.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Max Pechstein has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
Vier Badende (Moritzburg) Baustelle in Schmargendorf is a rare double-sided canvas that comprises two very different paintings; each one a major work that marks the highpoint of an important stage in Pechstein's early career. Standing in stark contrast to one another, Vier Badende (Moritzburg) is an outstanding Brücke group painting of a 'return to Nature'. It is a modern-day pastoral idyll made during the group's communal working holiday to Moritzburg in 1910. Baustelle in Schmargendorf of 1913 is a rare and important city painting depicting the urban sprawl and incessant expansion of the great German metropolis, Berlin. Uniquely, this double-sided painting encapsulates on one canvas the twin extremes of the urban-based Brücke group's ambiguous relationship with both modernity and the city.
In mid-July of 1910 Pechstein joined his fellow Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel with their girlfriends and models for an idyllic summer painting, bathing and attempting to 'return to nature' in and around the man-made lakes of the secluded Moritzburg woodland near Dresden. Heckel and Kirchner were regular visitors to Moritzburg while Pechstein usually summered in the Baltic fishing village of Nidden. For a brief period in 1909 Pechstein had joined Kirchner and Heckel in Moritzburg and so successful had the visit proved that in 1910 Pechstein once again chose to spend a large part of the summer in Moritzburg working, 'unobserved, open, naked and free in the midst of Nature'.
'We painter-folk set out early every morning heavily laden with our gear,' he later recalled, 'the models trailing behind with pockets full of eatables and drinkables. We lived in absolute harmony, working and bathing. If we found ourselves short of a male model, one of us stepped into the breach...Each of us was producing many sketches, drawings and paintings. Only once were we surprised and frightened when we ran into the local policeman. Quickly the girls slipped into their bathing robes, and there we stood - caught in his eyes - in an act of gross indecency. Trying to explain that life drawing was part of our profession was of no avail, and our argument that not only ourselves but also the drawing class of the Royal Academy of Saxony required nude human beings in God's Nature for study purposes fell on deaf ears. He confiscated my painting - the corpus delicti - and assured us that charges would be brought' (Max Pechstein Erinnerungen, Wiesbaden, 1960, pp. 42-43).
Attempting to live in closer harmony with nature by returning to a deliberately simple and consciously more primitive existence, this idyllic summer of 1910 became a crucial period for all the Brücke artists. Living and working together in Nature outside of the confines of their studios and the metropolitan environment of Dresden led for the first time in their work to the emergence of what could truly be called a group style. Like the example set by their predecessors Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin in Arles, which to some extent they were no doubt trying to emulate, in Moritzburg the Brücke artists' shared subject matter and free, energetic approach to their work, with its insistence on the use of raw colour, simple form, spontaneity and immediacy of observation and painterly response, led to a convergence in their style.
The foremost characteristic of this 'Moritzburg' style is a vitality and pervasive sense of immediacy in the surface of these works that appears to reflect the adventurous and uninhibited nature of the group's plein air activities. In this way, both the style and the ideal of die Brücke's aesthetics seem to become one. Figures, radiant and colourful in the sunlight, are integrated with the 'natural' forms of the landscape in a way that suggests the supposedly symbiotic relationship between man and nature - an idea that underpinned many of the Brücke group's atavistic ideals and their dream of mankind forging a 'bridge' to a 'new age' of the spirit.
The directness and immediacy of the Moritzburg paintings reflected their belief that man's true response to nature and his environment could only accurately be conveyed through his instincts and intuition. Such a raw and direct response to their environment, like that of so-called 'primitive' man would, they believed, encourage each artist to perform and create without recourse to the cultural conditioning of modern life. The success of their experiences at Moritzburg only encouraged this belief and forged a sense of togetherness and of group identity that had hitherto been lacking in their art. It is essentially for this reason that the Moritzburg paintings are often thought to represent the pinnacle of the Brücke's achievement.
In its depiction of four female bathers, one languidly reclining on the shoreline of the lake Vier Badende implements the pictorial convention of the naked female in the landscape as a timeless symbol of harmony in order to invoke this atavistic notion of an primordial age of innocence. Motivated by the spirit of Gauguin and moving beyond the more idealised nature of the classical idylls invoked in the bathers of Cézanne or Matisse, Vier Badende conveys a powerful sense of community and vitality - of the real living nature and experience of the scene it depicts.
