Lot 223 Dα

This sunny scene, with its play of shadows, dark tree trunks and traffic consisting of numerous shiny black motor cars and a tram, is a further example of the casual ease with which Lesser Ury was able to capture a seemingly candid, indeed ordinary, urban motif in a painterly manner. The pastel chalks develop a summery tone, in which the entire atmosphere becomes concentrated in the yellow of the tram and the long, bluish shadows of the vegetation seem to pleasantly temper the warmth of the radiant day. In the 1920s the artist had visited not just Paris, but also London, experiencing with all his senses, artistically responding to and recording the distinctive and also individual atmosphere of these metropolises - and these were then of course rejoined by his native Berlin.
“Everywhere the city exhales its own life. Ury is the only modern painter of vedute since the Venetians of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dutch painted their towns, streets and buildings with a love of detail. Ury permits the light to glide across the forms and provides the collective painterly impression. - Then it is repeatedly and until the end Berlin, his Berlin, the city in which he felt profoundly rooted and which he, the ultra-receptive, oversensitive individual, knew in its most intimate stirrings, for him breathing its air was a basic need of life, and he depicted it day and night, in wind and rain - and now also in larger formats.” (Karl Schwarz, Lesser Ury. Ein Essay, Der Großstadtmaler, in: Hermann A. Schlögl/Karl Schwarz, Lesser Ury. Zauber des Lichts, exhib. cat. Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin, Berlin 1995, p. 80). For the present work Sybille Groß could indeed detect the exact topographic situation: the pastel depicts to the right the crossway to the Lennéstraße close to the Tiergarten with the terrace of the café Moritz Dobrin, which opened there in 1926.