101 With these words to each other the Three Graces discover the sleeping Amor when they return from picking flowers in the fields. Christoph Martin Wieland’s poem Die Grazien provides inspiration for the charming moment Heinrich Friedrich Füger (German, 1751–1818) depicts in the Crocker drawing. A Neoclassicist by training and inclination, Füger, born 1751 in Heilbronn, studied first in Stuttgart under Nicolas Guibal, who himself had been trained by Anton Raphael Mengs. Known as a miniaturist even as a teenager, the artist left the field in favor of the law. He returned to art in 1771, when he went to study in Leipzig with Adam Friedrich Oeser, a disciple of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. There he attracted the attention of a British diplomat, Sir Robert Murray Keith, and accompanied him to Vienna in 1774. Successful at court, he was given a stipend for study in Rome by the patron Fürst Wenzel von Kaunitz. This stretched to seven years in the Eternal City, where Füger’s circle of acquaintances included Angelika Kauffmann, Jacques-Louis David, and Mengs himself. Perhaps owing partly to his court connections in Vienna, in 1781 he was called to Naples by Ferdinand I’s Austrian wife Queen Carolina. There, in addition to frescoing the library at Caserta, he studied the paintings and artifacts in Pompeii and Herculaneum. The next year he was offered permanent service there and received an offer from the Inscriptions signed, brown ink, lower right corner: H Füger d / 1815 Marks none Provenance Private collection, Newport, RI; Mia Weiner, by 2012; gift of Alan Templeton Literature William Breazeale, with Cara Dufour Denison and Victoria Sancho Lobis, Reuniting the Masters, European Drawings from West Coast Collections, exh. cat. Sacramento, 2016, no. 15 25 Friedrich Heinrich Füger The Three Graces Find Amor, 1815 Black chalk, pen and brown ink, brush and pinkish wash and white opaque watercolor, 43.8 x 55.9 cm. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Alan Templeton, 2012.128 “He lies on a bed of flowers, in the same way summer birds sway among them. Have you ever seen anything as lovely in your life? [Auf den Blumen liegt es, wie Sommervögel Sich auf Blumen wiegen! In euerm Leben Habt ihr so was liebliches nicht gesehen!]”1
102 Russian court, both of which he refused. In 1783 he returned to Vienna to become vice-director of the Akademie der bildenden Künste and at the same time court painter. Füger directed the Akademie from 1795 to 1806, when he left to direct the Imperial paintings gallery. Lamenting the demands of such a post, he wrote to a friend that year: “My directorship keeps me all too often away from my easel, and I would paint at least half again as many canvases each year if I had no such appointment.”2 His laments were justified, as in the following years he had to endure the predations of Napoleon’s troops and move the collection four times. He was however favored with visits by the Emperor to his studio, one in 1816, and was well liked at court. He died in 1818. Like Wieland, Füger was not an unyielding Neoclassicist in the mold of Winckelmann and his disciples. Rather than their desire to render the Antique world in modern times, in terms of both appearance and content, Wieland and those who thought like him used the ancient world partly to convey issues raised by their own times and culture, as Wolf Eiermann has pointed out.3 He finds Füger a historicizing counterpart to Jacques-Louis David’s more dogmatic Classicism during his time in Rome. As noted above, the Crocker drawing is based on Wieland’s light prose-poem hybrid Die Grazien, which tells the story of love’s rediscovery using the vocabulary of Roman mythology.4 Füger often turned to the Classicizing authors of his time rather than ancient texts as sources for his works, perhaps logically given that, with his actress wife Josepha Hortensia, he was well known in German-speaking literary circles. Wieland’s epistolary novel Aristipp und einige seiner Zeitgenossen provided the iconography for another drawing by Füger in the Crocker collection.5 Other sources included Salomon Gessner’s Der Erste Schiffer and Gottlieb Klopstock’s Messias, which later provided compositions for an entire series. The Three Graces Find Amor is one of the artist’s three works depicting the scene. A drawing, nearly identical to the present one except that Amor sits on his drapery rather than being partly covered by it, was sold in Vienna in 1916.6 Dated 1810, it was made five years before the Crocker drawing and six before the related painting, owned by the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesamlung.7 The figures in the Crocker drawing appear without change, though the setting has been altered with a forest behind the Graces at left, opening into a deep, sunlit landscape at right. Whether or not it is a model for the painting or the artist’s ricordo of a favored composition, the relationship is closer than that of the 1810 version. A trio of works also based on Wieland’s Die Grazien depicts another episode, with the Graces carrying Amor to his adoptive parents, a genial old couple. These are an 1810 drawing in a German private collection, an 1815 drawing now in Boston, and an 1816 painting sold in Vienna in 1980.8 Likely intended as pendants to the Crocker drawing and its related objects, they are of identical style and facture. 7
