Painter's paradise on the Baltic Sea
In 1909, Pechstein traveled to the Baltic Sea for the first time, to the small town of Nida on the Curonian Spit in what was then East Prussia. In the years that followed, the artist made the local landscape and the simple life of the fishermen and farmers the main motif of his works. In 1920, however, the stays in Nidden ended for the time being after the village fell under the administration of the newly founded League of Nations after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles and was later given to Lithuania. However, the artist could not do without the annual several-months-long stays on his beloved Baltic Sea, and so he chose the coastal town of Leba in what was then Pomerania as his new summer home the following year. Making it his second home, he returned regularly until 1945. In his "Erinnerungen” (Memoirs), the artist wrote about Leba in retrospect: "In April 1921 I went looking on my own, with only the most essential material in my backpack. According to the map, there was a similar spit in East Pomerania, between Lake Leba and the Baltic Sea. [.] Not only did I learn to appreciate this coast, I loved it. [..] It gave me a sense of security that helped me from going under after the war." (Max Pechstein, Erinnerungen, Stuttgart 1960, pp. 107f.)

The village of Leba is located on a narrow, almost island-like spit between the lakes Leba and Sarbsko and the open sea. Even in Pechstein's time, it was a popular, yet not overcrowded, small seaside resort, surrounded by a still very original dune landscape. The artist found the retreat he had been looking for, his personal paradise away from the noisy, hectic and anonymous city of Berlin: "But I admit that the city depresses and occasionally paralyzes me; I need air, sky and a wide view above me." (Pechstein in a letter to Walter Minnich, probably on March 1922, quoted from: ex. cat. Hamburg 2017, p. 149)

The picturesque 'Mühlengraben' (Mill Ditch)
The painting offered here was created during Pechstein's very first stay in Leba in 1921. Following his Easter "discovery voyag", Pechstein and his then wife Lotte went to Leba together in May. They stayed at ‘Strandhotel Möller’, where the artist met the owner's daughter Marta Möller, his future second wife, and her sister Liese. The two would become his preferred models and he captured them in numerous drawings and paintings. Until his departure in October 1921, Pechstein also painted some views of the coast and the dune landscape, as well as seascapes and pictures of Leba.

Pechstein showed the picturesque ‘Mühlengraben’ the way it winds through town lined with trees and bushes with two fishing boats bobbing on the water and one of the two wooden bridges. The mill ditch, the trees towering over it and the reflection on the water surface lead the eye into the picture’s depths. Pechstein uses few but rich and strong colors, which are repeated in the sophisticated reflection on the water: He shows the plants in green, the buildings in red tones, the paths in a warm yellow and the sky in clear blue tones.

The creative time between the wars
The early 1920s marked a quite extraordinary and very fruitful creative phase in which Pechstein captured the surroundings of his adopted homeland on canvas with an expressive, warm-toned color palette, thus creating a certain chromatic similarity to the widely-noticed pictures of the South Seas from 1914. The result is an extremely balanced, harmonious picture, both in terms of composition and color, which can certainly be considered a particularly successful example of these creative years after the First World War. With his flat yet detailed painting style and the strong colors, Pechstein expressed his intense experience of nature, as well as his inner world and thus achieved his very own expressionist visual language.

The works from the miserable post-war years, of which the present one is a prime example, document a kind of artistic rebirth and testify to him emotionally coping with the war trauma. The artist achieved such a harmonious, strong unity of form, content and color - particularly in the landscape depictions made during his stays at the Baltic Sea in the 1920s – that he conveys his deeply felt connection to nature and the simple life at the coast without any dramatic exaggeration (cf. ex. cat. Max Pechstein im Brücke Museum, Munich 2001, p. 19). [CH]