Lot 346 D

“Braunroter Sommer feiert Geburtstag in der Unendlichkeit”: it is surely no coincidence that Wollheim's poetic paraphrasing of his picture's contents recalls Paul Klee's method of assigning associative plays on words as titles to his own pictorial compositions. During the early years in Düsseldorf there was a fundamental admiration for Klee and his artistic principle, which may also find expression in the present composition: conceptually and stylistically. Textures in the interior drawing and the scattered, symbol-like elements certainly could recall Klee, and Wollheim - in experimental and Dadaistic playfulness - has also supplemented his collaged landscape with straws shimmering in a sunny yellow. The round cropped form in the foreground, resembling a head and forehead, formally corresponds to a delicately outlined volcano on the horizon. Else Lasker-Schüler is known to have addressed Gert Wollheim as "süßer, lieber, feuerspeiender Berg" ("sweet, dear, fire-spewing mountain"): the artist was, after all, an activist and editor of “Junges Rheinland”, whose issues of 1921/1922 are well-known to have been decorated with a woodcut (by Adolf Uzarski) featuring the symbol of a pointed, “fire-spewing” mountain.