Lot 137 Dα

Arnold Topp, born in Soest in 1887 and living mainly in Brandenburg since 1913, made contact with the well-known Berlin gallery "Der Sturm" and its founder Herwarth Walden at an early age. Right at the beginning of his artistic career, Walden included him in the ranks of 'his' artists and mentioned him in the same breath as Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Kurt Schwitters and Franz Marc. Topp greatly admired Walden and was aware that his artistic success would depend on him, the champion of Expressionism. Walden took on an almost paternal role for the aspiring artist and knew that he had a diamond to cut. During the war, Walden kept in touch and sent him the magazine "Der Sturm" to the front (see Rainer Enders, Arnold Topp. Ein Lebensbild, Weimar 2007, p. 37). Topp's artistic oeuvre encompassed a wide range of techniques - he worked in both oil and watercolour, mastered all common graphic techniques and also created reverse glass paintings from 1916 onwards.
The present work, owned by Topp's friend and sculptor Wilhelm Wulff, is one of the few surviving reverse glass paintings. With dark blue, green, orange and yellow areas of colour that have developed an attractive pattern due to the corroding tin, the glass painting "Malven" is one of Topp's earliest purely abstract works. It was exhibited at the "Der Sturm" gallery in 1923, the year it was created, and thus has an excellent provenance. As a large part of his entire oeuvre, especially the reverse glass paintings, was destroyed by the artist's early death in 1945, the work "Malven" is of particular significance.