Lot 42 D

During the winter months of 1911/1912, Heinrich Campendonk was familiarised with reverse-glass painting through the members of the artists association “Der Blaue Reiter”. It was Gabriele Münter who had discovered the folk art of reverse paintings on glass during her stays in the Bavarian town of Murnau, where she had master Heinrich Rambold (1872 - 1953) instruct her in the technique. Besides Münter and Campendonk, Franz Marc also created his first reverse-glass paintings. All of them were fascinated by this way of working with unmixed, luminous colours that had to be applied to the transparent surface of the picture in reverse order. The strictly two-dimensional treatment of the motifs and “naive” disregard for perspective and proportion were equally new.
After the end of the First World War and the death of Campendonk’s role model and mentor Franz Marc, he returned to reverse painting on glass in a different – and, especially, more developed – vein. His intense work with woodcuts during the interim would prove to be of decisive significance. For the “Eidechse” offered here, for example, Campendonk first created a pencil drawing in the manner of Marc and then worked with a graphic template, laying it under the glass and tracing its contours with a fine brush. He then filled the interiors of the resulting shapes with opaque, slightly marbleised colours, including different shades of red and a shimmering turquoise, which he further embellished with little golden scales. Among his fine, but limited early work in reverse-glass painting, the colourful “Eidechse” is one of the few images exclusively featuring an animal motif.