.
Carl Spitzweg
5th February 1808 – 23th September 1885
Carl Spitzweg was born on 5th of February in 1808 in Unterpfaffenhofen, Bavaria. Although trained as a chemist, he discovered quite early his talent for drawing and his affinity with art. Spitzweg travelled extensively during his lifetime and the impressions formed by his travels greatly influenced his work. Shortly after completing his studies in pharmaceutics in 1832, he visited Italy. It was particularly in the cities of Florence, Rome, and Naples that he discovered the many significant works of Western culture which were to leave a permanent imprint on him.
A severe case of dysentery in 1833 strengthened his resolve to abandon his career as a chemist and he proceeded to commit himself solely to his painting. In June 1835, he became a member of the Munich Art Association and travelled that same year to southern Tirol with the landscape painter Eduard Schleich, the Elder.
In 1839 he completed his first painting entitled ''The Poor Poet'. Although this recurring motif would later be considered his most well-known body of work, the painting was not accepted at this time by the jury of the Munich Art Association.
As regards his graphic production, the first publication in 1844 of his own illustrations in the Munich weekly paper 'Fliegende Blätter' is considered quite significant. His visits to the Industrial Exposition in Paris and the World's Fair exhibition in London in 1851 were his first contact with the Oriental scenes which would begin to inform his work.
To the deserving painter were bestowed numerous honours during the second half of Spitzweg's lifetime: in 1865 the Bavarian Royal Merit Order of St. Michael was conferred upon him, and in 1875 he was named an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Carl Spitzweg died on 23th of September in 1885 and was entombed in the historic South Cemetery in Munich.
He leaves behind a body of work dedicated to the townspeople who inhibit his genre scenes, and with acute and pointed, but never ill-natured humour he portrays the everday bourgeois life of his time.
Lit: Siegfried Wichmann, Carl Spitzweg. Verzeichnis der Werke, Gemälde und Aquarelle, Stuttgart: Belser, 2002.
Carl Spitzweg
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3006
Winterauktionen 24.–25.11.2023
Hofer, Karl
1878 Karlsruhe - 1955 Berlin.
«Blumenwerfende Mädchen (girls throwing flowers)».
Around 1924. Oil on canvas. Monogrammed lower left. Verso inscribed «A» and verso on the stretcher inscribed «[…]-Hofer» by hand as well as numbered «158/22» and «7.9.869» twice. Verso on the back of the frame a printed label of the Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett Roman Norbert Ketterer, Stuttgart, numbered «1242».
H 46,7,
«I have never created a figuration according to the external nature of the accidental. [...] Man and the human form was and is the everlasting object of my representations.» Karl Hofer in: Karl Hofer, Von Lebensspuk und stiller Schönheit, Kunsthalle Emden, Cologne 2012, p. 4.
Karl, also Carl, Hofer is THE great painter of the human figure of German Expressionism, even though he never saw himself as an Expressionist: «The ecstasies of Expressionism were not for me.» ibid.
As a master student of Hans Thomas, Hofer is more a Berliner than a Karlsruhe pupil. But it is not the big city scenes that would interest him like Kirchner, nor the bucolic of Expressionism as in Pechstein's or Mueller's œuvre; the human, the purely human, is the subject of his painting. «Karl Hofer's great achievement undoubtedly lies in his figure painting. And here it is above all those one- or two-figure pictures that are convincing, in which the mostly young women or men confront us in an almost picture-filling manner.» Frank Schmidt, Vom ‹heilig Nüchternen›, Hofers Figurenauffassungen am Beispiel der Aktdarstellungen, in: ibid. Hofer, before his Berlin years, spent several years in Rome for study purposes. Here he met the most important German art historian of the time, Julius Meier-Graefe, who wrote about him in ‹Neue deutsche Römer›: «In the larger paintings one notices the earlier tempera painter, but not to the detriment of the pictures. The thin application, which lays the paint quite loosely, sometimes like flakes, on the flesh and only distinguishes the coarser matter of the small parts of the garments with coarser strokes, suits these softly exposed, very tonal figures admirably. One can imagine them painted by a bolder brush, much more powerful; but one understands and respects the prudence which, once in possession of the harmony, may not call it into question with exaggerated impositions.» quoted in: Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin (Ed.), Karl Hofer
Karl Hofer, who only cautiously experimented with abstraction, remained faithful to the figurative throughout his entire artistic life. His pictorial motifs also recur again and again in his work, both in his strongest creative phase in the 1920s and 1930s and after the Second World War, which destroyed many of his works. Although completely apolitical in subject matter, Hofer's art was considered degenerate by the National Socialists. He himself regarded his art as German, which did not prevent his works from being shown in the propaganda exhibition ‹Entartete Kunst› in 1937 and his expulsion from the Prussian Academy in 1938. Nevertheless, he remained true to HIS painting and concentrated on nude painting as he had done in the 1920s:
«I occupy myself with the naked body not because I consider it more significant than otherwise, but because that is my disposition and because on this side lies my talent, and that is the main thing.» Karl Hofer in: Emden, p. 6.
Literature: Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett (Ed.), 22. Kunst-Auktion, Kunstliteratur, Kunstwerke des 15. - 20. Jahrhunderts, Ausstellung ausgewählter Werke im Württembergischen Kunstverein, 23. - 28. November 1955, Besichtigung im Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett, Versteigerung am 29.11. - 01.12.1955, Stuttgart 1955, p. 108,
Provenance: Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett Roman Norbert Ketterer, auction 22, 30.11.1955, lot 1242; private collection Markgräflerland.
Catalogue raisonné: Wohlert 576.
Condition report 