Lot 450 Dα

Seiwert used this small sculpture to introduce himself to the married couple Carl Oskar and Käthe Jatho during the war winter of 1916/1917, when he was a guest at their semi-public lectures on modern art. Jatho recalls: “He presented himself through a question: whether he would be allowed to pay the lecture fee (it was tiny) in the form of a small object? Because he didn't have it in cash. And he unwrapped a small clay sculpture out of a piece of newspaper and placed it in front of us on the table. It was the bowed half-length figure of a woman - a devotional image, if you will - but reserved in its movement, entirely without those false gestures which make this liturgical industry so dangerous. I confess: we felt like friends within those first minutes.” (Carl Oskar Jatho, op. cit., Recklinghausen 1964, p. 6).