My reflections on art, collectors, marchers and contemporary art auctions
My reflections on art, collectors, marchers and contemporary art auctions
Rediscovered Jawlensky
In its evening sale, Ketterer boasts major modernist works fresh from the market – the highlight is a portrait of a woman by Alexej von Jawlensky, which was privately owned for a century
Anyone who knows her doe-eyed portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler would not believe it to be possible: Thanks to her beauty, the Irishwoman Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert, at least in her heyday (with otherwise rather dubious talents), managed to stir up high-end Europe with a series of unprecedented scandals. For this purpose, she had reinvented herself: a good 30 years before the premiere of Bizet's "Carmen" she was repeatedly convicted of cheating as the Spanish dancer Lola Montez - from Seville, of course - only to climb all the higher afterwards. A young editor in Paris had himself shot in the head in a duel because of her, the somewhat more mature Ludwig I of Bavaria was content with raising the convicted bigamist to the nobility. With her daring escapades, the newly minted countess even triggered student unrest, whereupon the enamored monarch in Munich closed the university for the rest of the semester and calmly let his outraged cabinet go, ultimately resigning himself. This not only earned his nemesis a well-deserved entry in Meyers Konversationslexikon, but even helped the butt of a cigarette she smoked to museum dignity.
The fact that Montez would also write art history would have surprised even her. Not only that serious portrait painters of the time soon also shone with depictions of tambourine and castanet swinging "Spaniards" - their dazzling lives also inspired modern artists.
December 10 at Ketterer, Munich , is a major work by Alexej von Jawlensky from 1913, which joins the group of works by his Heads of Spanish Women, which began around 1911. At that time, around 50 years after her death, the meanwhile strongly romanticized gambler again attracted the interest of the media. It was probably also fueled by the success of a biographical novel by Joseph August Lux, who, like Jawlensky, moved in the Schwabing bohemian scene and was therefore probably known to him. As in the other examples in the series, the painter showed no interest in an individualizing approach to his counterpart with the present "Woman's Head with Flowers in Her Hair", but instead sought to work out the suprapersonal distillate of a certain type of woman: After other exotic women, he repeated here that of the vital , easy-going southerner. Ironically, he preferred to use a male model as a projection surface for the specifically Northern European conception of unsettling femininity; very likely the Ukrainian dancer Alexander Sakharov also sat for this head. Dressed up and made up as a woman, he neutralized overly thriving male fantasies through the artistic means of travesty.
This "Woman's Head" stands with the other pre-war "portraits" at the beginning of a development that was to lead the artist to his "truly modern images of saints", as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff once described Jawlensky's abstract "meditations". A similarly pious critic had recommended in Cicerone in 1921 that Jawlensky's pictures should be covered "and only exposed to the impression in celebration hours." However, the rare "Woman's Head" in Ketterer's work was probably invisible for long enough. It was owned by the family for a whole century, which is why it was not confirmed by the Alexander von Jawlensky Archive until 2017. The importance and market freshness of the almost square carton have their price: 2.5 million euros are expected.
A “still life” from 1910, in which yellow and red apples and a jug with a handle and a patterned glaze are arranged in front of a painting of his own in the background, is estimated at a much lower estimate of a quarter of a million. Jawlensky chose his motif “Murnau – landscape with an orange cloud” as the “picture in the picture”, which had only been created the previous year and was obviously of particular importance for the artist at the time, although he himself expressly negated an intention behind the selection of the objects: " I wasn't looking for the material object in this style life (sic!), but wanted to express what vibrated in me through color and form”.
no doubt affected by vibrations of a rather unfavorable kind at the time painters of the bridge , which ultimately led to their break with the Berlin Secession in 1910. Emil Nolde, who was already threatened with expulsion due to his opposition to the board, initially joined them, but soon went his own way. After all, through the brief collaboration he found the unbroken colourfulness that remained characteristic of his later works. Among the millions of objects on offer is his lushly blooming "Boxwood Garden", which dates back to 1909 and was created in the year before the big showdown within the Secession, but which already clearly reveals the influence of his "Brücke" colleagues in the bright palette.