Komödianten. Um 1918.
Watercolor and pastel over pencil.
Signed in upper center and titled in bottom center. Signed and titled on the reverse. 59 x 48.3 cm (23.2 x 19 in), the full sheet.
With a pencil drawing on the reverse that shows a portrait of the lawyer and friend Dr. Rudolf Hertz, probably from 1916. Dr. Rudolf Hertz (1861-1933) was the son of the lawyer and Hamburg senator Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (1827-1914) and the brother of the physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894), father of the hertz unit of frequency (symbol: Hz). Dr. Rudolf Hertz had a keen interest in art; in 1917, for example, he commissioned Georg Kolbe to create a figure in memory of his son Carl Heinrich, who died in the First World War ("Stürzender Flieger / Ikarus", 1917/19, unfinished). [CH].
• Sheet painted on both sides: with a portrait of the lawyer and friend Dr. Rudolf Hertz on the reverse.
• Made in the prolific time after Anita Rée had returned from Paris.
• Around 1918, she created a few children's pictures, which Rée united in a single scene in the present work.
• The artist adopted stylistic elements like asymmetry and deformation from Picasso's "Blue" and "Pink Periods".
• The children with their eyes half closed, gazing past the viewer with sadness and melancholy, reflect the forlornness typical of the years after the war.
• At the same time, the emotional world so characteristic of her figures is an expression of Anita Rée's unique personality and her emotional disposition.
• The painter was particularly interested in figure, form and expression: while the forms in the background are abstracted, the colors are delicate, muted and subdued.
• Elaborate watercolors of this kind are very rare on the international auction market.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Commeter / Commeter'sche Kunsthandlung, Hamburg (from 1925, with the label inscribed by hand and in typography on the reverse).
Private collection Schleswig-Holstein.
Ever since family-owned.

EXHIBITION: Ich kann mich in so einer Welt nicht mehr zurecht finden. Jüdische Künstler der Hamburgischen Sezession, Altonaer Museum, Norddeutsches Landesmuseum, October 18, 1989 - January 14, 1990.

LITERATURE: Maike Bruhns, Anita Rée. Das Werk, Munich 2018, no. A 27 and Z 37a (each with illu.).
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Maike Bruhns, Anita Rée. Leben und Werk einer Hamburger Malerin 1885-1933, Hamburg 1986, p. 273, cat. no. A 11 a.

Called up: June 8, 2024 - ca. 18.48 h +/- 20 min.