Wilhelm Morgner - Komposition mit Feldarbeiter - image-1

Lot 315 Dα

Wilhelm Morgner - Komposition mit Feldarbeiter

Auction 1070 - overview Cologne
03.06.2016, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 120.000 € - 150.000 €
Result: 173.600 € (incl. premium)

Wilhelm Morgner

Komposition mit Feldarbeiter
1913

Oil on artist's board, mounted on fibre board 60.5 x 86 cm Framed. Monogrammed and dated 'WM.' (joined) '13.' in black lower right. - Partially with minor loss of material to corners, minimal frame-related rubbing to margins. Slightly concave.

“The manner in which the colours and lines are provided is to be a further fading of my self, something like sound that is generated by some instrument and then sets the air into those same resonations provided by the instrument.” (Wilhelm Morgner to Georg Tappert, 10 November 1911, in: Wilhelm Morgner. Briefe und Zeichnungen, ed. by Christine Knupp-Uhlenhaut, Soest 1984, p. 29).
Wilhelm Morgner would paint his last oil paintings in 1913, at the age of just 22. After enlisting as a volunteer, he fought in the First World War and fell in the summer of 1917. Like his contemporaries Marc and Macke, Morgner left behind a remarkably advanced and complex oeuvre to posterity in spite of his early death.
He had been formatively influenced by his deep enthusiasm for Vincent van Gogh since the early years of his career; from 1912 onwards it was above all Morgner's links to the protagonists of the "Blauer Reiter" that would influence his work. At that point in time, Morgner was already an esteemed artist: in June of 1912, he was represented by a painting at the "Sonderbund" exhibition in Cologne. Shortly before that, Kandinsky and Marc had enabled him to make an outstanding appearance at the second exhibition of the "Blauer Reiter" in Munich.
The “Komposition mit Feldarbeiter” impressively demonstrates Morgner's intensive occupation with artistic issues that were typical of his time and situated between the poles of representationalism and abstraction, materiality and dematerialisation. Morgner's cascades of colour arranged by a resolute hand seem to have been tameable only by means of extreme force and appear to adhere to a pulsating rhythm. The title of this work was presumably selected by Morgner's mentor Georg Tappert, and it suggests that Morgner based the composition on a representational motif. Orienting himself towards his artistic role model van Gogh, Wilhelm Morgner did actually repeatedly occupy himself with the human figure and the subject of labour.
In terms of its format and technique, the “Komposition mit Feldarbeiter” corresponds to Morgner's “Astrale Komposition XXII” and “Astrale Komposition XXIII” (cf. exhib. cat. Münster 2015/16, op. cit., cat. nos. 127, 134). These two museum works are also from 1913 and are now in the collections of Soest's Museum Wilhelm Morgner and the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster.

Provenance

Private collection, South Germany; Villa Grisebach, Berlin, 4 June 1999, auction 71 Ausgewählte Werke, lot 27; Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin; (acquired there in 1999); Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia since

Literature

Generally: Exhib. cat. Wilhelm Morgner und die Moderne, Münster 2015/16 (LWL-Museum für Kunst Kultur)