Lot 208 D

Female nudes, revelries, landscapes from Ticino and, not least, still lifes of fruit and flowers were the preferred motifs of Karl Hofer, the great loner of the 20th century. Like so many painters of his generation, he repeatedly returned to pictorial compositions once he had found them, creating variations on them for decades.
This practice is also exemplified by the 1938 still life “Birnen” offered for sale here. Having thematised autumn fruits for the first time in 1920, Hofer repeatedly went back to these motifs over the course of the 1930s and also painted them in his late work around 1950. In our painting they lie in a rust-red clay bowl, stretching their stems up like necks alongside two apples. Establishing a vigorous contrast, Hofer has placed a crumpled white bag beside the ceramic vessel. Green, yellow, red and a dark violet form a muted harmony of colours whose subtle nuances stand out alongside the white. The clear use of line and the cohesive composition provide plain indications of Hofer’s intense engagement with the work of Paul Cezanne. This excellently preserved fruit still life is from the collection of the Winterthur-based Reinhart family, who provided Hofer with decisive support at the beginning of his career and purchased his works on a grand scale.