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105 One of the most accomplished landscapists of his generation, Johann Christian Klengel (German, 1751–1824) was born in Kesselsdorf near Dresden in 1751. His talent was recognized early, for he was said to have been trained by CharlesFrançois Hutin, later director of the Dresden Kunstakademie, and by Bernardo Bellotto, who left the city when Klengel was seven years old. At fourteen, in 1765, he was taken into the household of Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich, professor at the Akademie, where he lived until 1774. Around this time, he published his first landscape prints. In 1777, the artist was made a member of the Kunstakademie, the first to have been trained there. This training had brought him under the influence of Adrian Zingg, whose week-long sketching trips with his students at picturesque sites along the Elbe became a tradition at the Akademie. As a member, Klengel was given rooms in the institution and trained other artists as well, later including Johann Heinrich Menken. Klengel was made an honorary member of the Berlin Kunstakademie in 1786, indicating that his fame had spread. He spent 1790–1792 in Italy and honed a Classicizing mode of landscape he drew upon periodically for the rest of his career. By now part of an artistic community in which he was well regarded, he gained a professorship at the Akademie in 1800, working alongside Zingg. Nor was admiration limited to his own generation: Philipp Otto Runge praised him as a great landscapist in a letter of around this time.1 Klengel was attentive to younger artists and their training, publishing a treatise on landscape drawing in 1802 and, two years later, taking Traugott Faber into his household just as Dietrich had done for him. Plagued by ill health in later years, he went to Teplitz, now Teplice in the Czech Republic, for cures several times, the last shortly before his death in 1824. Inscriptions graphite, front flyleaf: Dieses Skizzenbuch zeigt die / charakteristische Handschrift von / Johann Christian Klengel. (last word underlined) / geb. 1751 in Kesselsdorf b. Dresden. / gest. 1824 in Dresden. / Es war in der Sammlung P. Bergfred, / Dresden, aus der es als Geschenk an / Frl. Anna Köhler, Hirschberg i. Rgb., gelangte. / Dr. Erich Wiese.; black chalk, first page: supplies and sums for a sketching trip including the destinations Pirna, Königstein, and Bad Schandau Marks none Provenance P. Bergfred; Anna Köhler; Erich Wiese; Grisebach, Berlin, 30 November 2016, lot 161; gift to the Museum Literature William Breazeale and Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil, trans. William Breazeale, The Splendor of Germany: Eighteenth-century Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento, London, 2020, no. 29; Anke Fröhlich in Grisebach, 30 November 2016, lot 161; Heino Maedebach, unpublished manuscript in Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, no. Z260 26 Johann Christian Klengel Sketchbook, circa 1785 Volume with sixteen black chalk and graphite drawings, one with brush and brown, green, reddish, gray watercolor, on cream laid paper, 23.3 x 17.7 (leaves) cm. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Anne and Malcolm McHenry, 2016.66
106 The Crocker sketchbook is one of four by Klengel known to survive. Consisting of thirty-three leaves, it bears sixteen mostly full-page drawings. It differs from the other volumes, known as the Freital sketchbook, dated 1766 and 1772 in its pages, the Weimar sketchbook, dated 1774 and 1778, and the undated Prague sketchbook both in technique and content. All three have many wash drawings and many figures and animals, often with several motifs to the page. The Weimar sketchbook contains more landscapes than the other two. The Crocker sketchbook, on the other hand, contains few casual sketches and few pages with more than one motif. Almost every drawing is a full-page landscape, most often farmsteads or villages. Done in black chalk or graphite, these include one scene supplemented with watercolor. Along with a distant small figure carrying a basket in one scene, the man walking along the road in the watercolor is the only human presence. A few pages have other motifs besides rural views—two renderings of the same vine-covered wall, a pair of columns in Dresden’s Grosser Garten, and a