Lot 537 D

Joseph Urbach was initially a student of Peter Behrens at Düsseldorf's school of decorative arts and then an assistant of Fritz H. Ehmcke. In 1911, he transferred to Karlsruhe's academy of art, in order to study painting there. From 1923 until his death in 1973 Urbach was professor at Essen's Folkwang School. After the end of the war, he joined the artists' association “Das junge Rheinland” (The young Rhineland), which had been founded in Düsseldorf in February 1919, and he exhibited works nine times within this circle - not only in the Rhineland, but also in Berlin. In 1929 this association progressed to the “Rheinische Sezession” (Rhenish Secession). Because Urbach's art was considered “degenerate” in the 1930s, his works were removed from the Museum Folkwang. A large part of his oeuvre, housed in his studio at the time, was destroyed during a 1943 bombing raid.
Josef Urbach is among the most important representatives of the "Rheinischer Expressionismus" (Rhenish Expressionism). At the same time, his early work displays not only a certain affinity with that of Nauen and Heckel, but also reflects - in a very individual way - the reception of Cubism in Germany. Space and plane are permeated with dynamic, prismatic forms. As early as 1922, an article about Josef Urbach stated: “Alongside depictions of Christ, he had also already devoted himself to landscape painting in a very idiosyncratic, architectonically dominated form: for example, the fantasy Neuß (his hometown), compact as a castle, shifted from the horizontal into the vertical” (Paul Alexander Scheffler, Josef Urbach, in: Hellweg, Westdeutsche Wochenschrift für deutsche Kunst, Essen 28 June 1922, p. 8).