Lot 345 D

Wollheim's important watercolour self-portrait from the estate of the photographer Dr Erwin Quedenfeldt (1869-1948) features a dedication written by Johanna Ey to his wife, Emma Quedenfeldt. Erwin Quedenfeldt was a key figure in the Düsseldorf scene of 1919/1920. The “Aktivistenbund 1919” had been founded at his house: this group of leftist writers, intellectuals and artists also had connections to Cologne as well as to “Stupid” and Franz Wilhelm Seiwert. The avant-garde journal “Aktivistenbund 1919” was also founded at Quedenfeldt's home in 1920 - in it “Gert H. Wollheim championed the reformulation of the artist's task in society with anarchic verve” (Dirk Teuber, Gert H. Wollheim und Max Ernst, in: Stephan von Wiese, Gert H. Wollheim: Monographie und Werkverzeichnis, Köln 1993, p. 26).
In the work here, Wollheim presents himself as correspondingly combative, directly fierce in his declamation. Behind him we discover a thoughtfully listening Johanna Ey(?) - the image does, after all, bear her soft and rounded features. In the rooms of her gallery, in the legendary “Ey” in the Hindenburgwall in Düsseldorf, a turbulent and subsequently famous mob had gathered on 9 July 1920, when the agitating artist held a fiery speech directed against the academy and reactionary artists. Max Ernst is also supposed to have been in the audience that day; he subsequently belonged to the circle surrounding “Mother Ey” and exhibited his work there in 1921. The influences and impulses in this period were diverse and some artistic developments seemed to run parallel for a short time, so that particularly with regard to the significance of “Dadamax” for Düsseldorf, we could speak of a “proto-Surrealism” in the case of Wollheim, without it being possible to directly document a personal connection.