Franz Wilhelm Seiwert - Weibliche Halbfigur im Gewand - image-1

Lot 450 Dα

Franz Wilhelm Seiwert - Weibliche Halbfigur im Gewand

Auction 1090 - overview Cologne
31.05.2017, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 6.000 € - 8.000 €
Result: 5.580 € (incl. premium)

Franz Wilhelm Seiwert

Weibliche Halbfigur im Gewand
1916/1917

Clay sculpture, red clay, burnt. Glazed reddish-brown Height 16.5 cm Monogrammed 'FWS' in the lower right margin, the letters vertically set one above the other. - The glaze partially with darker specks; in some areas, especially verso, not opaque. - In some places with old, unobtrusive, smaller chips.

Seiwert used this small sculpture to introduce himself to the married couple Carl Oskar and Käthe Jatho during the war winter of 1916/1917, when he was a guest at their semi-public lectures on modern art. Jatho recalls: “He presented himself through a question: whether he would be allowed to pay the lecture fee (it was tiny) in the form of a small object? Because he didn't have it in cash. And he unwrapped a small clay sculpture out of a piece of newspaper and placed it in front of us on the table. It was the bowed half-length figure of a woman - a devotional image, if you will - but reserved in its movement, entirely without those false gestures which make this liturgical industry so dangerous. I confess: we felt like friends within those first minutes.” (Carl Oskar Jatho, op. cit., Recklinghausen 1964, p. 6).

Catalogue Raisonné

Bohnen 343 (this exemplar)

Provenance

Private possession, Cologne

Literature

C.O. Jatho, Franz W. Seiwert, Recklinghausen 1964, p. 6 ; Wulf Herzogenrath (ed.), Vom Dadamax zum Grüngürtel, exhib. cat. Kölnischer Kunstverein 1975, S. 94 with illus. upper right; Uli Bohnen, Franz W. Seiwert 1894-1933, Leben und Werk, exhib. cat. Kölnischer Kunstverein 1978, p. 11

Exhibitions

Cologne 1975 (Kölnischer Kunstverein), Vom Dadamax zum Grüngürtel; Köln/ Münster/ Berlin/ Ludwigshafen 1978 (Kölnischer Kunstvereien/ Westfälischer Kunstverein/ Kunstamt Kreuzberg Berlin/ Städtische Kunstsammlung Ludwigshafen), Franz W. Seiwert, cat. no. 343 (this exemplar), with illus.