casual, charming view of cart horses eating from a trough. A list of expenses on the first leaf tells us where Klengel found his farmsteads and villages. He paid for lodgings in Pirna, Königstein, and Bad Schandau, all towns along the Elbe to Dresden’s southeast, and mentions the Kuhstall, a natural stone arch near Lichtenhain. This mention is significant, for it is one of the most famous sites along the Malerweg, or painter’s pathway. This trail was laid out by Klengel’s professor and colleague Adrian Zingg to connect an entire series of picturesque views near, and often overlooking, the Elbe River. Used for sketching trips by both Zingg’s landscape classes and those of his contemporaries, the route stretches from Pillnitz down to Tetschen, now Dečin in the Czech Republic. Klengel’s route lay along the upper part of the Malerweg, certainly known to him given his closeness to Zingg. Rather than recording the Bastei rocks, the Amselfall, or the Kuhstall itself in his sketchbook, however, he ignores his dramatically beautiful surroundings in favor of simple farmsteads, roadside shrines, and villages. Impossible to identify with the passage of time, his views of half-timbered houses and barns, thatched buildings, and fenced gardens may have been meant to remain anonymous, eventually contributing to a repertory of Saxon motifs useful for his painted landscapes. This anecdotal approach, so different from the experience of Zingg’s sketching trips with his class in the same district, is almost a rebellion against the Kunstakademie tradition built up by the elder artist. In any case it represents a different aspect of proto-Romanticism from Zingg’s, a focus on the local and humble aspects of the countryside that grew in importance for artists of Klengel’s generation and beyond. 7
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109 A subtly colored scene of Apollo and the Muses, this design for a stage set is unusual in Felice Giani’s oeuvre. Best known for his bold Neoclassical scenes of ancient history, the artist designed decorations for theater architecture and even stage curtains, but rarely sets themselves. The high degree of finish and the presence of color indicate the drawing may have been meant as a work of art in its own right. Born in 1750 in San Sebastiano Curone, near the border between Piedmont and Lombardy, Giani (Italian, 1758–1823) studied first in Pavia with Antonio Galli-Bibiena. At the age of twenty-eight, he entered the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, and two years later moved to Rome, perhaps sponsored by the Doria-Pamphilj family who owned the town of his birth, for study at the Accademia di San Luca. The influence of the Gandolfi in the first city and Domenico Corvi in the latter were important to his art. In Rome, he was apprenticed to Pompeo Batoni and Cristoforo Unterperger, and his circle included Giuseppe Cades as well. He was taken with Neoclassical styles as was his flatmate Francesco Caucig, with whom he made sketching trips in the Roman countryside. By the late 1780s he had attracted the patronage of Marchese Luigi Botto Adorno in Pavia, and did work there and in Faenza, mostly palace frescoes, into the 1790s. However, work in Rome continued with Doria-Pamphilj and Borghese patronage, and included frescoes completed in 1793 for Palazzo Altieri as well. With the coming of the French Revolution, Giani found patrons who shared his convictions favorable to events in France, so the resulting instability did not affect his career overmuch. He continued work on Inscriptions none Marks none Provenance Maria Angela Novelli, Bologna; sale, Pandolfini, Florence, 22 November 2016, lot 62, bought in; Maurizio Nobile; Museum purchase Literature Pandolfini, Florence, 22 November 2016, lot 62, bought in; Adriano Cera, Disegni, acquarelli, tempere di artisti italiani dal 1770 ca. al 1830 ca., Bologna, 2002, no. 47 27 Felice Giani Project for the Theater with Apollo and the Muses, n.d. Pen and black ink, brush and purple, green, brown, gray, yellow, pinkish watercolor on cream laid paper, 15 1/4 x 17 1/2 in. (38.7 x 44.4 cm.) Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by the Anne and Malcolm McHenry Curatorial Fund, 2019.66
