.
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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2063
Winterauktionen 19.–20.11.2021
Schön, Otto
1893 Suhl - 1971 Göppingen.
«Das Gesetz (the law)».
Pastel on chamois wove paper. Signed lower right and dated «Lazarett Rheinberg / Rheinland. 1917. (military hospital Rheinberg / Rhineland. 1917.)». Titled lower left. Verso on the back board inscribed by a different hand «1924 von K.M - Otto Schön - München persönlich erworben. Hammersfeld (in 1924 by K.M - Otto Schön - Munich personally purchased. Hammersfeld)» as well as with the artist's data.
H 25,
The multifaceted artist Otto Schön was active as a painter, graphic artist and stage designer. Only a few works from his early Expressionist oeuvre have survived, as this group of works was mostly stored in his studio in Göppingen, which was looted after the end of the Second World War. His later work, which is close to Neue Sachlichkeit, is therefore more familiar to the public. In the present pastel drawing, we see a male nude of herculean dimensions, frozen in a dynamic lunge, in the midst of a steeply sloping meadow landscape in various shades of green, on which individual, silhouetted conifers thrive. The muscular athlete is shown in rear view, gazing at a mountain panorama that stretches into the depths of the picture, consisting of alternating bluish triangles, from which in turn a horizon glowing in warm colours, perhaps an auspicious dawn, stands out radiantly. The jagged, angular simplification of nature, the evenly tanned muscle parts of the steeled wanderer contrasting with geometric clarity, the backdrop-like layering of the pictorial planes and the high-contrast, three-tiered use of colour make this drawing appear to be a prime example of Expressionist colour and form. Thematically, the work embodies in the literal sense of the word the characteristic guiding ideas of the so-called Lebensreform that thrived at the same time, such as the increased interest in untouched nature, exhausting physical exercises and naturism.
Provenance: probably purchased directly from the artist, in 1924; private property Bad Säckingen.
Condition report 