Lot 126 D

Carlo Mense’s painting “Parklandschaft mit Schwänen” was exhibited multiple times with works by the Rhineland expressionists; its wooded park contains numerous people out for a stroll and is seen from a slightly elevated vantage point. The swans of the picture’s title are found on the water and along the shore. Mense has composed the smooth surface of the water in a particularly captivating manner: the surrounding trees, the swans and a small passage of sky are reflected in it. Based on old photographs, the depicted park is probably to be identified as Düsseldorf’s Hofgarten – the city where Mense lived and had his studio from at least 1913.
This park landscape created around 1912 is one of only a few paintings which reveal Mense’s engagement with analytical cubism. In the spring and autumn of the year it was created, Otto Feldmann’s Rheinischer Kunstsalon and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne showed cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque – Mense has transferred their geometrical unfolding of form to his park landscape. The predominantly dark, earthy palette also indicates that the landscapes Braque was creating around 1908 served as a point of orientation. However, in contrast to this French painter, Mense ultimately preserved the two-dimensional forms derived from Fauvism, weaving them together and thus generating a landscape image which conveys a sense of depth.
The reverse side contains the likeness of a man in a tail coat, white shirt and bow tie. This is probably a portrait of the painter Heinrich M. Davringhausen.