110 decorative projects in Rome, Venice, Emilia, and, later, France. Made a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1811, he was wealthy enough at his death in 1823 to leave money for the creation of a school. The Crocker drawing is centered on Apollo, in his aspect as Apollo Musagetes, leading the Muses towards a circular temple on a hill. This is Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses. The group at left are Urania with her globe, Melpomene with her tragic mask, Polyhymnia with her veil, and Euterpe with her flute, representing astronomy, tragedy, sacred poetry, and music respectively. Further on, a genius grabs the skirt of lyrestrumming Erato, muse of lyric poetry, while behind her Terpsichore raises her arms in dance. The last three are Clio, muse of history, handing a scroll to Apollo, Calliope, muse of epic poetry, who seems to wear a small crown as queen of the Muses, and Thalia, muse of comedy and idylls, with her crook. Pegasus, whose hoof-strike has created the sacred spring Hippomene, arrives as a sacrifice burns on an altar at right. The same temple appears in an 1816 fresco of the subject in the Sala di Apollo in Faenza’s Palazzo Cavina,1 though the rest of the iconography is not the same. Different from Giani’s stage curtain designs, which include both Apollo scenes2 and temples, though these are seen in interior views,3 the Crocker drawing includes a foreground scene stretching forward from a stream, most likely the same Hippocrene, complete with swan and river god. The stream flows forward past a recording genius to the viewer’s space, flanked by Corinthian columns. Resting on a flat stage floor in front of the columns are a smoking brazier at right and, at left, modern attributes of the arts—tragic and comic masks, a globe, a lyre, scrolls, and a painter’s palette with brushes. The blurring of space between flat and stage is paralleled by the blurring of time, ancient and modern. The recording genius sits at the junction, neither fully in the set nor out of it, a creature of ancient mythology recording the central event just as we, the viewers, record it in our memories. Though Giani worked on theater decoration as early as 1796 in Jesi,4 most of his other similar commissions started a decade later, beginning with the proscenium at Bologna’s Teatro del Corso in 1805.5 The last was in Pesaro in 1818.6 It seems to this writer, however, that the most likely date for the Crocker drawing is either near 1800–1801, the date of the theater curtains with scenes of Apollo, or near 1815–1816, the date of both the Temple of Fame theater curtains and the Palazzo Cavina Apollo and the Muses fresco. 7
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113 J ohann Georg von Dillis (German, 1759–1841), a somewhat undistinguished painter but an excellent draughtsman, was a relentless experimenter in drawing media and techniques. This striking view of a village—now suburb—just north of Munich dates from his most fertile period of innovation. Dillis’s lifelong love of landscape may come from early experience, as he was the son of a forester for the Electoral princes of Bavaria. Though he studied theology originally, he entered the Munich Zeichnungsakademie in 1782. His patrons in the 1780s included Benjamin Thompson, knighted in 1791 as Count Rumford, who was an American in service to the Bavarian court and laid out the city’s Englischer Garten. Rumford commissioned landscape drawings from the young artist, sponsoring various journeys. Dillis’s career as an artist competed with long service to the Electoral court collections; in fact, he wrote to King Ludwig I at the end of his life “I regret very much that my dealings prevented me from presenting my art to the world... [Ich bedaure recht sehr, daß mir meine Geschäfte nicht erlaubten, auch meine Kunstwerke der Welt vorlegen zu können...]”1 This service included travel, however, and he was able to visit Bohemia, Spain, France, and at least seven times, Italy. He wasted no opportunity: a companion on his 1816 trip to Rome and Naples in the company of the Crown Prince describes the artist being carried in a sedan chair, his glasses perched on his nose as he draws the landscape around him.2 Curator of the Electoral paintings gallery in Munich from 1790, Dillis became its director in 1822 and was instrumental in the creation of the Alte Pinakothek, which opened in 1836. The curatorship was no sinecure. He was charged with rationalizing the Wittelsbach paintings collection after the family’s Mannheim, Zweibrück, and Düsseldorf Inscriptions signed, black chalk, lower right corner: GvD; graphite, lower left: Schwabingen Marks none Provenance C. G. Boerner, by 2011; Museum purchase Literature An Album of Landscapes comprising German Drawings, Watercolors, and Oil Sketches 1784 to 1868, C. G. Boerner, 2011, no. 11 28 Johann Georg von Dillis A View in Schwabing, circa 1820 Black and white chalks on electric blue laid paper, 21.3 x 26.5 cm. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by Anne and Malcolm McHenry and A.J. and Susana Molinet Watson in honor of William Breazeale, 2011.55
