Naked woman with child

Details

Provenance:

Estate of the artist, on the reverse as well as on the frame backing card with the partially trimmed stamp (Lugt 1775b);

Gallery Vömel, Düsseldorf;

Privately owned, Essen, acquired from the aforementioned in 1958, 1981 by succession to the present owner;

Private property, Southern Germany.

Descrizione

– Expressive, spontaneous oil sketch with vibrant colours

– Rare combination of the themes of children and nudes

– Created in 1912 at August Macke’s artistic peak

The years 1911-1913 in Bonn were a particularly successful time for August Macke. They were characterised by intensive exhibition activities with the Blauer Reiter, the Rhenish Expressionists, the Cologne Gereonsklub and the Sonderbund, for which he often pulled the organisational strings as a gifted networker. Macke also had an excellent international network, cultivating contacts in Scandinavia and Russia, Switzerland and, above all, France. In addition to his active professional life, Macke is also a pronounced family man. His oeuvre includes numerous portraits of his wife Elisabeth, depictions of his two sons Walter and Wolfgang, born in 1910 and 1913, and scenes from his own house or garden. The oil sketch “Nude Woman with Child”, with its unusual combination of nudes and children, probably does not depict a real situation, but rather a fictitious one that combines the two themes of children and nudes. It is tempting to see Elisabeth and her first son Walter, born in 1910, in the motif. However, this is rather unlikely, as Elisabeth was dark-haired and Walter only had a light reddish-brown mop of hair. Nevertheless, this work is one of August Macke’s favourite intimate family scenes.

“Macke regarded life in the family circle with his wife and two sons as happiness, art and life as the ‘joy of nature’. This positive attitude to life found its very own artistic expression, especially in the Bonn years from 1911 to 1913. In his pictorial worlds, he created varied and multi-faceted depictions of an earthly paradise. His works prove to be a vision of a harmonious state of the world and are (…) at the same time an alternative concept to his time, which was characterised by technical innovations and industrialisation. While the great world exhibitions of the 19th century in Paris and London localised the South Seas or the Orient as distant places of longing, Macke relocated his earthly paradise to this side of the real world. (…) In intimate, everyday scenes, Macke stages the world of the children, who appear naturally and unselfconsciously absorbed in their play. (…) (Ina Ewers-Schultz, August Macke 1887-1914. Life and Work, online text August Macke Haus, Bonn, Chapter VIII. Earthly Paradise: https://www.august-macke-haus.de/august-macke/leben-und-werk.html).

Illegible handwritten inscriptions on the reverse at the lower margin.

Vriesen 361; Heiderich 373.