Sale: 540 / Evening Sale, June 09. 2023 in Munich Lot 59

 

59
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Stillleben mit Flasche, 1951.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 120,000 / $ 129,600
Sold:
€ 342,900 / $ 370,332

(incl. surcharge)
Stillleben mit Flasche. 1951.
Oil on canvas.
Grohmann p. 307. Signed in upper left. Once more signed on the reverse and titled "Stilleben mit Flasche“, as well as inscribed with the work number "511“ and "gewachst“. 101.5 x 87.5 cm (39.9 x 34.4 in).

• The colors enter into a fascinating, powerful dialog.
• Remarkable modernity: Owing to the clarity of his pictorial language and the colors' two-dimensionality, this is an outstanding still life in Schmidt-Rottluff's œuvre.
• Formerly part of the acclaimed private collection of Berthold and Else Beitz.
• For the first time offered on the international auction market (source: artprice.com)
.

The work is documented in the archive of the Karl and Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Foundation, Berlin.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Wilhelm Grosshenning with a label on the reverse).
Berthold and Else Beitz Collection (acquired from the above).
Private collection Northern Germany (inherited from the above).

EXHIBITION: Ausstellung bedeutender Kunstwerke des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Deutsche Expressionisten – Deutsche Impressionisten). Galerie Wilhelm Grosshenning, Düsseldorf, December 15, 1958 - February 15, 1959, no p. (with illu.).

After the National Socialists’ occupational ban had forced him to interrupt his artistic activity for years, Schmidt-Rottluff returned to Berlin in 1946. Starting around 1950, a highly intensive and prolific creative period, in which he would build on the productivity of earlier years, commenced in the war-torn city. He put a particularly strong focus on the still life, in the context of which he constantly aimed at increasing the expressiveness of the subject.

The present "Stillleben mit Flasche" (Still Life With a Bottle) is a special testimony to this intense time in Berlin. In this phase of his examination of the 'nature morte', Schmidt-Rottluff increasingly detached the depicted objects from their actual spatial location and their real colors. Their expressive values and the correspondence of the colors to each other were decisive for him. Our painting, which remained in an important family collection for decades, presents itself as one of the most fascinating products from the group of these late still lifes. Schmidt-Rottluff puts forms and colors into an intensive relation to the virtuoso contour lines. Due to their size and proximity to the viewer, he gave the picture’s individual objects, such as the teapot positioned in the back left in, a meaningful monumentality. Through the concise use of light and the unique use of shadows, the artist knew how to skillfully increase the pictorial effect, two-dimensionality and the expressiveness of the colors. In this extraordinary still life, he achieved a pictorial effect in which he takes the conciseness and clarity of the motif and the colors to an unprecedented level.

In many respects, the 1950s were an extremely exciting period for the artist's later oeuvre. A growing degree of abstraction - even if Schmidt-Rottluff always understood representationalism as the top priority of his art - testifies to the artist's never-ending engagement with his own environment and the expressive qualities of his own work. In this sense, the work "Stillleben mit Flasche" represents a new style in the painting of the former "Brücke" artist. [AM]



59
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Stillleben mit Flasche, 1951.
Oil on canvas
Estimate:
€ 120,000 / $ 129,600
Sold:
€ 342,900 / $ 370,332

(incl. surcharge)