114 collections were consolidated with Munich’s. At the same time, he had to move its entire contents three times before the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio reduced military threats, and again beginning in 1800 until the Peace of Lunéville. In addition, he had to deal with the paintings coming in from monasteries suppressed in 1802–1803, and navigate the reorganization of the court and its institutions after Bavaria became a kingdom in 1806. He held this post at the same time he served the Munich Akademie der bildenden Künste as professor of landscape drawing from1808–1813. A confidant of Crown Prince Ludwig, later Ludwig I, he traveled Europe for him on buying trips for the collection, acquiring such masterpieces as Raphael’s Bindo Altoviti, then considered a self-portrait and now in Washington, D.C., Dürer’s iconic Self-Portrait of 1500, and the ancient Barberini Faun marble for the Glyptothek, which opened in 1827. Dillis experimented a great deal with landscape. Though he created many Classical scenes and was comfortable with the vocabulary of idealized landscape, his real strength lay in the more realistic views he made of the land before him. Among his experiments was the practice of painting out-of-doors directly onto the canvas, well before it became common. In his far-flung journeys he made detailed studies of the peasants he would use to populate his landscapes, recording their costumes and attitudes in precise watercolor. But the greatest experiments were in drawing landscapes rather than painting. In his early work Dillis combined black ink and red chalk, an unusual pairing. He also employed graphite for landscape, a medium more often used for portraiture in the period due to its precision and subtlety, and he adopted Jacques-Louis Conté’s manufactured crayon as soon as it was patented in 1795.3 More relevant to the present drawing are two habits Dillis developed early in his career, the use of colored paper and the use of a water-filled brush. Whether tinted by the artist or made to color, a variety of these papers appear in his works, some grey or blue as common in the Academic tradition, but also more exotic colors as time went on. Around 1820, he employed a variety of bright blue papers, rather more intense than those in Academic use, for an unusual series of cloud studies. Here he used white chalk in a variety of ways, most notable when gone over with a moistened brush. This allowed him to achieve a razor-sharp edge at the tide line and a gradual toning within the form, often adding other intense effects by reworking the moistened area in white chalk.4 The present author believes the Crocker drawing should be dated near these cloud studies, to the early 1820s. The scene shows a father and his dog returning home to his dirndled wife, who holds a child. The family goat looks on from behind her. Other figures appear up the pathway and along the fence enclosing the prosperous-looking farmstead. The most striking features, however, are the trees and clouds. The intense effects in the sky, aided by the contrast with the brilliant electric-blue paper, were likely achieved by wetting the paper before applying the chalk. The greatest variety of textures is present in the trees, from deep alternating black and white chalk strokes for trunks and branches, to leafy areas where he used the point of the black chalk for contours and its side for broader areas, taking advantage of the paper’s texture. Here, and in the broad grassy foreground, the shaded areas seem too liquid to be stumped, and under magnification the grains sit on
115 top of the paper’s fibers rather than between them as would be expected with wash. It seems to this writer that Dillis had drawn a half-wet brush over the chalk after laying it down rather than the more common stumping, or that there was a combination of the two. The hillock at left serving as repoussoir does have stumped areas in the upper half. The deep black of fenceposts, figures, and roofs was probably added last, almost certainly with a wet chalk. The sense of spontaneity that the drawing preserves comes from the artist’s perceptive use of these innovations. The deckled edges, common among Dillis’s drawings of the 1820s,5 only add to its charm. A second drawing on electric blue paper, of a slightly greener tint however, was offered by C. G. Boerner in 2011 along with this one.6 Its Munich subject, the Quellwassersteg bridge over the Isar at the Praterinsel, was part of a habitual walk of Dillis’s, described by Barbara Hartwig on the basis of the artist’s diaries. The route was from his office in the Residenz, through the Englischer Garten, across the Praterinsel to Gasteig on the eastern Isar bank, then up the river to Föhring or beyond. Noting that the artist’s bureaucratic service kept him in town most of the time apart from buying trips, she praises the drawings made along this route as some of his most handsome.7 The Crocker drawing bears an inscription to the village of Schwabing, though the inscription has been considered as by another hand in the past.8 If so, the fact that the drawing bears no distinguishing landmarks would reduce it to a generic, if charming, scene. However, Dillis’s documented habit of drawing his best-loved scenes from his Munich nature walks lends support to the idea that the drawing does indeed represent Schwabing, just north of the Englischer Garten where the author walked so often. 7
