Lot 2 D

With his quiet pictorial worlds removed from their everyday context and abstracted into timeless and secret symbols, Bruno Goller stood outside the artistic currents of his time. The Second World War marked a turning point for him. In the years following the war, he built on his earlier motifs, although he moved to a warmer chromatic mood with a predominantly brownish colour scheme. A formal idiom featuring a cubist rupturing of form became combined with inspiration derived from medieval manuscript painting, leading to an increased use of ornamental elements.
In the mid 1950s the artist drew the attention of Werner Schmalenbach. The retrospective he presented at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in 1958 was Goller’s first major solo exhibition and introduced him to a broad audience.
In “Der Kleiderschrank” a wardrobe occupies the entire canvas to offer a glimpse into its inner life: this work is one of Goller’s best known and most frequently exhibited paintings from the post-war years and was also shown at the retrospective. Volker Kahmen writes: “The painting ‘Der Kleiderschrank’, 1947, is less medieval – only the folds of the drapery display echoes of this – but it is nonetheless enthralled with that ornamentalisation; incorporated into the objective context of the wardrobe’s moulding, the ornamental bands are heightened to the point of an almost physiognomic expression and become increasingly autonomous” (Kahmen, op. cit., p. 43). In addition to these vibrantly realised details of the furniture, it is the dominant diagonals of the drapery formed by the clothing which provide this still life with its unusual dynamism.