Werner Schramm
Der Selbstmörder
1919
Oil over pencil on panel 66 x 53 cm Framed. Monogrammed and dated 'WS 19' in black upper right. Inscribed 'GEWIDMET ROMAIN ROLLAND' in the composition and numbered '38'.- Numerical paper label "Kunstpalast Düsseldorf" verso and the label of a furniture warehouse in Düsseldorf, therein typewritten "Schramm". - Frame-related rubbing along the margins with minor losses of colour.
Werner Schramm's disturbing depiction of “Der Selbstmörder” is to be seen as an important masterwork from the earliest years of the artist's oeuvre. Born in Duisburg in 1898, Schramm chose to receive his education at the art academy in Munich and the school of applied art in Düsseldorf, where - as a member of “Junges Rheinland” - he pioneered his own very distinctive path between Expressionism and abstraction after the end of the war. Between 1920 and 1922 he initially worked under Louise Dumont and Gustav Lindemann as a stage designer at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf; until 1925 he also worked for other theatres in the region. It is hardly surprising that, as with many members of his generation, the experience of the war left its mark on his work in a formal idiom and a choice of motifs defined by an enormously drastic quality. Schramm supplemented this with an enigmatic symbolism, for example, in the form of the globe, cross, heart and the number “38”. As in the case of our painting or the prints published by Alfred Flechtheim (see comparative illustration), his works remind us with a radical immediacy of a traumatised world falling apart.
The dedication to the French writer and pacifist Romain Rolland is also to be understood in this context: with his critique of the militaristic politics of the German as well as French combatants, he became a symbolic figure for the transnational anti-war movement and the international worker's movement during the First World War. In addition to his novel “Jean-Christophe”, Rolland's critical series of articles “Au-dessus de la mêlée” (“Above the Battle”) played a large part in being subsequently selected in 1916 as the recipient of the 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Provenance
Artist's estate; Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf; Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia
Literature
Das Junge Rheinland, 5th issue, 1. Febr. 1922, with illus. p. 8; cf. Liselotte Schramm-Heckmann (ed.), Werner Schramm und Liselotte Schramm-Heckmann, Stuttgart 1976, p. XIX ff.; Ulrich Krempel (ed.), Am Anfang: Das Junge Rheinland. Zur Kunst- und Zeitgeschichte einer Region 1918-1945, exhib. cat. Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1985, p. 94 and 337
Exhibitions
Düsseldorf 1922 (Galerie Johanna Ey), Junges Rheinland; Düsseldorf 2005 (Galerie Remmert und Barth), 25 Jahre Remmert und Barth 1980-2005. Ausgewählte Werke, cat. no. 179 with colour illus.