116 29 (recto) A Farmstead in the Rabenauer Grund
117 This assessment of the works of Christian Gottlob Hammer (German, 1779–1864) is telling, not only for its praise of the artist but also for the criteria by which his watercolors were judged. Unlike the eighteenth-century British artists who prized spontaneity, resulting in a plein-air technique that relied on broad areas of diluted pigment manipulated for effect, German artists of Hammer’s time worked differently. Most often created in the studio based on sketches made on site, their watercolor landscapes were built up from meticulous small patches of color, as seen here. Christian Gottlob Hammer was a late exponent of the Dresden school of landscape begun by Adrian Zingg. A student of Zingg’s protégé Johann Philipp Veith starting in 1798, he had already begun study at the Dresden Kunstakademie in 1794, when he was fifteen. In 1810, before he became a member of that academy, he was honored by a studio visit from the poet and draughtsman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. By this time Hammer was well on his way to developing his own style, and continued to do so in following years, absorbing the influences of Johann Christian Klengel and turning away somewhat from Inscriptions lower margin center, dark brown ink: c g hammer dl Marks none Provenance Emanuel von Baeyer, by 2007; Museum purchase Literature Emanuel von Baeyer, Drawings, Watercolors, Bozzetti and Paintings from 1530 to 1880, London, 2007, no. 27 29 (recto and verso) Christian Gottlob Hammer A Farmstead in the Rabenauer Grund, verso:Tourists on the Bastei Rock Bridge, n.d. Pen and gray and dark brown ink, brush and green, brown, yellowish-green, red, pink, purple watercolor, brownish varnish on cream wove paper, verso: pen and red ink, squared for transfer in graphite, 23.3 x 31 cm. Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds from A.J. and Susana Mollinet Watson and Charles and Théa Givens, 2007.112 “Hammer’s works are distinguished by an unusual precision in handling, and his watercolors are so clear and pure in coloring, and at the same time so pleasantly presented, that they can without question be numbered among the most beautiful of their kind...[Die Arbeiten Hammer’s zeichnen sich durch eine besondere Nettigkeit in der Behandlung aus und seine Aquarelle sind nebenbei so klar und rein in den Tönen und so angenehm im Vortrag, dass man sie unbedingt zu den schönsten ihrer Art rechnen darf...]”1
118 29 (verso) Tourists on the Bastei Rock Bridge
119 his early years under Veith. Seemingly devoid of the latter’s keen interest in Italy and the Classical world, Hammer tended to focus on the world around him in Germany, which he likely never left. A friend of the painter Caspar David Friedrich, who had settled in Dresden in 1798, Hammer shared none of the drama of the elder artist’s work and pursued a more rational and congenial type of landscape until his death in 1864. The Crocker sheet, double-sided, shows on its recto a village clearing dominated at left by a pile of logs and the workers managing it. Seated on the pile, closer to the center, a man seems to greet another who bears a basket of grain. His sledge already packed, he and his companion will likely follow the more distant man carrying a pack and bucket, who in his turn follows a laden horse-drawn cart down the central path. A basket-carrying woman and her child are just starting out themselves, and another pair crosses the bridge at right—all are going to market. The focus, however, is on the surroundings. Trees and hills seem to glow in exceptionally fresh watercolor under a cloud-streaked sky. The watercolor technique used for the view, with its rosy colors, precision with the brush, and use of black, can be traced back through Veith and Zingg to Johann Georg Wille. Emanuel von Baeyer proposes that the scene is of the Rabenauer Grund, in the Erzgebirge near Dresden,2 which was opened to tourism from its previous isolation only in the 1830s. Though likely, it is difficult to confirm from the style of architecture or from any distinguishing features of the Trachten worn by the figures. The verso of the sheet depicts tourists looking out from the Bastei rocks near Rathen. The dramatic cliffs rising from the valley of the Elbe are part of a series of characteristic outlooks along the river near Dresden called the Malerweg, or painter’s pathway, made popular by Adrian Zingg as a place for sketching trips. Proposed by Baeyer in 2007,3 the identification is confirmed by Hammer’s print of 1828, which shows the pedestrian bridge built across the rock formation in 1826 and constructed identically to the one in the Crocker drawing.4 Since the Bastei rocks are southeast of Dresden and the Rabenauer Grund southwest, about fifty kilometers from each other, it is unlikely that the two images were created at the same time. Given its more casual nature and more portable medium, the verso view in red ink may have been created first in the field, and the recto watercolor in the studio based on sketches. Though the Bastei scene is squared for transfer, no corresponding print or painting has yet been located. 7
