Lot 348 Dα

He was one of the best-known German artists of Modernism in his era: Ludwig von Hofmann created numerous pastel works and achieved an unmistakable and individual quality in this medium that in terms of both style and theme united Classicism, Symbolism and Modernist forms. German Impressionism also had a certain preference for this artistic technique, which was evidently easier to deploy commercially than oil painting. Max Liebermann presented some of his pastel works on stretchers in the manner of paintings and still into the 1920s his Berlin colleague Lesser Ury used pastel pigments to produce a dense, magically glowing composition of colour.
Hofmann's work was informed by other influences; the play of colour comprising lines, surfaces and contours was inspired by more recent French developments. The tonal dominance of selected colours, here a dark blue and a yellow, which flows energetically around the shapes as a reflected surface of light creates an expression that today not only seems atmospheric but also decidedly artificial.
In his aesthetics and artistic sensibility, the artist who from 1903 was based in Weimar was most closely related to the circle of Henry van de Velde and Harry Graf Kessler. Esteemed and highly successful with his idealistic, arcadian scenes that seem somehow removed from time Ludwig von Hofmann inspired in particular German writers and poets such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann who were also his friends.