Lot 200 Dα

Particularly in his landscapes, it becomes clear that Lesser Ury was a painter of light. In “Abendstimmung am Grunewaldsee” the painted light truly seems to be further intensified through the duplication in the reflection on the lake's surface of the sky seen in the last moments of the glowing red dusk. The selected cropping of the image of the evening forest and lake landscape is an interesting choice, because the positive-negative effect of the light surface of the water shown before the dark ground stands in contrast to the dark crowns of the trees before a light ground. The chiaroscuro effect achieved in this way recalls a shadow theatre, in a sense, and intensifies the gentle pastel tones into chromatic fireworks that convey a grandiose effect and paradoxically seem to further intensify the stillness of the evening scene.
As a contemporary and friend of Max Liebermann - a friendship broken off in the 1890s - Ury became a member of the Berlin Secession at the instigation of Lovis Corinth. Evening urban scenes and landscapes from the countryside around Berlin were among Ury's favourite motifs.
The lawyer Sabersky, who emigrated from Germany in 1938, purchased the painting “Abendstimmung am Grunewaldsee” directly from Ury's studio and took it with him to the USA. There he represented the interests of Jewish emigrants and, in his work as a lawyer, specialised in restitution cases. Ury drew the same composition two more times in pastel, as Sibylle Groß explains in more detail in her expertise - a sign that he found particular pleasure in the painting and the pictorial idea respectively.