Lot 659 Rα

Rau Collection for UNICEF

Around 1900 it was Sadayakko (or "Sada Yacco", 1868-1932) and her husband Kawakami Otojiro's celebrated theatre company who introduced Japanese theatre to the Western world for the first time. It had been virtually unknown in Europe until then. People were absolutely fascinated by the aesthetic beauty of those amazingly colourful performances. A tour of the United States and France turned out to be quite sensational. Graceful Sadayakko had been dancing at the World Exposition in Paris in 1900, then giving guest performances in Berlin in November and December 1901. She was perceived as a highly unusual and enchanting actress - in both Berlin theatres, in the "Zentral-Theater" and in "Buntes Theater" (also known as "Überbrettl"), newly established by Ernst von Wolzogen. German newspaper articles even compared her stage acting to a work of fine art:
"We are faced with a tableau coming alive and beginning to move, continuously changing into the shapes of thousand new images, each one as perfect as the other." ("Der Tag", Berlin, quoted in Peter Pantzer, op. cit., p. LXIV).
Sadayakko's performances are well documented, and so are the two paintings of "Sada Yacco" by Max Slevogt who himself took the note, that he created them in "the winter of 01/ to 2" (Bernhard Geil, Slevogt Archives). Former, traditionally assumed dates of Sadayakk's portraits ("1906") can be regarded as erroneous.
This painting is one of Slevogt's first masterpieces in Berlin after his move from Munich in November 1901. It is distinguished from the stage portrait of the Kohl-Weigand Collection (now: Saarland Museum, Saarbrücken, see comparative illus.), which is roughly about equal in size, by rendering Sadayakko's delicate movements. Unlike the other portrait, this painting has been further enriched, both formally and in it's narrative, by the presence of the child. Another major compositional element are the calligraphic brushstrokes, written by the Japanese dancer herself: they have been preserved like some precious foreign autograph, inscribed into Slevogt's picture as a graphic feature and on the same level as the pictorial composition itself. The painter even seems to have responded to it artistically by adding a dark vertical brushstroke to the dancer's brightly colourful kimono, balancing out imperceptibly the two sides of the painting's large format.
The characteristics and the specific qualities of Slevogt's art had found an ideal counterpart in this Japanese theme: the negation of space and the blank backdrop, the non-corporeal character of the figure and the impulsive sketchiness of the depicted subject, the intensive colours and the abstract interplay of lines and brushstrokes - all these elements are aesthetic aspects of East Asian art. Nevertheless, they are fundamental features of Slevogt's own art, his "line" has positivly been described as an "element of meaning", touching the distinct idea of his approach to painting (Meinrad Maria Grewenig, Max Slevogts impressionistisches Bildkonzept, in: Max Slevogt, exhib. cat. Saarland Museum Saarbrücken, 1992, p. 133).
As for the subject, there are direct links to other stage studies by Slevogt, painted during the same period as this portrait of Sadayakko - the theme of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Slevogt's realisation of "Das Champagnerlied" (1902, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). The latter is a portrait of the singer Francisco d'Andrade in his role on stage, painted subsequently after "Sada Yacco".
"Slevogt's art - its 'music' - is 'modern' [...] Despite all impressionist sensitivity for surface textures, it is full of contradictions - contradictions between figure and plane, the whole and its parts, between expressive, energetic lines and the colours that have been either disrupted or liberated in their streaming, and contradictions between the nervousness and tearing flow of time and the hovering quality of the moment." (Lorenz Dittmann, Max Slevogt: Farbe und Zeitgestalt, in: exhib. cat. Saarbrücken, op.cit., p. 125).