Lot 54 D

In a rigorous process that began in the 1920s, Walter Dexel developed a constructive formal idiom which was defined by a high degree of individuality from the very beginning. His art neither adhered to fixed philosophical concepts nor restricted itself to a narrow formal vocabulary of the kind sometimes found within the De Stijl movement.
Structurally, the vertical composition here recurs back to a work from 1923/1924. Regarding this phase in the artist’s work, Ruth Wöbkemeier writes: “Those who survey Dexel’s paintings of the twenties immediately situate them within the sphere of influence of the axis leading from the Dutch De Stijl group to the Bauhaus. The attempt to define Dexel’s position within this field of forces goes amiss if we set out in search of influences. Like others, Dexel indubitably stood under the impression made by the exhilarating persona of van Doesburg, and the experimental versatility of El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy may also have inspired him. At the same time, his development shows that he was not unprepared to react to these impulses. He did not veer off into constructivism, instead, he found in it the basis that helped his own intentions to achieve clarity and transparency” (Ruth Wöbkemeier, Walter Dexel Werkverzeichnis, Heidelberg 1995, p. 101).
In the early 1960s, Walter Dexel recurred back in various ways to sketches from the first major period of his oeuvre. In Wöbkemeier’s opinion, this decision to intensively occupy himself with his own artistic past was also conceptually motivated – as an evaluation of his own constructive approach’s timelessness (ibid. p. 78). Not least within this context, the large-format composition by Walter Dexel offered here can be understood as an important contribution to constructive abstraction in Germany and Europe.