In complete contrast Baustelle in Schmargendorf depicts the mechanised vitality and unstoppable energy of that potent symbol of industry and Twentieth Century modernity - the city. Painted three years later, after Pechstein's move to Berlin and the disbanding of the Brücke that the group's move to the city ultimately precipitated, Baustelle in Schmargendorf is a rare example of a Brücke artist engaging with the subject matter of the city for his art. Although by 1913, Kirchner, Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Otto Mueller were all living in Berlin, with the exception of Kirchner, it was rare for these artists to turn to the motifs of their immediate urban environment in their art. The celebration of raw untamed primitive Nature and their invoking of the virtues of the rural idylls of Moritzburg, Fehmarn, Dangast and Nidden, was in part, a reaction to their metropolitan lives in Dresden. For the most part, this tendency in their work continued in Berlin.
In this panoramic city painting however, in a way that anticipates to some extent Ludwig Meidner's later Futurist-inspired invocation to his fellow artists to 'paint what is close to us our city world! the wild streets, the elegance of iron suspension bridges, gas tanks which hang in white-cloud mountains, the roaring colours of buses and express locomotives', Pechstein has painted the fast-changing landscape of the outskirts of the city where this mechanical asphalt jungle meets and invades the countryside.
In 1913 Berlin was the fastest-growing city in the world. As today, cranes and building works were a constant feature of the city's daily life. In Baustelle in Schmargendorf, like Adolph Menzel before him, Pechstein depicts the urban sprawl of the suburban edge of the city as it relentlessly moves into the surrounding countryside. In 1913 Pechstein was living amongst many other Expressionist painters and poets in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. The district of nearby Schmargendorf just south of Wilmersdorf marked, at that time, the furthest edge of the city's rapid expansion. Pechstein must have intentionally traveled to the building works of Schmargendorf in order to witness this progress and in order to paint this work.
Baustelle in Schmargendorf is in fact one of two versions of the subject painted by Pechstein at this time. The alternative work, a freer and seemingly more rapidly executed version that is possibly the study for this painting, is now in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf. Both works depict the same scene with its army of ant-like building workers in the foreground, its 'iron-snake' S-bahn train in the mid-ground and its domes, spires and smoking factory chimneys crowding together in the distance. Using the heightened, intensified and emotive colour and simplified angular form of the style he had developed in places such as Nidden and Moritzburg, Pechstein attempts in this fascinating work to render an 'Expressionist' portrait of the city and establish himself as a painter of modern life.
The painting was purchased by the celebrated collector Herbert Schonburg from Galerie van Diemen Lilienfeld in the 1920s and has only been exhibited rarely since that time. It is therefore shown on the international stage for the first time during our exhibition in London.
Vier Badende (Moritzburg) Baustelle in Schmargendorf is a rare double-sided canvas that comprises two very different paintings; each one a major work that marks the highpoint of an important stage in Pechstein's early career. Standing in stark contrast to one another, Vier Badende (Moritzburg) is an outstanding Brücke group painting of a 'return to Nature'. It is a modern-day pastoral idyll made during the group's communal working holiday to Moritzburg in 1910. Baustelle in Schmargendorf of 1913 is a rare and important city painting depicting the urban sprawl and incessant expansion of the great German metropolis, Berlin. Uniquely, this double-sided painting encapsulates on one canvas the twin extremes of the urban-based Brücke group's ambiguous relationship with both modernity and the city.
In mid-July of 1910 Pechstein joined his fellow Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel with their girlfriends and models for an idyllic summer painting, bathing and attempting to 'return to nature' in and around the man-made lakes of the secluded Moritzburg woodland near Dresden. Heckel and Kirchner were regular visitors to Moritzburg while Pechstein usually summered in the Baltic fishing village of Nidden. For a brief period in 1909 Pechstein had joined Kirchner and Heckel in Moritzburg and so successful had the visit proved that in 1910 Pechstein once again chose to spend a large part of the summer in Moritzburg working, 'unobserved, open, naked and free in the midst of Nature'.
'We painter-folk set out early every morning heavily laden with our gear,' he later recalled, 'the models trailing behind with pockets full of eatables and drinkables. We lived in absolute harmony, working and bathing. If we found ourselves short of a male model, one of us stepped into the breach...Each of us was producing many sketches, drawings and paintings. Only once were we surprised and frightened when we ran into the local policeman. Quickly the girls slipped into their bathing robes, and there we stood - caught in his eyes - in an act of gross indecency. Trying to explain that life drawing was part of our profession was of no avail, and our argument that not only ourselves but also the drawing class of the Royal Academy of Saxony required nude human beings in God's Nature for study purposes fell on deaf ears. He confiscated my painting - the corpus delicti - and assured us that charges would be brought' (Max Pechstein Erinnerungen, Wiesbaden, 1960, pp. 42-43).
