Lot 422 Dα

The most important period in the oeuvre of Hölzel began after he was already over fifty years old, when he received his professorship at the academy in Stuttgart. This led to a stylistic shift and confirmed his formal tendencies towards abstraction as well as summary and synthetic, two-dimensional compositions of the kind first realised in his famous “Komposition in Rot” from the former Pelikan collection (Venzmer Ö III 6.6). Colour gained in significance and independence, and around 1907/1908, Hölzel was simultaneously concentrating on figural, religiously defined motifs. In these works form, colour and figures merge together into a characteristic and unique “composition” that Hölzel also referred to as a “construction in colour”. A note written by the artist in this period mentions “the complementary and simultaneous 'influences of the chromatic mediations, which contain such great secrets', and further the 'supplementations of lines, form and colour, which mutually rid one another of their materiality', and he continues: 'Thus the dematerialisation of the objective also forms that peculiar medium which leads more and more ... towards simple sacred subjects and favours a certain mysticism even in objective, naturalistic depictions.” (cited in Wolfgang Venzmer, Adolf Hölzel, Stuttgart 1982, p. 81) Venzmer succinctly describes how, in contrast to the early work of the artist, here there is genuinely a “deliberate refraining from thematic and objective concretisation” and how the “painter's distinctive hand, as an abstracting, distancing element” is a part of the “pictorial realisation” from now on (ibid., p. 82). The present painting belongs to a series of similar, figurally composed works and provides viewers with an exemplary opportunity to study the effect achieved in this way, particularly the importance and dominance of colour. Artistic influences also play a certain role - surely not least the experience of "Gauguin" and the "Nabis", whose works Hölzel encountered in exhibitions at that time.