Lot 100a Dα

Karl Hagemeister’s landscape paintings strikingly reveal the intensity with which the painter not only grasped nature visually but also experienced it with all his senses. With its lakes, woods and bogs, the area around his home town of Werder an der Havel offered the artist a variety of unspoilt landscapes, which he captured in atmospherically dense images at various times of day and year.
For this forest scene, Hagemeister has used an extremely vertical format corresponding to the direction of the slenderly soaring tree trunks. The view selected for the image is narrow and focused on the brook snaking its way through the trees. This water leads the viewer’s gaze deep into the picture’s depths; its calm surface reflects the tree trunks and passages of sky. The atmosphere of a cold autumn day becomes palpable in the hazy air and the cool tone of the colours. “The landscape is quiet, elegant and really lives solely through its atmosphere, which I had recently come to love more and more. […] When I wished to express myself spiritually, I divided the atmospheric tone into two tones: the light and the shadow tone. I spread these across the entire canvas and then, from this big atmospheric tone, I developed all of the other things in their particular tones. In this way, the coloration of my pictures became organic and not just tastefully harmonised,” is how Hagemeister described the substance of his art (cited in: Karl Hagemeister (1848-1933). Gemälde – Pastelle – Zeichnungen, exh. cat. Bröhan Museum, Berlin 1998, p. 27).