Philipp Bauknecht - Blumenstillleben mit Buch (Blumenstillleben) - image-1

Lot 266 Dα

Philipp Bauknecht - Blumenstillleben mit Buch (Blumenstillleben)

Auction 1134 - overview Cologne
31.05.2019, 17:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 60.000 € - 70.000 €

Philipp Bauknecht

Blumenstillleben mit Buch (Blumenstillleben)
1929-1932

Oil on canvas 81 x 71 cm Framed. Signed 'Ph. Bauknecht' scratched in black lower right. - In excellent condition.

Philipp Bauknecht was a painter and was engaged in applied arts, as well. He first grew up in Barcelona and, for health reasons, later immigrated from Southern Germany to Davos, Switzerland. There he met painters like Cuno Amiet and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who moved there later. Kirchner provided his friend Bauknecht with opportunities to exhibit in Germany, as well, and personally purchased works by him. Through his Dutch wife Ada van Blommestein, whom Bauknecht met in Davos and married in 1925, his works made their way to the Netherlands following his early death. There they were first made accessible to the public again in 1961, through the efforts of Joop Smid, at his Monet Gallery in Amsterdam.
Our painting shows an interior, a room in the “House in Stilli”, the home of the artist and his family. A painting created two years later is a variation on the view of the room in this picture: it features some of the same objects, such as the strikingly patterned tablecloth, the cabinet with the porcelain figure and also the landscape painting on the wall, which is presumably one of Bauknecht's own works (see Wazzau/Smid 237).
The space and the depicted space are, in fact, extensively layered in depth from the table to the cabinet and on to the window providing a view of nature, and the cropped image of the painting as well as the window provide viewers with levels of reception that are immanent in the painting, but lead beyond the work. At the same time, the expressive colouration so typical of Bauknecht's painted oeuvre leads to a uniform emphasis and equality among the depicted objects. Thus the poinsettia which sprout, so to speak, out of the Delft vase become mixed with the painting on the wall. Only after looking twice does it become apparent that the female figure with a fan seated on the cabinet is not a subject depicted in that painting. The impression of space seems to have been reduced and homogenised in favour of an opulent rapture of colour that invests this interior still life with a high degree of abstraction.
“In some of his Davos landscapes Bauknecht did not combine his palette of colours into a unifying tonality, but instead heightened the intensity of the experience by means of striking, luminous combinations of colours in red-blue contrasts, in a more diffuse pinkish red or in unusual accords featuring glaring green, violet or orange. […]In the later works created after 1925, in numerous still lifes and interiors, the artist drove the intimate interplay of colour and form even further.” (Beat Stutzer, Zur Malerei von Philipp Bauknecht: Eine Einführung, in: Wazzau/Smid 2016, op. cit., pp. 19, 21).

Catalogue Raisonné

Wazzau/Smid 236

Provenance

Artist's estate Davos/the Netherlands; Galerie Kunsthandel Monet, Amsterdam; Art trade, the Netherlands; Private possession, the Netherlands; Galerie Thomas, Munich; Private collection, South Germany

Literature

Trouw Utrecht 24.7.1961, Bauknecht, vergeten expressionist. Kunst als vorm van protest, with illus.; Iris Wazzau/Gioia Smid, Philipp Bauknecht. 1884-1933, Verzeichnis der Gemälde, Davos/Künzelsau 2016, p. 364 f.

Exhibitions

Amsterdam 1961 (Galerie Kunsthandel Monet), Philipp Bauknecht