Lot 19 D

Harlequins, street performers and Pierrots have been an established part of modern art’s repertoire of motifs since Picasso’s famous “Les Saltimbanques”. These figures fascinate us through the ambivalence with which they push the entire spectrum of human emotions to extremes, oscillating between visual opulence and anarchy, humour and drama.
Heinrich Campendonk possessed a particular affinity for the fantasy world they embody and which certainly bears an air of the unfathomable. Depictions of Harlequins run through his entire oeuvre.
This theme is also present in paintings and reverse-glass pictures from the 1920s – as in the case of our splendid composition. The dark background forms a stage in the most literal sense, not just for the depicted figures but, above all, for the colours: the delicate, whitish-grey shading of the basic figurative forms and the intense tones of the scenery’s details shimmer and shine out of the darkness. In 1924 and 1925 Campendonk had great success designing sets for Krefeld’s theatre. This was accompanied by a shift in his artistic oeuvre: the forms become more stable and clear, and a stronger sense of space can be felt. Our work illustrates this in an exemplary manner. The coloured forms are invested with their own intrinsic value, and the dimension of depth is emphasised through the shining colours of the tiles linking the dominant figure in the foreground with the three Pierrots in the background. The same composition, reversed and more strongly simplified, can be found again in the reverse glass painting “Pierrot mit Guitarre” (Firmenich 946, see comp. ill.) – demonstrating how convincing Campendonk found this particular pictorial solution.