Watercolor
Signed, dated and titled lower right. With inscription "1290" in lower right corner. With another inscription "GLA 73006" on verso. On light cardboard. 63,8 x 45 cm (25,1 x 17,7 in), the full sheet

We are grateful to Mr Matthias Griebel, Dresden, for his kind support in cataloging this lot. This work will be included into the œuvre register under the number 67.2.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Wiesbaden (acquired at the gallery Kühl, Dresden, in the 1960s).

Art experts in his days saw Otto Griebel at the same level as his contemporaries Otto Dix and Georg Grosz. Paul Ferninand Schmidt, director of the Dresden municipal art collection bought several watercolors by Griebel in the early 1920s. During the years of the inflation, the social and cultural life in Dresden is at a remarkable climax. It is in this environment that the artistic movement of Magic Realism begins to develop. Dix and Griebel created key works in their days as master students at the academy. Thsi watercolor was also made during this most productive part of Otto Griebel's creative period. However, the artist was not only interested in the model beauties of the golden 1920s. He came across his models on the street and examines their fate, but he did not possess as much angry cynicism as his contemporaries Grosz and Dix, his message is less direct and exposing, but more subtle and with a great deal of symbolic meaning. In order to take a direct stand, he rejects the tedious glazing technique of the Verist artists and attains a great degree of a realistic effect with his watercolor technique. Paul Ferdiand Schmidt praises Otto Griebel as "a nude painter who has never been matched by another artist in Germany" (Kunstblatt, 1926). The œuvre of Otto Griebel fell victim to the National Socialists and the war. In connection with the exhibition of degenerate art, works by Griebel were removed from private and public collections and were destroyed. Most of the works that survived this action were destroyed in the Dresden night of bombing. Accordingly, only very few works by the artist survived. They are extremely rare on the auction market, a work in such a precise execution as this one has only been offered once before. [SM].