Heinrich Campendonk

Galerie Der Sturm (Herwarth Walden), Berlin
L. Roland, Munich
Wolfgang Werner, Bremen (acquired from the above in 1993)
Diethelm Hoener, Germany (acquired from the above and sold: Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, November 2001, lot 25)
Acquired from at above sale by the present owner

Mutter und Kind, dating from 1917, exemplifies Campendonk’s talent as a colorist and his expressive style of painting.   Along with Franz Marc and August Macke, Campendonk pioneered the second-wave of German Expressionism in 1911, known as Der Blaue Reiter, and continued to develop his avant-garde style of painting throughout the First World War.   This picture, which he painted at the end of the war, demonstrates his mature Expressionist technique.

Like many of the German Expressionist painters, Campendonk drew from a variety of artistic precedents to create his truly original compositions.  In this vibrantly colored picture, the artist uses rich, Fauvist-inspired shades of red and green, with sharp highlights of orange and white.  Other visible influences here are the aesthetic of German folk art and the luminous colors of painted glass.  For his subject Campendonk has chosen the time-honored theme of the mother and child.  While the representation calls to mind traditional religious icons and depictions of the Madonna, Campendonk has modernized the motif, rendering the figures in a domestic setting and with a structural complexity and dynamism that is unmistakably avant-garde.   His inclusion of the bird and the fish in this composition shows a kinship with the work of his colleague Franz Marc, who also gave animals a central roll in his paintings.  Peter Selz has observed that “By means of his extremely personal symbolism, Campendonk has created an idyllic, evocative world that defies rational explanation. As early as 1921 Georg Biermann pointed out that among European artists Campendonk was most closely related to Marc Chagall, probably with reference to the mysterious symbolism that each artist employed” (Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting, Berkeley, 1973, p. 309).