Lot 398 Dα

This work on card, part of which was unfortunately decimated during the Second World War, belongs to a small series of paintings created in 1911 by the Expressionist Wilhelm Morgner. These works depict labourers who carry out their specific tasks while merging with the surrounding landscape into a swirling network of lines made up of dots and fields of colour. The divisionist application of the brushstrokes clearly points to the work of Van Gogh, without neglecting what is characteristic of Morgner's own work. He created paintings such as “Die Steinbrecher” (Weihs/Tappert 114), the “Heuernte” (Weihs/Tapper 88), “Mann mit blauer Karre in ornamentaler Landschaft” (Weihs/Tappert 95) or “Der Holzarbeiter” (Weihs/Tappert 112) - where the lost pendant to our composition is handled as an independent motif (see exhib. cat. Ins unermesslichste Vielleicht, op. cit., cat. no. 4). “The artist believed that spiritual forces manifest themselves in the material world. His goal was to capture these forces visually - whether representationally or non-representationally was of secondary importance for him, in the case of this subject matter which lay beyond the visible anyway,” is how Friederike Weimar explains the thoughts Wilhelm Morgner expressed to his Berliner patron and collector Georg Tappert (Weimar in: op. cit., p. 85). On 10 November 1911 Morgner described to him the process of creating his works: “When I painted the woodcutters, for example, my head was burning and then all my skin was white hot, so that I couldn't hold it next to a cold object without feeling intense pain. Then I had a feeling as if what was deepest inside me was being turned to the outside and the outermost turned inside, and then the reverse again. At the same time I also had a very strange feeling, I don't know what I should call it. A feeling of happiness is too stale and awkward to express it. With my recent pictures I've felt this way every time. I have good reason not to say this to anyone, because otherwise people would always tell me I'm crazy. I know that, of course.” (cited in Knupp-Uhlenhaut, op. cit., p. 30).
Our work stands in an important context within his limited oeuvre and is from what is surely the most interesting phase of the Expressionist Morgner, who died at a young age and whose works are now to be found in the collections of prominent museums.