Lot 311 Dα

In a darkly glowing colour harmony of blue, brownish orange and yellow as well as red and green - mixed heavily with grey and black - Seehaus has developed a nearly abstract composition that is Cubist in character: “What is seen is the left part of a harbour, with anchored ships whose masts soar upward. Together with their reflections in the water, they establish the dominant vertical orientation of the composition. At the left, along the shore, there are houses formed out of clear, cubic forms. The background cannot be interpreted in representational terms: a great number of splintered forms tapering upwards recall cliff formations - those of a fjord, for example - broken up by clouds of smoke” (Peter Dering, op. cit., p. 74). Suggested figurative elements on the quays or docks are virtually insignificant, and the effects of the reflections and the abstract-formal correspondences between the background and foreground are thus all the more dominant: the bluish, steeply soaring mountainous landscape finds its pendant in the prismatically refracted reflections of the seemingly deep water of the harbour. The result is a remarkably fanciful, boundary-dissolving, expressive vortex, which is stabilisingly countered by the more strongly representational vertical and horizontal elements in the middle ground. The selected detail of the motif as well as the almost square format are concentrated, even if Dering mentions that this could possibly be a fragment of a canvas (see p. 74, note 427, p. 150). “Schiffe im Hafen” is dated to 1914; its suggestive, formally abstract as well as expressive sense of depth clearly distinguish it from more strongly descriptive, topographically defined works of this period. The composition, interpreted as “Nordic-'Celtish'” in terms of its expression, builds on key works from 1913. The chiaroscuro contrasts applied in the colours and shading underscore the immanent structure within the painting and the independent formal life of this image.