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121 Well known for his atmospheric landscapes, Ernst Fries (German, 1801–1833) spent most of his career in Germany, apart from four years in Italy during the 1820s. There he created a corpus of drawings of ancient and modern monuments that, upon his return to Germany in 1827, he exploited for paintings over the rest of his career. This view of the Capo Miseno promontory, dating from his only known trip to the Bay of Naples, is annotated with color notes for possible future use. The son of a prosperous dye manufacturer and banker, Ernst Fries was born in Heidelberg in 1801. The household, an intellectual one, was important enough to receive visits from Goethe, Czar Alexander, and Emperor Franz of Austria, and the paintings collection rivaled that of their neighbors, the famous Boiserée brothers.1 Ernst studied first in nearby Karlsruhe, then in Munich under Wilhelm Kobell, and finally in Darmstadt, all between 1814 and 1818. From 1817, he worked as a lithographer, creating a series of views of Heidelberg Castle early on, his prints supplemented by paintings after 1820. Starting about 1819, Fries made regular sketching trips to southern Germany and Switzerland. These ended in 1823, when he left for Italy. Without pressing financial need, he had the freedom to devote himself entirely to drawing and painting the Italian landscape around him, as Sigrid Wechssler has pointed out.2 Settling in Rome, he soon met Joseph Anton Koch and connected with Georg Augustus Wallis, whom he had met in Germany, in Massa di Carrara. He made many trips outside Rome, in the campagna but also elsewhere, including several months in 1826 when he visited the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In these years the German Nazarene Inscriptions graphite, at right: blau / grünlich / grüngelb; graphite, upper right corner: 30. (underlined) Marks none Provenance Rudolph Kuntz; Hans Geller; Siegfried Billesberger; Walter Bareiss; Thomas Le Claire, by 2013; sale, Grisebach, Berlin, 25 November 2015, lot 162; Museum purchase Literature Grisebach, Berlin, 25 November 2015, no. 162; Thomas Le Claire, Cavalier d’Arpino to Nolde, Watercolors, drawings, and oil sketches by European Masters, catalogue 31, Hamburg, 2013, no. 15 30 Ernst Fries Capo Miseno with Mar Morto on the Gulf of Naples, 1822 Graphite on cream wove paper, 16 7/8 x 22 5/8 in. (42.6 x 57.2 cm.) Crocker Art Museum purchase with funds provided by Anne and Malcolm McHenry, 2015.74
122 artists were active in the Eternal City and, in fact, Fries’s draughtsmanship at the time shows their influence somewhat. However, his circle included many others, including Camille Corot whose portrait he drew.3 In 1827 he returned to Heidelberg, where he began painting based on his Italian sketches, as well as exploring the Neckar Valley with new eyes. Two years later he moved to Munich, but was called back to Karlsruhe in 1831 to become court painter to Leopold, Grand Duke of Baden. However, never in good health after his explorations in the low, malarial country outside Rome, Fries caught scarlet fever and died within the year. Though many of the monuments in Fries’s Italian drawings are familiar, others are not, and even familiar ones are often shown from unusual points of view, as Domenico Riccardi has explored in some detail.4 It is clear that Fries was not interested in the usual curriculum of ancient and more modern Italian monuments built up around the Academic tradition, nor perhaps the tradition built up by foreign artists from Poelenburgh and Breenbergh through Fragonard and Hubert Robert, and on into the nineteenth century. Perhaps less steeped in Classical culture, Fries looked at Italy through his own, less prejudiced eyes. The artist’s trip to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies began on June 11, 1826.5 His itinerary in the first month was quite dense, to the extent that one can imagine a rather harried artist scurrying from one breathtaking view to the next with little time to take it all in—from dated drawings it seems he spent only two days in Procida and Ischia, and two in Paestum. In addition, the route included Naples itself, Pompeii, Capri, Vesuvius, Ravello, and Amalfi, but also less famous places such as Eboli and Gragnano. Drawings made on the trip include quite distant views focused more on topography than any specific monument,6 views