Sale: 520 / Evening Sale, June 18. 2021 in Munich Lot 321

 

321
Wilhelm Morgner
Landschaft mit kleiner Brücke bei Soest, 1910.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 70,000 / $ 75,600
Sold:
€ 175,000 / $ 189,000

(incl. surcharge)
Landschaft mit kleiner Brücke bei Soest. 1910.
Oil on canvas.
Hand-written estate register of Georg Tappert no. 55 (formerly no. 52). Signed and dated in lower right. Verso signed, dated and inscribed by Georg Tappert, as well as inscribed with the old and new estate number and the dimensions. With an estate stamp on the stretcher. 75 x 85 cm (29.5 x 33.4 in).

• Paintings by Wilhelm Morgner are extremely rare on the international auction market.
• This landscape from 1910 is an early masterpiece of museum quality from the small oeuvre of the artist who fell in WWI in 1917.
• The National Socialists posthumously defamed Morgner's painting as "degenerate"
.

We are grateful to Mr Walter Weihs, Wilhelm-Morgner-Archive, Soest, for his kind expert advice. The work is listed in the new and to date unpublished catalog raisonné of Wilhelm Morgner's paintings with the number "WV Weihs/Tappert 55".

PROVENANCE: From the artist's estate.
Horst Wendlandt, Berlin.
Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich.
Collection Reinheimer, Sindelfingen (1981- at least 1992).
Private collection Northern Germany.

EXHIBITION: Wilhelm Morgner 1891-1917, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Landesmuseum Münster, September 17 - October 22, 1967 / Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, January 19 - February 25, 1968 / Bruges, March 9 - March 31, 1968 / Ostende, April 6 - April 28, 1968 / Ypern, May 4 - May 26, 1968, cat. no. 5 (with illu.).
Wilhelm Morgner 1891-1917. Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster, April 21 - June 30, 1991 / Wilheim-Morger-Haus Soest, July 7 - September 15, 1991 / Städtische Galerie im Lehnbachhaus Munich, November 20, 1991 - January 19, 1992, cat. no. 25 (with illu. on p. 90).

LITERATURE: Lempertz, Cologne, Auction 480, Modern Art, December 3/4, 1964, lot 462 (with illu.) .

Wilhelm Morgner, born in Soest in 1881, began his artistic training at the private art school of Georg Tappert, the Berlin expressionist in Worpswede, in October 1908; it lasted until the end of January 1909. In 1910 Morgner was Tappert's student again, this time in Berlin. In Berlin Morgner was in contact with the latest art movements, not least with the help of Tappert, which led to participation in exhibitions that also consolidated his artistic position in Soest, from June on Morgner was back in Soest. Morgner worked extremely hard: he drew a lot and transferred the motifs into pictures, making portraits of Soest women, men and children, some show people at work, while others show the local landscape like this one with a small bridge that he had sketched in a pen drawing one year prior: An old man with a cane crosses over the ditch and focuses his gaze into the background showing a woman working on the field. A year later the scene was transferred into a painting without figures. This picture is not only strictly ordered in terms of perspective and the effective way the colors are applied – thin and thick layer of paint alternate. Morgner's color scheme tends to be yellow-brown, but also green, red and, as it is particularly striking in the sky in this work, a pink alternating with a delicate blue and lemon yellow which contributes to the liveliness of the narrow landscape detail. Morgner‘s soft light shapes the three-dimensional swell over which an old, crooked bridge leads like a tunnel-gate into another 'country'. The soft sfumato in the transitions of the at times hard dabs of the pointillist brush.
Morgner was well informed about van Gogh and Millet; he was in possession of Julius Meier-Graefes' monograph published in 1910. And Morgner most certainly visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1910, where latest artistic positions from France were shown from June to October, and he also kept an eye on the collection of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. “I will be going to Hagen in the near future,” Morgner confirmed on September 28, 1910 to his friend Wilhelm Wulff. (Hans Wille, Briefe und Postkarten von Wilhelm Morgner an Wilhelm Wulff, in: Wilhelm Morgner, Münster 1991, p. 65). Morgner discovered a wide range of modernist positions at the still young Museum Folkwang, which the museum‘s founder Karl Ernst Osthaus had compiled since 1901. The collection comprised pictures and drawings by the masters of Post-Impressionism: Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, as well as works by the then current pointillists such as Georges Seurat , Paul Signac and Edmund Gross. With “Landschaft mit kleiner Brücke (bei Soest)“ from 1910 Morgner created an early masterpiece. Drafted at the beginning of the war, Wilhelm Morgner fell in Langenmarck in the province of Flanders in August 1917. [MvL]



321
Wilhelm Morgner
Landschaft mit kleiner Brücke bei Soest, 1910.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 70,000 / $ 75,600
Sold:
€ 175,000 / $ 189,000

(incl. surcharge)