Lot 303 Dα

This drawing depicts Elisabeth Gerhardt around the age of 20. Elisabeth came from a wealthy Bonn-based family of entrepreneurs. Her Uncle, the Berlin factory owner Bernhard Koehler, would soon become Macke's most important patron (Klara Drenker-Nagels, Elisabeth Macke und Maria Marc, in: Volker Adolphs/Annegret Hoberg, August Macke und Franz Marc: Eine Künstlerfreundschaft, Ostfildern 2014, p. 68). At Koehler's suggestion, August Macke moved to Berlin for six months, beginning in October of 1907: there he received instruction from Lovis Corinth at his school of painting. Two years later the artist - then only 22 years old - married Elisabeth, who had been his girlfriend for many years and was expecting a child.
The rather large-format and painting-like drawing later continued to inspire the artist to create further compositions. During a stay along the Tegernsee from 1909 to 1910, Macke composed a similar motif, for example, in the painting “Unser Wohnzimmer in Tegernsee”, based on the domestic and seemingly quite bourgeois circles in which he lived (cf. Heiderich 232). The drawing as well as the painting share the large tabletop in the foreground that seems as though it has been folded upward. “Because of the relief of the strongly textured drawing paper, the portrait of Elisabeth peeling fruit displays a rigid and strict organisation in its hatching. Here the drawing hand has deliberately been countered through resistance against an excessively rapid and fluid handling of the material” (Ursula Heiderich, August Macke Zeichnungen, Werkverzeichnis, Stuttgart 1993, p. 22). An attractive aspect of the present drawing is the contrast between the delicately drawn, gentle face of Elisabeth - who stands out glowingly before the neatly filled-in sofa - and the rest of the forms, which have been drawn with quick strokes. Some of these are laid out only in the form of contours, while others - for example, the patterned table cloth - are articulated through interior drawing carried out with great artistic liberty. The drawing conveys an emphatically harmonious overall impression.