Lot 312 D

Oil on thin canvas, laid down on a 5 mm thick wooden panel 107.2 x 72.9 cm, in the artist's original frame. Monogrammed and dated 'E.V. 1919' in red lower right (the date slightly difficult to decipher). - A wooden panel lined with thicker canvas to the reverse and signed, dated, titled and inscribed with information on the owner 'Frühling in Soest/ E. Viegener 1919' (Spring in Soest) in pencil by the artist. - The painting was apparently later removed from the stretcher and transferred to the wooden panel, with visible nail holes in the unpainted edges of the canvas (size of the image approx. 105.5 x 70.5 cm). - In good condition apart from several inconspicuous, minor losses of colour to the lower right. The painting was professionally restored and cleaned in the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in 1994 for the exhibition in Paderborn.

Provenance
A personal gift from the artist to the former owner, since then in private possession

Exhibition
Münster/ Soest 1990 (Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte/ Wilhelm-Morgner Haus), Eberhard Viegener 1890-1967, cat. no. 15 with a full-page colour illus.; Paderborn 1994 (Städtische Galerie in der Reithalle, Paderborn-Schloß Neuhaus), Durchfreuen der Natur: Blumen, Gärten, Landschaften: August Macke und die Expressionisten in Westfalen, cat. no. 80 with a full-page colour illus. p. 177

Literature
Will Frieg, Eberhard Viegener, in: Der Cicerone, Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler, Kunstfreunde und Sammler, Ausg. B, XIII. Jahrg., issue 19, October 1921, p. 545; Bernhard Kerber, Der Maler Eberhard Viegener, Soest 1982, no. 6 with colour pl.; Andrea Wandschneider, Die zerrissene Schönheit, Welt im Widerstreit - Gärten und Landschaften von Eberhard Viegener, in: Exhib. cat. Paderborn 1994, Durchfreuen der Natur: Blumen, Gärten, Landschaften: August Macke und die Expressionisten in Westfalen (ed. by Westfälischen Landesmuseum für Kunst u. Kulturgeschichte Münster, i.a. Klaus Bußmann und Ursula Heiderich), p. 95 ff., p. 97/98

Even in the early 1920s, works of this painter from around 1919 were already being described as new, different and visionary. The poet and author Hans Franck, friend and biographer of the artist, enthusiastically characterised his early Expressionist work as "of this side-two tone" in "red and green". "He found his own style at a very early stage: His flickering palette, the consonance constantely recurring in single elements and fundamental structure through which his paintings, when they did appear occasionally in exhibitions, could be recognised in fact as "Viegeneresque" even from afar." ( Hans Franck, Eberhard Viegener, Essen 1925, p. 12, p. 21/22). The painter hat met Hans Franck probably through the circle of Alfred Flechtheim. Flechtheim had edited Eberhard Viegener's series of Expressionist woodcuts "Mond über Soest" (The Moon Over Soest) 1918/1919 in few copies as the "first opus" of the Flechtheim editions in Düsseldorf (cf. Kerber, op. cit., p. 14).

Viegener dispensed of the "pointillist", late impressionist manner of 1914-1916 in his painting in order to create expressionist images, influenced by his own direct emotional impulses. The material quality and expressive power of the colours are the main components of these works, and the entire world of objects within the image is encompassed by a new immanent dynamic. These intense compositions, among which were several garden and landscape motifs such as "Blühender Garten mit Pauliturm" (Blooming garden with Paulitower), "Landschaft" (Landscape) and the pendant motif to the current work "Herbst in Soest" (Autumn in Soest, now kept in the Märkisches Museum, Witten, see comparative illus.) all originated directly after the war.
The process of abstraction from natural forms is quite developed in this picture, and these transformations of the ordinary seem not least to be influenced by mystical and religious sentiments. In "Frühling in Soest" (Spring in Soest) the figure of an angel appears, visible in the oval-shaped house form to the left side of the composition. She stands in a pale aureole as if in blessing high above the implied fields of the artist's home depicted in the lower third of the composition and amid the broad vegetal web of tree branches in the upper half of the work. In "Frühling in Soest", the natural world explodes in a fully new experience of colour.