작품 상세

Oil on canvas 65 x 90 cm, framed. Signed and dated 'G. Schrimpf 37' lower right. - Professionally cleaned. In good condition; some small, scattered retouches in the sky area. Hofmann/Präger 1937/9 With a photo-certificate from Christmut Präger, Cologne, dated 6 August 2013 Provenance Private possession, South Germany Literature Matthias Pförtner, Georg Schrimpf, Berlin 1940, p. 61 with illus. (here titled "Seehamer") This painting - long considered lost - shows the Seehamer See, a lake in Upper Bavaria, in gentle morning light. The lake lies there peacefully, surrounded by woods and meadows, far removed from any sign of civilisation. The morning mists cast a delicate, ephemeral veil over the Alpine mountain chain lying in the background. It can be gathered from a text by Georg Schrimpf that this is not a naturalistic reproduction of the landscape, but of the artist's mental image of it. Schrimpf experienced landscapes during long walks surrounded by nature; however, he first painted them during a second stage - from memory and in the studio. In spite of its apparent exactitude, extending down to details, this is thus so to speak a 'dream landscape' (cf. Georg Schrimpf: Bildvorstellung, in: Wolfgang Storch, Georg Schrimpf und Maria Uhden, Leben und Werk, Berlin 1985, p. 183). On account of the mild transparency and the luminous colours, there adheres to the painting a somewhat melancholy, lyrically meditative calm that facilitates a contemplative state of mind. In the same year that Schrimpf painted the 'Seehamer See', Munich hosted the "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibition, where one of his works was among those shown. Schrimpf had been professor of painting at the Staatliche Hochschule in Berlin since 1933. Although he was one of the most important representatives of German landscape painting at that time, he was dismissed from his post in the summer of 1937, because of his earlier membership in the German Communist Party and the Red Aid organisation.