Lot 486 Dα

In the 1910s and 1920s Christian Rohlfs occupied himself intensively with the depiction of people. Particularly under the impression of the First World War, he created an evocative complex of works which is unmistakably oriented towards figural themes and repeatedly takes up Biblical motifs. In addition to images of pain, death and salvation, Rohlfs was particularly interested in the specific individual and created portraits of crooks, lovers or farmers - sometimes laconically humorous, as in our painting, but always defined by the greatest capacity for empathy.
Renouncing any sort of transcendental superstructure, Christian Rohlfs is able to capture the state of the individual on the canvas using just a few strokes. Kurt Freyer - assistant to Karl Ernst Osthaus at the Folkwang-Museum, where Rohlfs had a large studio - saw Rohlfs's great artistic achievement precisely in this aspect: “This is a case neither of the highest intensity in grasping the world nor the complicated overstimulation of an inner life, neither mystical visions nor augmentations of real appearances for the purpose of strong expressiveness. Instead, everything is much simpler here. A restraining of his own spiritual life, a simplicity in his attitude to the world, which speaks to us today in an entirely foreign manner […]. What is modern about this concept of form is less the intensification of appearances than their simplification.” (Kurt Freyer, Katalog der Rohlfs-Ausstellung bei I.B. Neumann, Berlin 1918, cited in: Birgit Schulte, in exhib. cat. Christian Rohlfs: Gemälde, Münster/Weimar 1989/1990, p. 47).