Bleaching clothes

Details

We would like to thank Rainer Noeres, Otto Modersohn Museum, Fischerhude, for his help in cataloguing this work.

Provenance:

Private collection, Bremen;

Private collection, Northern Germany, acquired from the above-named 30 years ago.

Description

Otto Modersohn is one of the best-known artists of the Worpswede School. With his conscious rejection of the academic conception of art, he developed his own characteristic conception of landscape, which he composed from real experiences of nature and artistically interwoven dream landscapes. “Art can do nothing without nature, but it only has charm and value after it has been transformed by the artist.” (Otto Modersohn, diary, 25 May 1935, quoted from: Exhib. cat. Otto Modersohn, Otto-Modersohn-Nachlass-Museum Fischerhude et al. 1981/82, p. 164). Modersohn thus characterised Worpswede landscape painting like hardly any other painter of his time. In their rural simplicity, the motifs are left to the most diverse moods of light and appear absolutely timeless.

Influenced by the atmospheric landscape painting of the late 19th century, in particular the Barbizon school, the artists of the Worpswede artists’ colony around 1900 painted landscapes in which the mood of refracted light played a key role. Above the flat landscape of the Devil’s Moor in Lower Saxony, the sky with its constantly changing play of clouds and colours is the spectacular protagonist. In addition to the image of nature, personal feelings and moods are also captured and reflected. The proximity of painting to lyricism and poetry is unmistakable here, represented in particular by Rainer Virgin Rilke in Worpswede.