Lot 106 Dα

Lake Grunewald among the pine forests of Brandenburg was among the Secession painter Walter Leistikow’s most common subjects. Within the context of landscape painting’s resurgence around 1900, he sought motifs in the countryside around Berlin and during his travels. Trained by the Norwegian painter Hans Frederik Gude, he was initially committed to the Nordic version of art nouveau. It was not until 1905 that his palette became lighter and his brushwork freer.
In the painting “Grunewaldsee am Morgen”, the landscape is arranged in three expansive planes running parallel to the picture. In the foreground we find the calm surface of the lake. On the opposite shore rises a dense pine forest which is reflected in the water and reveals a yellow-orange coloured sky at the top left. The unusual cropping of the view and the highly expressive use of line were presumably influenced by the Japanese colour woodcuts that Leistikow had discovered for himself while in Paris in 1893 and whose principles he then artistically integrated into his landscapes. In terms of colour the painting “Grunewaldsee am Morgen” is bathed in the mild light of the beginning of the day, and it provides a characteristic example of Leistikow’s oeuvre from the period around 1900. “It is his everlasting achievement”, pronounced Max Liebermann, “to have found the style for depicting the melancholy charms of the countryside around Berlin. We see the lakes of Grunewald or those along the upper Spree with his eyes; he taught us to see their beauties” (cited in: Nationalgalerie Berlin. Das XX. Jahrhundert, Leipzig 2001, p. 228). An inverted but otherwise almost identical view of Lake Grunewald has been in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin since 1898.