Gert Heinrich Wollheim - Kartenspielende Zirkusleute (Circus people playing cards) - image-1

Lot 498 N

Gert Heinrich Wollheim - Kartenspielende Zirkusleute (Circus people playing cards)

Auction 1134 - overview Cologne
31.05.2019, 17:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 12.000 € - 15.000 €

Gert Heinrich Wollheim

Kartenspielende Zirkusleute (Circus people playing cards)
1948

Oil on wooden panel 46 x 61 cm Framed. Signed 'Wollheim' in white within the depiction lower right. - Age-related, unobtrusive, vertical tension crack.

Gert Wollheim had spent World War II in France, interned and underground. After the war, he stayed in Paris for another two years before moving to New York in 1947. On the other side of the Atlantic, a fantastically surreal imagery developed in which a specific aspect of the Old Masters seems to be increasingly inherent. Wollheim remains true to himself in the furious, bizarre poetry of his pictorial content. Our flickering portrayal of the card-playing circus people opens the view into an alternative world, marked by play, magic and exoticism contrasting a modernity shaped by the distant idea of progress, which had only just survived the horrors of the Second World War. The circus was an attractive subject for Wollheim not least because of the theatrical qualities of his protagonists, which he skillfully addresses in the painting with remarkable narrative intensity and density.

Catalogue Raisonné

Euler-Schmidt/Osterhoff 384

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by the former owner; in family possession since, USA