Lot 319 D

The painter Ulrich Leman spent his childhood and adolescence in Danzig; after the war, in 1919, he returned to Düsseldorf and quickly became active as a member of the board of “Junges Rheinland”, the new secessionist artists association in the town of his birth. A member of Heinrich Nauen's master class at the academy, just like Otto Dix in the early 1920s, Leman was directly influenced by the first generation of Rhineland Expressionists. The present early oil painting - from a period in his oeuvre that is now almost impossible to present on account of destroyed and lost works - also develops the architectural motif entirely on the basis of colour, depicting it in harmoniously modulated chromatic and formal contrasts, almost in the sense of Orphism. According to annotations written by the artist himself, this work presumably represents a detail from the historical complex of the Kaisariani Abbey. This abbey dates back to the 11th century and is located in the suburb of the same name, which lies to the east of Athens, in the valley of Hymettus.
Leman had also become decidedly politically active in the Rhineland during those years and he had to escape the threat of mistreatment by journeying to Greece, the Balkans and Italy. The works he brought back to Düsseldorf were presented to the public for the first time in 1926/1927, as part of the art exhibition at the GeSoLei exposition and at Johanna Ey's gallery. The local press quickly made a “Vlaminck of the Balkan landscape” out of him (Ulrich Leman, exhib. cat. Düsseldorf 1985, op. cit., p. 17), using this description to refer to the expressive substance and power of his striking compositions of colour. Here we are presented with a beautiful as well as rare painting from this intense and also vibrant period in his oeuvre.