Lot 30 Nα

In this light-filled depiction of a road set between the trees, Lesser Ury has developed his own very distinctive use of Impressionistic colour. The modest selection of this typical Berlin motif has enabled him to clearly as well as suggestively divide his sheet up into expansive surfaces. Every painterly device has been developed in staging an illusionistic magic: the intense pastel colours are laid alongside and on top of one another in rich variations, the powdery pigments are blurred, blended together and supplemented with fine details of dots, strokes and graphic elements - a brush has also been used, making it possible to concisely insert bright highlights in opaque white, sometimes mixed and sometimes applied pure. As is often the case in Lesser Ury's work, the composition develops strong contrasts through idiosyncratic formal elements. The rigidity of the unyielding basic lines as well as the construction of a perspective receding unimpeded into the distance are countered by the seemingly playfully unfurled haziness of the general impression, which is generated through freely modulated effects of light and colour on the street, on the darkly gleaming vehicles and in the sky and trees - we actually almost seem to hear their old crowns moving and rustling.
In this context it is not without interest that Carl Schapira has described how, in the early twenties, Lesser Ury also made use of postcards and photographs - in particular, views sent to him from Paris - to help him study technical details like the newly emerging density of traffic and the car. These phenomena were initially completely unintelligible to him as a painter, and he first had to overcome his preliminary “timidity”: “It is a peculiar activity of the brain which concentrates on the object to be painted purely from the standpoint of the eye, that is, of feeling, but not that of understanding.” (Carl Schapira, cited in Hermann A. Schlögl, Ury und die moderne Technik, in: exhib. cat., Lesser Ury, Zauber des Lichts, Berlin 1995, p. 51).
According to the documentation gathered by Sibylle Groß, the present pastel was originally in the possession of the Berlin lawyer Dr Sally Jacobsohn (1876 Schönlanke, Brandenburg - Houston, Texas 1964), who first fled from Germany to Cuba in 1939 and then emigrated to the US in 1940, where he was naturalised under the name Sam Jacobson. Edward H. Littman - a professional colleague based in Wharton, Texas, and the son of the well-known collector Ismar Littmann from Breslau - purchased this work in the 1960s directly from Sam Jacobson (according to the documents accompanying the family's collection), and it has been in this family's possession ever since.