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拍品專文
Max Liebermann yearned for a private garden for much of his life. When visiting a farmer's garden near Hamburg in the early 1890s, he had reacted passionately to the simplicity and linearity of the cut hedges, straight paths and flower beds lined with box he saw there, saying 'When I have a villa built for myself at home, I am going to put in a garden like this one'. Holding his hands before his eyes to frame different pictorial motifs, he added, 'one could paint hundreds of pictures here, one more beautiful than the other'. (A. Lichtwark, Makartbouquet und Blumenstrauss, Munich, 1894, p. 59)
In 1909 Liebermann, by now an established and prosperous portrait painter and president of the Berlin Secession, bought a lakeside property by the Wannsee, a fashionable outdoor district west of Berlin. There, together with Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg and a follower of the reformist garden movement, Liebermann carefully created his own tightly structured, rhythmically hierarchised garden. This 'Wannsee paradise', besides being a hideaway from his busy city life, was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the artist who, for the most part, painting directly from nature, produced about 200 oil paintings, pastels and drawings of the garden from all possible viewpoints and in different seasons.
Blumenstauden am Gaertnerhaeuschen nach Nordosten is one of a series oil paintings depicting a border of colourful flowers by the gardener's shed in the fruit and vegetable garden towards the North-East of the estate, which he artist revisited at least twice more in 1923. The richness in colours of the red brick building and the tall purple blooms against the white shed wall must have held a special fascination for Liebermann at the time. Unlike in other later views of this subject, the painter, for this work, took greater interest in the architecture and colours of the house and it's decorative pattern of white wiondows and doors agains burnt red brickwork. In the present version, he employs a bright blue for the perennials, heightened against the foil of the white wall and the few red dots interspersed in the foliage of the trees. As another gardener who knew Liebermann recalled, the colour blue had a special significance for the artist: 'Pictorially, blue is the most interesting in a garden. Nowhere else is the question of the neighbouring and background colours so vital' (J. E. Howoldt, Der Nutzgarten: 'Hundert Bilder könnte man hier malen', in Im Garten von Max Liebermann, exh. cat. Hamburg, 2004, pp. 63-64).
In Blumenstauden am Gaertnerhaeuschen nach Nordosten the abundant vegetation grows over the canvas blocking out the sky, evoking a strong plasticity realised by a combination of thick brushwork, sometimes reworked with a palette knife, and an extensive mesh of quick, fluid dabs. Typical of his late views of his Wannsee garden, Liebermann has here tirelessly fathomed all possible varieties of nuanced relationships between geometric shapes and spaces, colour and texture, regularity and disorder, to invest the painting with a highly modern abstract quality that reflects a new degree of painterly freedom and expression. Until 1933, the present lot was in the inventory of the National Gallery in Berlin.
In 1909 Liebermann, by now an established and prosperous portrait painter and president of the Berlin Secession, bought a lakeside property by the Wannsee, a fashionable outdoor district west of Berlin. There, together with Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg and a follower of the reformist garden movement, Liebermann carefully created his own tightly structured, rhythmically hierarchised garden. This 'Wannsee paradise', besides being a hideaway from his busy city life, was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the artist who, for the most part, painting directly from nature, produced about 200 oil paintings, pastels and drawings of the garden from all possible viewpoints and in different seasons.
Blumenstauden am Gaertnerhaeuschen nach Nordosten is one of a series oil paintings depicting a border of colourful flowers by the gardener's shed in the fruit and vegetable garden towards the North-East of the estate, which he artist revisited at least twice more in 1923. The richness in colours of the red brick building and the tall purple blooms against the white shed wall must have held a special fascination for Liebermann at the time. Unlike in other later views of this subject, the painter, for this work, took greater interest in the architecture and colours of the house and it's decorative pattern of white wiondows and doors agains burnt red brickwork. In the present version, he employs a bright blue for the perennials, heightened against the foil of the white wall and the few red dots interspersed in the foliage of the trees. As another gardener who knew Liebermann recalled, the colour blue had a special significance for the artist: 'Pictorially, blue is the most interesting in a garden. Nowhere else is the question of the neighbouring and background colours so vital' (J. E. Howoldt, Der Nutzgarten: 'Hundert Bilder könnte man hier malen', in Im Garten von Max Liebermann, exh. cat. Hamburg, 2004, pp. 63-64).
In Blumenstauden am Gaertnerhaeuschen nach Nordosten the abundant vegetation grows over the canvas blocking out the sky, evoking a strong plasticity realised by a combination of thick brushwork, sometimes reworked with a palette knife, and an extensive mesh of quick, fluid dabs. Typical of his late views of his Wannsee garden, Liebermann has here tirelessly fathomed all possible varieties of nuanced relationships between geometric shapes and spaces, colour and texture, regularity and disorder, to invest the painting with a highly modern abstract quality that reflects a new degree of painterly freedom and expression. Until 1933, the present lot was in the inventory of the National Gallery in Berlin.