Lot 56 D

Dated 1930 and signed, “Vor Bellinzona” is one of Karl Hofer’s important large-format paintings of the Ticino landscape. It combines e a well-conceived pictorial composition with a palette consisting primarily of pastel tones.
For the expressionist Karl Hofer, Ticino was a personal as well as an artistic revelation. He himself writes that when he came there for the first time, just before the end of the First World War, it meant the discovery of a “paradisiacal world”. Fascinated by the landscape, he purchased an estate by the lake, near Lugano, in 1925 and spent his summer months there creating enchanting landscape paintings until the outbreak of the Second World War: “I created my numerous Ticino landscapes, in which I repeatedly developed new variations in order to try, under the guise of objective representation, to clearly reveal the secret geometry of this symbiosis of house and environment” (cited in: Elisabeth Furler, Karl Hofer. Leben und Werk in Daten und Bildern, Frankfurt 1978, p. 95). Seeking to track down this “secret geometry”, he also created the painting “Vor Bellinzona”. With an expansive foreground that draws our gaze along the winding street and into the picture, a lively middle ground and the bluish shimmer of the group of mountains, the painting features a well-conceived composition. The skilful distribution of passages of light and shade provides the landscape with a sense of life, even if it contains no people. The Ticino paintings were also the last landscapes created before Hofer began primarily painting images of figures and still lifes once the Second World War started, explaining that “the sand of the March of Brandenburg does nothing for me” (cited in: Furler, ibid., p. 108).
In addition, the painting’s provenance is outstanding and completely documented. It was sold by Alfred Flechtheim to Hans Ehlermann – a well-known bank director at the time, with whom Hofer carried on a correspondence that extended into the 1950s and has been preserved down to the present by his descendants. Hofer found the landscape scene selected here so attractive that he created a total of four versions of the motif.