Lot 233 Dα

Georg Schrimpf had the good fortune to meet men like Oskar Maria Graf, Herwarth Walden and Franz Roh, who were vehement activists for the renewal of modern art. After his apprenticeship as a baker in Passau, the young Schrimpf set out as a journeyman and met Graf, who also worked as a baker. Enthusiastically fond of his young companion, he wrote the following in the “Kunstblatt” in 1918: “The cosmic element in Georg Schrimpf's pictures is what is new. His pictures are emanations of a profoundly jubilant, cosmic soul.” (Oskar Maria Graf, Brief über Georg Schrimpf, in: Das Kunstblatt, vol. 2, 1918, p. 75).
From 1915 Herwarth Walden, who edited the journal “Der Sturm” and ran the gallery of the same name in Berlin, placed his capacities as a publisher and gallerist at the service of the young Schrimpf. And, finally, the young artist and journalist Franz Roh also used the term Post-Expressionists to describe the new style of painting of the 1920s, the New Objectivity which was causing a sensation: “Above all, however, the new art now no longer wishes to understand the world dynamically, but statically - a decisive reorientation that may reach far beyond visual art.” (Franz Roh, Georg Schrimpf: Seine kunstgeschichtliche Stellung, written in 1924 for a planned book about Georg Schrimpf, in: Georg Schrimpf und Maria Uhden, Leben und Werk, ed. by Wolfgang Storch, Berlin 1985, p. 142). “Mädchen lesend”, “Mädchen auf dem Balkon”, “Mädchen am Fenster” or the painting “Ausschauende” (see comparative illustration), which is related to the watercolour, are pictures full of idealism; they present an idea of reality within which the artist's models move and which the artist describes meticulously and in detailed precision. Contemporary events may exert a marginal influence, for example, journeys to Ascona or Sicily, which can be recognised in small details in the watercolours and paintings. Sometimes, as in the case here, the young woman seems to turn away in amazement from the dense, light, southern landscape with the red-roofed farmstead on the right and the lone cypress on the left. In spite of her simple story, before the gentle view into an expansive landscape, the young model grows to take on a secretive, introverted monumentality that Franz Roh labelled “Magic Realism”.


Comparative illustration: Georg Schrimpf, Ausschauende 1924, oil/canvas 62 x 47.5 cm
From: Georg Schrimpf und Maria Uhden, Leben und Werk, ed. by Wolfgang Storch, Berlin 1985, p. 140