Lot 280 Dα

For Georg Muche the gallery "Der Sturm", which Herwarth Walden founded in 1910, was an art Mecca: it is in Berlin where the young artist encountered the contemporary international avant-garde. In 1914, following his studies in Leipzig and Munich, Muche moved to Berlin, where he visited museums, galleries and, for the first time, the “Sturm”. There he saw works by Jacoba van Heemskerck, which would stylistically influence his early work as a painter. However, it was particularly to the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee that Walden would introduce Muche. After these encounters at the “Sturm”, which followed an initial synthesis between academic figuration and his first abstract experiments, Muche developed luminous chromatic harmonies - constructivist compositions which dealt with his elder contemporaries, which would influence his own pictorial idiom and which would accompany him to Weimar. He was one of the first artists whom Walter Gropius offered a position at the “Staatliches Bauhaus” opening in Weimar at the end of 1919; as one of it's first teachers, from the spring of 1920 Georg Muche alternated with Johannes Itten in heading the preliminary course (Vorkurs) and serving as master of form (Formmeister) for wooden sculpture and weaving. His organisational contribution was also significant: he headed the commission in charge of the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923 and designed the first piece of Bauhaus architecture in Weimar - the legendary “Haus am Horn”, built by Adolf Meyer in the same year.
The radicalism with which Muche also changed his painting is remarkable and can be wonderfully grasped through these colour drawings dated to 1916, possibly arranged some time later to a sequence for the collector. The studies occupy themselves with abstract forms in space, explore interrelated structures and culminate in compositions featuring various accumulations of forms. Colour played a paramount role for Muche as he engaged with what were then new theories of painting: as though floating in the coloured firmament that forms the sheets' ground, the abstract elements luminously advance in the foreground or disappear into the imaginary space behind it. Muche's intention of bringing colours and forms into a balanced harmony and equilibrium (“Perpendikel”) is plain, and these sheets - which were created almost simultaneously, but executed in different techniques - also demonstrate his mature engagement with a theme which dominated that period: abstraction.
Muche linked colour with light ("Leuchtperpendikel"), whose distinctive qualities and effects he first examined in the compositions of 1916 to 1918. Magdalena Droste described these paintings and watercolours as an early pinnacle in his development as an artist: “Both his idiosyncratic use of colour and light and these spaces created within the picture are essential characteristics of Muche's early pictures.” (M. Droste, op. cit. 1980, p. 20).