Lot 341 D

Werner Scholz was a master of the pastel, a drawing technique that he discovered for himself early on and favoured throughout his life. Regarding this, Gadamer had already remarked that the works created by Scholz in the early 1930s “represent a different material world and a more strongly blossoming tonality” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Werner Scholz, Recklinghausen 1968, p. 31). This is confirmed by the brilliantly preserved pastel colours of the “Verschleierte”. While the girl is dressed revealingly and not unerotically, she nonetheless appears as though in bridal white. In terms of the motif, there are links to the 1930 oil painting “Die Braut” (whereabouts unknown, see comparative illus.)
Modelled in striking layers of colour, the figure laid down in pastel seems far less “drawn” and is set off against the paper ground concisely and in strong contrast. The empty surface surrounding her is not experienced in terms of “non-finito”; instead, it recedes and takes on qualities that are, in a sense, suggestive and generate pictorial space.
The dedication to Josef Nierendorf (1898-1949) at the bottom right is, perhaps, an exceptional feature of the present sheet: it is a testament to a close bond with the co-founder of the gallery “Nierendorf Köln Neue Kunst”, which Josef Nierendorf briefly relocated from Cologne to Düsseldorf in 1925. From 1926 Karl and Josef Nierendorf ran the gallery in Berlin, under the name “Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf”. It was Josef Nierendorf who kept the business going in Berlin in the 1930s while Karl Nierendorf expanded to New York in 1937.