Lot 220 Dα

Lovis Corinth's Walchensee paintings form the grand finale of the turbulent life of an artist. They are metaphysical landscapes, visions in which Corinth was able to combine impression and expression like scarcely any other artist. Contemporary critics were already falling all over themselves to sing hymns of praise for this work. In 1926, for example, Paul Fechter wrote: “The longer Corinth is at it, the more he dissolves the things and the air in which they exist into a colour that, the longer he is at it, also becomes more and more not just colour for him, but pure feeling. Without Corinth himself knowing what he is doing, he achieves the actually expressionist miracle, the transubstantiation of the material; in his hands, colour becomes not just the vehicle of a feeling, but almost a feeling itself. This touches on matters that are difficult to grasp conceptually, particularly as they have taken place within a soul which, like Corinth's, is so distant from concepts, so anti-conceptual. For the ageing Corinth, the world became a strangely hovering play of splendidly sad colours and tones, in which and behind which humanity's yearning probing of the world resonated, shining through the colours - and in the watercolours of his late period, he actually also even dissolved the colours, permitted them to mix and flow together like his feelings, to become figures that are almost a law unto themselves, and he nonetheless caused the whole cosmos of the external world to rise up again out of this strange chaos of the filled surface above the feeling radiating behind it.” (Paul Fechter, Der Landschafter Corinth, in: Cicerone, XVIII, vol. 1926, no. 19, pp. 626-628. Cited in: exhib. cat. Lovis Corinth. Die Bilder vom Walchensee. Vision und Realität, Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg/Kunsthalle Bremen 1986, p. 99).
In the last summer the painter spent in the village of Urfeld am Walchensee, he created various views of the lake with the Jochberg opposite it. As though a curtain consisting of the wooded slopes on the left were being opened, the work here provides viewers with a view of the blue of the Walchensee, which the artist merges into the white at the left edge of the paper in a masterful transition. Without a doubt, Corinth has achieved the highest degree of freedom of artistic expression in our watercolour in an exceptional format: “One stands before these pictures as though before a miracle”, writes Paul Fechter (ibid.).