Sale: 432 / Modern Art I, June 11. 2016 in Munich Lot 335

 

335
Oskar Schlemmer
Sitzende, 1929.
Watercolor
Estimate:
€ 140,000 / $ 151,200
Sold:
€ 262,500 / $ 283,500

(incl. surcharge)
Sitzende. 1929.
Watercolor and opaque white over pencil.
Von Maur A 378. Lower right barely legible signed and dated. On laid paper (with watermark). 55 x 33.4 cm (21.6 x 13.1 in), the full sheet.

Pictorial watercolor from the artist's best period of creation.

PROVENANCE: Gerd Rosen, Berlin, 39. auction 5 - 10 November 1962, cat. no. 1311a with illu. on p. 271.
Collection Siegfried und Gesche Poppe, Hamburg.
Villa Grisebach Berlin, auction 27 November 1998, cat. no. 40 with color illu.
Private collection Hesse (since 1998).

EXHIBITION: Meister des Aquarells aus der deutschen Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Kunstverein Hamburg 3 August - 15 September 1963, cat. no. 163.
Oskar Schlemmer. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Plastiken, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, Graphisches Kabinett Wolfgang Werner, Bremen 17 November 1976 - 31 January 1977, cat. no. 12.

The watercolor, a repetition of the motif that Oskar Schlemmer had already rendered in the painting "Sitzende in Weiß" around1925, is a document of the artist's turn to a more spiritual and abstract style. Schlemmer noted about the watercolor in his diary on 18 November 1936 that he tried to find "the 'magic-suggestive atmosphere' of this composition, achieved through the white priming and the artificiality of figure and hair, anew and with different stylistic means" (quote after: v. Maur, p. 60). Oskar Schlemmer used the period between the two works to attain a new conception of the motif. The schematic figurative aspect remained; what is new is the statuary element of the seated, ending in an aura of abstract mysticism. Similar to the figures in the "Triadisches Ballett", the pose and not the individuality is the expression's decisive factor. The figure's aloofness, comparable with portraits of rulers from Italian mannerism, has a projected effect on the observer which Oskar Schlemmer made a special stylistic means in this work. Owed to a state between approximation and formal abstraction, his figures dwell in a no man's land of "magical suggestion", as he noted in his diary in 1936.



335
Oskar Schlemmer
Sitzende, 1929.
Watercolor
Estimate:
€ 140,000 / $ 151,200
Sold:
€ 262,500 / $ 283,500

(incl. surcharge)