Lot 201 Dα

Jankel Adler's Spanish “Novillero” from the period of his stay on Mallorca takes the form of a portrait of a very young individual filled with the seriousness, pride and dignity of a fledgling matador. The artist has used the specific means provided by the colour as well as the painterly texture to suggest the preciously gleaming finery through the embroidered brocade that forms a part of it. Regarding this, Annemarie Heil mentions the torero's legendary “suit of lights”, the “Traje de luces”. In doing so, she incorporates a possible level of meaning, which subtly brings the antagonism of the motif as well as the myth of the corrida into play. This thematic aspect may - latently as well as deliberately, comparable to a fateful substratum - lie at the root of Jankel Adler's figure of the boy.
Created at the pinnacle of Jankel Adler's work as an artist, the present work takes its place among the body of work created towards the end of the 1920s in terms of its style and typology. In particular, the artist's wall-filling tableaux for the 1929 exhibition “Raum und Wandbild” at the Kölnischer Kunstverein should be mentioned - of these only the “Junger Arbeiter”, the central piece of “Familie” (1928), is still preserved today (Museum Sztuki, Lodz, see also comparative illus.). It is well-known that Jankel Adler maintained close ties to the Rhineland's “Gruppe progressiver Künstler”, centred around F.W. Seiwert and Heinrich Hoerle, and shared their ideals. In his art his specific image of the human being manifests itself not just through abstract and constructive tendencies but also through a monumental understanding of the figure. Both provide a means to express his quiet “humanitas”, and they also find themselves realised as aspects present in the likeness here. In this context, the concentrated and objectivised manner of the painterly composition in “Novillero” seems like a distant echo of the pictures of Oskar Schlemmer.