Lot 298 Dα

For Walter Gramatté and his wife Sophie-Carmen, their temporary relocation to Barcelona and their subsequent journeys to Spain represented an act of liberation from the fears and necessities of life in Germany. During those years the light of the south, its luminous magic and transparency, made its way into Gramatté's work. Regarding this he reported - not without a sense of euphoria - to his father-like friend and doctor Paul Sudeck: “That is where the new is, that in which I feel myself and find my way forward” (Walter Gramatté to Paul Sudeck, Berlin, 12 December 1926, cited in: Claus Pese (ed.), Walter Gramatté: Eine Dokumentation in Bilder und Text, Stuttgart/Zurich 1993, p. 265).
The paintings of Spanish cityscapes particularly embody the aspect of the dream which is so specific to the artist and which was so rarely realised with as much warmth and openness as in the present landscape near Granada, which Gramatté has immersed in the calming blue and green tones of the night. In order to emphasise the gently rolling hills at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, he has largely renounced any structuring of the image by means of architectural elements, and he has succeeded in transforming the compositional rigour typical of comparable works into a gentle, deeply poetic tranquillity. Here, within a body of work defined by searching, the strange emptiness of the dream-like landscape presents itself not just as a riddle, but also as a solution instead. A first version of our representative and often exhibited work was lost in 1918.