Rudolf Schlichter - Scala - image-1

Lot 2 D

Rudolf Schlichter - Scala

Auction 1155 - overview Cologne
19.06.2020, 18:00 - Modern and Contemporary Art - Evening Sale
Estimate: 25.000 € - 30.000 €

Rudolf Schlichter

Scala
Circa 1926

Watercolour, gouache and black chalk on light card with blindstamp "SCHOELLERSHAMMER". 64.8 x 49.8 cm. Framed under glass. Signed 'Rudolf Schlichter' lower right in pencil. Verso titled 'Nutten' in Sütterlin script and dated '1920' by an unknown hand as well as with the estate stamp "NACHLASS R. SCHLICHTER" (not recorded by Lugt), there handwritten number "B 179". - The paper browned with narrow light-stain; the depiction in fine condition with vibrant colours.

“Standing before Schlichter's watercolours, one often wishes to say: illustrated picture stories for adults! […] Because they are actual illustrated picture stories, the primary concern is the cut of their fashionable dresses. So that is what people wore! Is first of all what they are supposed to mean. The outfit is important: the people underneath, even at such a time, secondary. We are all wearers of clothing. The reign of the uniformed is only just abolished. Pay close attention: the shoes of the ladies are important. An erotic element.” - this is Theodor Däubler's apt commentary on Schlichter's work from 1921 (cited in: exh. cat., Rudolf Schlichter, Tübingen/Wuppertal/ München 1997/1998, p. 22). For the draughtsman and painter, the 1920s in Berlin represented a cumulative pinnacle biographically as well as artistically: Schlichter joined the Communist Party, created illustrations for the Malik publishing house and met George Grosz, with whom he became very close friends, and his first solo exhibition soon opened at the Galerie Burchard. In the mix and stirring things up: DADA, politics and leftist intellectualism demanded ceaseless mental as well as physical restlessness - indeed, even more, constant provocation - in the unfettered world following in the wake of the lost war.
Around 1924 he created his painting “Margot” (Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin), in which a significant scrap from a poster on the brick wall in the background features the inscription “CIRCUS BUSCH/QUO VADIS”. This individual portrait from the social context of prostitution, a milieu with which the artist was all too familiar, can also ultimately be grouped with the present watercolour, on the back of which Schlichter has written “Nutten” ["tarts"]. Thematic ambivalences unfold around this formally simplified street scene, and these in turn become laconically condensed in the sketched electric sign for the “SCALA”. This refers to what was surely Berlin's most famous cabaret theatre, which opened in 1920.

Provenance

Former Collection Wolf Uecker, estate

Literature

Cf. exhib. cat. Rudolf Schlichter, Eros und Apokalypse, Mittelrhein Museum Koblenz, 2015/2016, cat. no. 24 with ill. p. 88, "Scala", 1926 (same but inversed motif as pencil drawing)

Exhibitions

I.a. Hamburg 1978 (Galerie Brockstedt), Rudolf Schlichter. Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Grafiken der 20er Jahre, cat. no. 16 with ill.; Berlin/Stuttgart 1984 (Staatliche Kunsthalle/Württembergischer Kunstverein), Rudolf Schlichter, cat. no. 117, ill. 81; Tübingen/Wuppertal/Munich 1997/98 (Kunsthalle/Von der Heydt-Museum/Städt. Galerie im Lenbachhaus), Rudolf Schlichter. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, cat. no. 85 with full-page colour ill.