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Lot Essay
Bursting with exuberant energy, Kuh mit Kalb is a large and colourful painting that dates from the height of Campendonk's involvement with the Blaue Reiter movement. In it, he has presented a pair of animals interacting within a bustling arrangement of almost abstract forms. The rich colourism fills the painting with life and also lends it an electrical presence. The importance of this painting within Campendonk's work of the period is highlighted by the extensive early exhibition history: during the 1910s, Kuh mit Kalb was exhibited no less than three times in Herwarth Walden's famous Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin.
Kuh mit Kalb is filled with movement and dynamism, with the intriguing and absorbing interplay between the cows taking place in the right-hand side of the canvas and the abstracted forms of nature on the left. These shapes, in part geometrical, allow Campendonk to render trees, flowers and the landscape through the use of a highly modern, Cubism-inspired language of form. In Kuh mit Kalb, he has synthesised the same fusion of spirituality in the form of the almost animistic appearance of the animals with the highly modern forms of abstract art that were coming to dominate the works of his friend Kandinsky during this period. At the same time, they pay tribute to the influence that Cubism itself, and also the Orphism of Robert Delaunay, exerted on the artists of the Blaue Reiter and on Campendonk in particular.
Like his friend Franz Marc, Campendonk's pictures took natural themes in order to present a raw spiritual core. Using animals as subjects, they presented a world of innocence, a world of natural and spiritual forces. In Kuh mit Kalb, Campendonk presents the world full of energy, of potential, translating a potent and intoxicating sense of wonder. This is not the same landscape that has been trammelled by a thousand people, but instead one seen fresh, as though after a Pauline conversion. It has the wondrous energy of creation and sings with a spiritual intensity. It was this sense of spiritual power that lay behind the Blaue Reiter. Fuelled by their anxieties at the development of technology and the adherence to staid old traditions and views, they sought to capture a new, truer and refreshed spirituality. Their theosophy was combined with an intense interest in colour and its meanings that resulted in paintings for their new age. As Marc had written in 1912, their aim was 'To create out of their work symbols for their own time, symbols that belong on the altars of a future spiritual religion' (F. Marc, 'The Savages of Germany', pp. 61-64, in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. K. Lankheit, London, 1974, p. 64).
Campendonk had been invited to join the Blaue Reiter in Sindelsdorf in Bavaria in 1911. The other Blaue Reiter artists, whom he had not met, had come to learn of his works and his similar views through Helmuth Macke, a cousin of August, and subsequently Kandinsky and Marc invited Campendonk to exhibit with them, and indeed to join them in Bavaria. Campendonk and Marc remained there, with their respective families, in relative isolation for several years, leaving Sindelsdorf only in 1914, the year that this picture was painted. They had sought a simpler way of life, one that involved contact with nature and therefore allowed them all the more directly to portray it in all its wonder. Even in the homes to which they moved after Sindelsdorf, they sought this type of rural simplicity in order all the more to commune with nature and to focus their spiritualism without distraction.
Kuh mit Kalb is filled with movement and dynamism, with the intriguing and absorbing interplay between the cows taking place in the right-hand side of the canvas and the abstracted forms of nature on the left. These shapes, in part geometrical, allow Campendonk to render trees, flowers and the landscape through the use of a highly modern, Cubism-inspired language of form. In Kuh mit Kalb, he has synthesised the same fusion of spirituality in the form of the almost animistic appearance of the animals with the highly modern forms of abstract art that were coming to dominate the works of his friend Kandinsky during this period. At the same time, they pay tribute to the influence that Cubism itself, and also the Orphism of Robert Delaunay, exerted on the artists of the Blaue Reiter and on Campendonk in particular.
Like his friend Franz Marc, Campendonk's pictures took natural themes in order to present a raw spiritual core. Using animals as subjects, they presented a world of innocence, a world of natural and spiritual forces. In Kuh mit Kalb, Campendonk presents the world full of energy, of potential, translating a potent and intoxicating sense of wonder. This is not the same landscape that has been trammelled by a thousand people, but instead one seen fresh, as though after a Pauline conversion. It has the wondrous energy of creation and sings with a spiritual intensity. It was this sense of spiritual power that lay behind the Blaue Reiter. Fuelled by their anxieties at the development of technology and the adherence to staid old traditions and views, they sought to capture a new, truer and refreshed spirituality. Their theosophy was combined with an intense interest in colour and its meanings that resulted in paintings for their new age. As Marc had written in 1912, their aim was 'To create out of their work symbols for their own time, symbols that belong on the altars of a future spiritual religion' (F. Marc, 'The Savages of Germany', pp. 61-64, in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. K. Lankheit, London, 1974, p. 64).
Campendonk had been invited to join the Blaue Reiter in Sindelsdorf in Bavaria in 1911. The other Blaue Reiter artists, whom he had not met, had come to learn of his works and his similar views through Helmuth Macke, a cousin of August, and subsequently Kandinsky and Marc invited Campendonk to exhibit with them, and indeed to join them in Bavaria. Campendonk and Marc remained there, with their respective families, in relative isolation for several years, leaving Sindelsdorf only in 1914, the year that this picture was painted. They had sought a simpler way of life, one that involved contact with nature and therefore allowed them all the more directly to portray it in all its wonder. Even in the homes to which they moved after Sindelsdorf, they sought this type of rural simplicity in order all the more to commune with nature and to focus their spiritualism without distraction.