Attempting to live in closer harmony with nature by returning to a deliberately simple and consciously more primitive existence, this idyllic summer of 1910 became a crucial period for all the Brücke artists. Living and working together in Nature outside of the confines of their studios and the metropolitan environment of Dresden led for the first time in their work to the emergence of what could truly be called a group style. Like the example set by their predecessors Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin in Arles, which to some extent they were no doubt trying to emulate, in Moritzburg the Brücke artists' shared subject matter and free, energetic approach to their work, with its insistence on the use of raw colour, simple form, spontaneity and immediacy of observation and painterly response, led to a convergence in their style.
The foremost characteristic of this 'Moritzburg' style is a vitality and pervasive sense of immediacy in the surface of these works that appears to reflect the adventurous and uninhibited nature of the group's plein air activities. In this way, both the style and the ideal of die Brücke's aesthetics seem to become one. Figures, radiant and colourful in the sunlight, are integrated with the 'natural' forms of the landscape in a way that suggests the supposedly symbiotic relationship between man and nature - an idea that underpinned many of the Brücke group's atavistic ideals and their dream of mankind forging a 'bridge' to a 'new age' of the spirit.
The directness and immediacy of the Moritzburg paintings reflected their belief that man's true response to nature and his environment could only accurately be conveyed through his instincts and intuition. Such a raw and direct response to their environment, like that of so-called 'primitive' man would, they believed, encourage each artist to perform and create without recourse to the cultural conditioning of modern life. The success of their experiences at Moritzburg only encouraged this belief and forged a sense of togetherness and of group identity that had hitherto been lacking in their art. It is essentially for this reason that the Moritzburg paintings are often thought to represent the pinnacle of the Brücke's achievement.
In its depiction of four female bathers, one languidly reclining on the shoreline of the lake Vier Badende implements the pictorial convention of the naked female in the landscape as a timeless symbol of harmony in order to invoke this atavistic notion of an primordial age of innocence. Motivated by the spirit of Gauguin and moving beyond the more idealised nature of the classical idylls invoked in the bathers of Cézanne or Matisse, Vier Badende conveys a powerful sense of community and vitality - of the real living nature and experience of the scene it depicts.
In complete contrast Baustelle in Schmargendorf depicts the mechanised vitality and unstoppable energy of that potent symbol of industry and Twentieth Century modernity - the city. Painted three years later, after Pechstein's move to Berlin and the disbanding of the Brücke that the group's move to the city ultimately precipitated, Baustelle in Schmargendorf is a rare example of a Brücke artist engaging with the subject matter of the city for his art. Although by 1913, Kirchner, Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Otto Mueller were all living in Berlin, with the exception of Kirchner, it was rare for these artists to turn to the motifs of their immediate urban environment in their art. The celebration of raw untamed primitive Nature and their invoking of the virtues of the rural idylls of Moritzburg, Fehmarn, Dangast and Nidden, was in part, a reaction to their metropolitan lives in Dresden. For the most part, this tendency in their work continued in Berlin.
In this panoramic city painting however, in a way that anticipates to some extent Ludwig Meidner's later Futurist-inspired invocation to his fellow artists to 'paint what is close to us our city world! the wild streets, the elegance of iron suspension bridges, gas tanks which hang in white-cloud mountains, the roaring colours of buses and express locomotives', Pechstein has painted the fast-changing landscape of the outskirts of the city where this mechanical asphalt jungle meets and invades the countryside.
In 1913 Berlin was the fastest-growing city in the world. As today, cranes and building works were a constant feature of the city's daily life. In Baustelle in Schmargendorf, like Adolph Menzel before him, Pechstein depicts the urban sprawl of the suburban edge of the city as it relentlessly moves into the surrounding countryside. In 1913 Pechstein was living amongst many other Expressionist painters and poets in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. The district of nearby Schmargendorf just south of Wilmersdorf marked, at that time, the furthest edge of the city's rapid expansion. Pechstein must have intentionally traveled to the building works of Schmargendorf in order to witness this progress and in order to paint this work.
Baustelle in Schmargendorf is in fact one of two versions of the subject painted by Pechstein at this time. The alternative work, a freer and seemingly more rapidly executed version that is possibly the study for this painting, is now in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf. Both works depict the same scene with its army of ant-like building workers in the foreground, its 'iron-snake' S-bahn train in the mid-ground and its domes, spires and smoking factory chimneys crowding together in the distance. Using the heightened, intensified and emotive colour and simplified angular form of the style he had developed in places such as Nidden and Moritzburg, Pechstein attempts in this fascinating work to render an 'Expressionist' portrait of the city and establish himself as a painter of modern life.
The painting was purchased by the celebrated collector Herbert Schonburg from Galerie van Diemen Lilienfeld in the 1920s and has only been exhibited rarely since that time. It is therefore shown on the international stage for the first time during our exhibition in London.