Lot 241 Dα

In this portrait of his wife Martha, Vogeler presents himself not least as a painter who also knows how to masterfully depict landscape spaces. It is late afternoon and the fields of snow in the low-lying middle ground are already draped in a bluish shimmer, while there is still sunlight on the peaks of the high mountains that can be recognised on the horizon, behind a small pine forest; their light seems as though it were reflecting on to the clear features of Martha Vogeler's face.

Accompanied by her husband, Martha had gone to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1907 to recover her health in the mountain air and spend the winter there. The couple experienced the time they spent there as solitary and withdrawn from social life, and Vogeler commented in a letter to Otto Modersohn to the effect that he had taken a studio in Munich to escape the close quarters and melancholy mood (Worpswede Archive op. cit.).
Martha would leave her husband and the home where they lived together, the Barkenhoff, at the end of the 1910s. Vogeler himself, whose impression of the First World War led him to become a staunch Communist, would emigrate to Russia in 1931.
Around 1900, in the Barkenhoff which the painter had personally converted into his home at the Worpswede artists colony, he sought a unity of everyday life and art entirely in keeping with the model provided by Britain's Arts and Crafts movement. He designed furniture and clothing for himself and his family, and he also created designs as a typographer.

Martha's clothing - the fur cap, the trim-like scarf and the gloves with their floral pattern - are appropriate for the time of year, but they are also an expression of this Jugendstil-driven will to form.
The contouring of the landscape's foreground, middle ground and background, seemingly stacked on top of one another, and the figure shown in profile convey an ornamental effect. The impression is that Vogeler has used this painting to join the portrait of his wife Martha and Bavaria's alpine realm in pursuit of a synthetic artistic unity within this powerfully balanced composition.
It is rare for works from the artist's early oeuvre displaying such extraordinary painterly quality to be offered for sale.