Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart

Ilse Vordemberge-Leda, Stuttgart (wife of the artist)
Galerie im Erker, St Gallen
Acquired from the above by the father of the present owner in 1970

Hanover, Kunstverein, 98. Grosse Kunstausstellung, 1930
The Hague, Haags Gemeentemuseum, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, 1966
Eindhoven, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart - Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1967
Basel, Kunstverein Basel, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart - Camille Graeser - Franz Danzkin, 1967
London, The Camden Arts Centre, De Stijl, 1968
Hanover, Galerie Brusberg, Kunst in Hannover. Die 20er und die 60er Jahre, 1969
St. Gallen, Galerie im Erker, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, 1970

Hans L. C. Jaffe, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Mensch und Werk, Cologne, 1971, no. 55, illustrated p. 90
Dietrich Helms (ed.), Vordemberge-Gildewart, The complete works, Munich, 1990, no. K51, illustrated p. 270

The canvas is not lined. UV examination reveals minor lines of retouchings to places in the white pigment. There are some fine, unobtrusive and stable lines of craquelure to the yellow band. This work is in overall good condition.
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Strikingly composed of contrasting diagonal and horizontal linear forms, Komposition 51 is a highly important example of the significant developments which took place within Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart’s artistic idiom during the late 1920s. Since the beginning of his career, Vordemberge-Gildewart had sought to move beyond the confines of traditional painting, whilst seeking an alternative means of non-objectivity from that advocated by Wassily Kandinsky, whose early abstractions focussed on the primacy of colour planes. The emphasis on the diagonal had become increasingly important in the artist’s work since 1926, and the growing geometrical precision of Vordemberge-Gildewart’s approach to abstraction was closely connected to that of Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky and Theo van Doesburg, all artists with whom he shared philosophical ideals and creative ideas. In 1927, two years before the creation of the present work, Vordemberge-Gildewart became a founder member, alongside Schwitters, of ‘Die Abstrakten Hannover,’ a group of artists whose works favoured predominately geometric, Constructivist tendencies. In its elegantly bisected planes of colour and form, Komposition 51 is a powerful example of this theoretical and creative methodology.

Vordemberge-Gildewart championed the importance of geometric, angular forms within painting, declaring that: ‘The word painting can no longer be regarded as a felicitous expression… that the plane as such should at last be respected, following on the cubist method of telescoping receding planes, and the Russian, and later Hungarian, method of creating spatially poised isometrical forms, certainly constitutes the main point’ (quoted in Dietrich Helms (ed.), Vordemberge-Gildewart, The complete works, London, 1990, p. 200). Music – in particular that of J.S. Bach - and musicological theory was also an abiding source of inspiration for the artist, and the structural purity and order of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier arguably finds its counterpoint in the exquisite linearity and logic of Komposition 51.