Mädchenporträt im Profil. Ca. 1930s.
Oil on canvas, laid on hard fibre board.
Not in Wohlert. Upper left with monogram in ligature, scratched into wet paint. 25,7 x 19,5 cm (10,1 x 7,6 in).

The work's authenticity has kindly been confirmed orally by Karl Bernhard Wohlert.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Alex Vömel, Düsseldorf.
Collection Hajo Schwartz, Düsseldorf (the collector Hajo Schwartz was a good friend of the gallery owner Alex Vömel, from whom he presumably acquired the work in the 1930/40s).

Karl Hofer was born in Karlsruhe on 11 October 1878 the son of a military musician. After an apprenticeship in C.F. Müller's court bookstore, he began to study at the Großherzoglich Badische Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 1897. Here he studied under Poetzelberger, Kalckreuth and Thoma until 1901. None of these teachers, however, were able to provide him with ideas for his ambitious striving for a new art form and he soon came under the influence of Arnold Böcklin. Hofer traveled to Paris in 1900 where he was greatly impressed by Henri Rousseau's naive painting. The art historian Julius Meier-Graefe introduced Hofer not only to private collections worth while seeing in Paris, but also drew his attention to Hans von Marées. As a result Hofer decided in 1903 to spend a couple of years in Rome. His painting, which was until then influenced by Böcklin's Symbolism, changed in favor of Marées' classic-Arcadian concept. In 1904 the Kunsthaus Zurich presented Hofer's first one-man show within the ‚Ausstellung moderner Kunstwerke', which was afterwards shown in an extended version at the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and at the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen and in Weimar in 1906. From 1908 Hofer lived temporarily in Paris. The stay changed his style through dealing with influences of Cézanne, French Impressionists and El Greco. In 1913 the artist moved to Berlin. He was interned in France one year later and only returned to Germany in 1917. He accepted a post as a professor at the Kunstschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1921. On the occasion of his 50th birthday a retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, the ‚Berlin Secession' and Alfred Flechtheim's gallery in Berlin.

Hofer worked on different types of figures as early as in the twenties, figures that had already appeared at an earlier point. The group of women at the sea, the loving couple and, countless times, the figure of a girl with plants or fruits, seated or standing by the window. These are motifs expressing the artist's longing for pristine beauty. By making ever more variations thereof he eventually brought them to perfection. They are portraits "in which his strive for classicism, for the depiction of man's undisturbed harmony with nature becomes obvious. The erotic appeal these girls and couples emanate is extremely demure, nudity something normal, but yet, they are seducing. It is vegetale, fragile creatures that Hofer painted, meditative and ususally passive. [..]" (Renate Hartleb, Karl Hofer, Leipzig 1987, p. 35).
IThe small profile portrait of a girl is also to be seen in this context, which was presumably made as a preliminary study around 1930. Just as it is the case with his other portraits, Hofer sought not to depict what is most striking about a face, he visualized a world of inner tensions hiding behind a rather distanced superficiality.

His art was considered "degenerate" during the 'Third Reich' and he was dismissed from his teaching post in 1933/34. His works were exhibited in 1937 in the Munich exhibition 'Entartete Kunst'. Hofer lived in Berlin for the rest of his life. He was the director of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. [CB].