.
Painted in 1912, Himmelfahrt is an exceedingly rare work from this pivotal period in Morgner’s oeuvre, as he explored multiple different themes, styles and painterly techniques in his pursuit of an art that conveyed a sense of the spiritual. In Himmelfahrt, he tackles the traditional religious theme of the Ascension, transforming it into a highly stylized composition that vibrates with luminous color. Morgner was fascinated by the frescoed ceilings in the Church of Our Lady in the artist’s hometown of Soest, and reportedly spent hours lying on his back gazing up at the painted scenes. Across the present canvas, nine figures are arranged in a rhythmic progression that appears to radiate outwards from the central body, their simplified contours and forms overlapping one another, as they float in mid-air. Eschewing any sense of individualization, Morgner constructs their sinuous, elongated forms in short, parallel strokes of pure pigment that subtly transition from one shade to the next as the eye travels upwards. This creates the impression that they are anonymous, otherworldly beings, ascending towards a higher spiritual plane, an effect accentuated by their connection to the background, which is composed of ribbon-like streams of rippling color that echo and mirror the treatment of the figures.
In a letter to Tappert, composed shortly before he embarked upon the present picture, Morgner described his highly personal approach to his subjects. “I have neither an ideal nor do I consider realism to be correct; instead, I substitute ‘life’ for these two things,” he wrote. “I want to let the infinity, the endlessness of my own self—endlessness because it is the will to exist—overflow into the paintings, into the colors, into the lines. The way the colors and lines are presented is meant to be a continuation of my self’s vibration, like sound produced by some instrument, which then sets the air into the same vibrations as the instrument created” (letter to Georg Tappert, 10 November 1911; quoted in G. Schade and M. Ohlsen, eds., Expressionisten: die Avantgarde in Deutschland, 1905-1920, exh. cat., Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1986, p. 282). These ideas, which found fervent expression in Himmelfahrt, would lead Morgner towards complete abstraction the following year.
After Morgner’s death, the painting remained with his mother, Maria, for over a decade, before it was acquired by the Städtische Gemäldesammlung in Soest in March 1931. However, just six years later, the painting was confiscated from the museum by the notorious Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who had labelled Morgner’s work as “Degenerate” in their vicious campaign against modern art. Like many of his contemporaries—including Franz Marc, August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee—Morgner’s idiosyncratic Expressionist paintings were targeted by the Nazi regime, removed from public institutions and sold. Such was the case with Himmelfahrt, which entered the open market in the late 1930s.
Largely self-taught, Morgner was seventeen when he left home and moved to the artist’s colony in Worpswede, to study under the Expressionist painter Georg Tappert, who became a close friend and an important advisor to the young artist. Quickly moving beyond the naturalism of his early works, Morgner began to explore a bolder, more idiosyncratic approach to painting, rooted in expressive brushwork and pure, unmixed color. His painterly style was further influenced by his encounters with Pointillism, the art of Vincent van Gogh and the bourgeoning Blaue Reiter group, leading him to the very forefront of the avant-garde in Germany—he exhibited with the Neue Sezession in Berlin in 1910, as well as at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912, while Herwarth Walden published a number of the artist’s woodcuts and linocuts in his influential periodical Der Sturm.
Painted in 1912, Himmelfahrt is an exceedingly rare work from this pivotal period in Morgner’s oeuvre, as he explored multiple different themes, styles and painterly techniques in his pursuit of an art that conveyed a sense of the spiritual. In Himmelfahrt, he tackles the traditional religious theme of the Ascension, transforming it into a highly stylized composition that vibrates with luminous color. Morgner was fascinated by the frescoed ceilings in the Church of Our Lady in the artist’s hometown of Soest, and reportedly spent hours lying on his back gazing up at the painted scenes. Across the present canvas, nine figures are arranged in a rhythmic progression that appears to radiate outwards from the central body, their simplified contours and forms overlapping one another, as they float in mid-air. Eschewing any sense of individualization, Morgner constructs their sinuous, elongated forms in short, parallel strokes of pure pigment that subtly transition from one shade to the next as the eye travels upwards. This creates the impression that they are anonymous, otherworldly beings, ascending towards a higher spiritual plane, an effect accentuated by their connection to the background, which is composed of ribbon-like streams of rippling color that echo and mirror the treatment of the figures.
In a letter to Tappert, composed shortly before he embarked upon the present picture, Morgner described his highly personal approach to his subjects. “I have neither an ideal nor do I consider realism to be correct; instead, I substitute ‘life’ for these two things,” he wrote. “I want to let the infinity, the endlessness of my own self—endlessness because it is the will to exist—overflow into the paintings, into the colors, into the lines. The way the colors and lines are presented is meant to be a continuation of my self’s vibration, like sound produced by some instrument, which then sets the air into the same vibrations as the instrument created” (letter to Georg Tappert, 10 November 1911; quoted in G. Schade and M. Ohlsen, eds., Expressionisten: die Avantgarde in Deutschland, 1905-1920, exh. cat., Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1986, p. 282). These ideas, which found fervent expression in Himmelfahrt, would lead Morgner towards complete abstraction the following year.
After Morgner’s death, the painting remained with his mother, Maria, for over a decade, before it was acquired by the Städtische Gemäldesammlung in Soest in March 1931. However, just six years later, the painting was confiscated from the museum by the notorious Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who had labelled Morgner’s work as “Degenerate” in their vicious campaign against modern art. Like many of his contemporaries—including Franz Marc, August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee—Morgner’s idiosyncratic Expressionist paintings were targeted by the Nazi regime, removed from public institutions and sold. Such was the case with Himmelfahrt, which entered the open market in the late 1930s.