Lot 62 D

“I became familiar with all the local inhabitants, and they confided in me. Like them, I lived mainly from the fishermen’s harvest in the water, from fish of every form. From the first day to the last, no shoes confined my feet; I went around barefoot, without particularly thinking about it” (Max Pechstein, Erinnerungen, ed. by Leopold Reidemeister, Wiesbaden 1960, p. 36).
The direct realisation of what he saw and experienced was essential for Pechstein and, in this respect, Nidden’s rich natural and cultural landscape presented itself to him as an almost infinite source of inspiration. The painter recalls: “I drew and painted the dunes, the sea, the lines of the waves, their crests, the foaming surf, the fishermen rowing, battling against the elements, plodding across the beach, mending nets or off to hunt in lifeboats and their wives and girls bathing on the flooded sand of the coast, open boats at rest with their steep masts, clouds and stormy winds. My art, the work of a labouring fisherman and the pleasures linked with them are inseparable from one another” (ibid., p. 78).
Max Pechstein created our enormously colourful portrait of a farmer’s wife from Nidden during his first stay on the Curonian Spit, in 1909. Pechstein’s works of that summer exhibit an entirely distinctive aesthetic, intensity and tonality. They document his sensitive eye for the elemental quality of the region and its people. It was particularly in blue and green that the painter found what he refers to in a letter to Erich Heckel as the “Curian colours” – which would shape his work in a great variety of ways.