Oilon cardboard
No longer recorded by Wietek. Signed upper right. Barely readably inscribed upper centre. With inscription 'No 10. G. Tappert. Worpswede' on the reverse. 38,7 x 33,3 cm (15,2 x 13,1 in)

PROVENANCE: Private collection Bremen.
Private collection Germany.

Tappert went to Worpswede in 1906, where he soon founded a private art school. Its best-known pupil would be Wilhelm Morgner. At that time Tappert was preoccupied with the mother and child motif and related themes, to which he devoted paintings, photographs and prints. The present painting, which presumably depicts a settlement woman in the peat-cutting region, belongs to this thematic complex. Everything representational has here been summarily reduced to surface forms executed with great verve in powerful brushwork. The approach to the motif differs greatly from that employed by older members of the Worpswede colony. With this new freedom in rendering reality, Tappert emerges from the artists’ colony in the Teufelsmoor as the first real Expressionist. [KD].