Sale: 539 / Modern Art Day Sale, June 10. 2023 in Munich Lot 388

 

388
Josef Scharl
Zwei Herren im Frack, 1927.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 35,000 / $ 37,800
Sold:
€ 44,450 / $ 48,006

(incl. surcharge)
Zwei Herren im Frack. 1927.
Oil on canvas.
Firmenich/Lukas 93. Signed and dated in upper right. 75 x 60 cm (29.5 x 23.6 in).
[JS].
• Scharl's pictures, in which he anatomized society in the Roaring Twenties, are the cream of the crop of his creation.
• Multi-figure works from this creative period are very rare and count among his most sought-after ones on the international auction market.
• Paintings from his early creative period are in many important collections like the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Städel Museum, Frankfurt a.M. and the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
• Recently, Scharl's works were shown alongside works by Georg Grosz, Karl Hubbuch, Karl Hofer und Christian Schad, in the exhibition "Kunst und Leben 1918 bis 1955" (October 15, 2022 - April 16, 2023) at the Lenbachhaus in Munich
.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.
Private collection (around 1999).
Galerie Levy, Hamburg.
Private collection Northern Germany (acquired from the above).

EXHIBITION: Josef Scharl, Pavillion im Alten Botanischen Garten, Munich, January 3 - 25, 1953.
Josef Scharl. Gedächtnisausstelling, Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin, April 20 - June 16, 1964.
Josef Scharl. 3. Gedächtnisausstellung, November 1, 1971 - January 12, 1972, cat. no.9 (with illu. p. 8).

Scharl is a painter of people whose special painterly quality becomes particularly obvious in his strong character portraits, which show simple workers and soldiers in a physicality battered by life or death and with unembellished immediacy. On the other hand, however, his painterly mastery also becomes evident in his wonderful multi-figure society paintings of the Golden Twenties. These evening parties, which often show wealthy men in tails, act like a glamorous, almost decadent antithesis to the battered physiognomies that confront us in his worker paintings. In the typical style of the 1920s, Scharl has rendered the two male characters from the Weimar Republic on the canvas in "Zwei Herren im Frack" (Two Gentlemen in Tails) with a typical brushstroke inspired by Van Gogh. Scharl's dissecting society pictures of these years, such as the present painting or ""Blinder Bettler im Café" (Blind Beggar in the Café, 1927, Kunsthalle Emden), "Drei Korporierte (Larven) (Three Corporates (Grubs), 1925, Lenbachhaus Munich) are among the best that Scharl's painterly work has to offer. Scharl's clearly dynamic style of these years is unique, combining elements of Expressionism and New Objectivity. And so it is not surprising that the painting "Konferenz/Die Gruppe" (Conference/The Group, 1927) with four gentlemen in tails, and the work "Der Abend” (The Evening, 1925) are currently listed as the artist's two most expensive works on the international auction market. In the 1920s, Scharl was at the peak of his creativity, he joined the artists' association "Neue Münchner Sezession" and the "Juryfreie" and successfully took part in their exhibitions. With the beginning of the National Socialist’s cultural policy, he witnesses drastic changes in the 1930s: sales and exhibition participation decreased, Scharl's financial situation worsened and he was banned from painting. Nevertheless, in 1935, Karl Nierendorf helped him to a solo exhibition. An invitation to take part in an international exhibition together with Beckmann, Scholz, Heckel and Hofer, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, encouraged Scharl to emigrate to America in 1939. [JS]



388
Josef Scharl
Zwei Herren im Frack, 1927.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 35,000 / $ 37,800
Sold:
€ 44,450 / $ 48,006

(incl. surcharge)