in which an unusual house of no particular historic importance caught his eye, 7 but occasionally more usual scenes such as the Serapeum at Pozzuoli.8 The trip ended on August 24, 1826 after what must have been several pleasant weeks on the Amalfi coast. The Crocker drawing was made either between July 2nd and 5th or around the 9th. Having begun the 2nd in Cuma, Fries passed the Lago d’Averno and traveled south down the peninsula to Baia and the Mare Morto before reaching its tip at Capo Miseno.9 Drawings in Heidelberg10 and on the art market in 200811 are of the temple at Baia and the Mare Morto respectively. Both are dated July 2nd. By the 5th Fries left the peninsula for Pozzuoli, where he drew the Serapeum that day.12He returned to Baia on the 9th to draw the temple once more,13 placing the end of the peninsula within reach again. Long known as a view of the Capo Miseno with the Lago d’Averno, the view includes the Mare Morto instead. From the Lago d’Averno the distinctive profile of the cape would be too distant to be the size depicted here, and it would be much further to the right. As unusual as Fries’s points of view often are, it is rare for him to rearrange landscapes. In the Crocker drawing, the crag depicted at center right divides the sea at left from the Mare Morto at extreme right. This crag is the real subject of Fries’s drawing, with its progression of picturesque buildings up the slope to its peak, while the more famous cape, with its lighthouse better visible from the other side, is relegated to the distance. The composition,
123 with its intersection of vertical and horizontal elements, is well composed and topographically accurate. It is possible that the drawing was made in conjunction with the view of the Mare Morto on the market in 2008 mentioned above, since that view shows the sandy far shore of the lake with the mainland beyond, close to what would have been visible if the artist had turned ninety degrees to his right from his position in the Crocker drawing. That drawing being dated July 2nd, 1826, means that the Crocker drawing would have been made the same day. Whether or not that is the case, this compelling view, with its color notes for the waters of the Mare Morto, is well suited to a painting, though none based on it has yet been located. 7
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125 Unconnected with other objects by Boudin until recently, this view of the artist’s home port can now be dated to the years around 1860. ¶ Famous as a painter of seaside scenes, Eugène Boudin (French, 1824–1898) was immersed in maritime matters from childhood. The son of a sailor who plied the coast of Normandy, Boudin was born in 1824 in Honfleur but attended school in Le Havre across the Seine estuary. One of his first jobs as a young man at the stationery and framing shop of Alphonse Lemasle, brought him in contact with the works of Théodule Ribot, Thomas Couture, and the Barbizon painters Jean-François Millet, Constant Troyon, and Eugène Isabey. Millet, whom he met in person in 1845, tried to turn the young man away from becoming an artist, but within two years Boudin was in Paris studying the Old Masters. Support from various sources, including the city government of Le Havre, enabled travel within France and Belgium in following years. Boudin encouraged the young Claude Monet, whom he met in 1856, and the two made excursions near Le Havre for sketching and painting. Boudin’s relationship with the Parisian artistic world varied: he exhibited at his first Salon in 1859, the Salon des Refusés in 1863, and the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, while continuing to exhibit at the Salon from 1864 forward. Though Boudin was represented by Durand-Ruel from 1881, Millet’s early prediction of financial precarity came true for the artist, especially in the 1870s. With increasing sales in the 1890s, he was able to travel more, to the French Riviera and Venice. Awarded the Legion of Honor at the age of 68, Boudin died in Deauville in 1898. Though sometimes considered a minor Impressionist, Boudin is more complicated than the term implies. His continuing participation in the official Salon indicates a less Inscriptions black chalk, lower left corner: E. Boudin; black chalk, lower right corner: E.B. Marks none Provenance Galerie Schmit; sale, Arcole, 11 April 1989, lot 10 (as Bâteau de pêche à Trouville); Mary de Limur Weinmann; bequest to the Museum 31 Eugène Boudin Le Port de Honfleur, circa 1860 Pastel on cream laid paper, 9 x 111/2 in. (22.9 x 29.2 cm.) Crocker Art Museum, bequest of Mary de Limur Weinmann, 2019.145.3
126 rebellious nature than his protégé Monet, and his exclusive focus on the life of the seashore and occasionally farming leaves out many of the modern urban themes proposed by the younger Impressionists. This pastel of Honfleur is in many ways an epitome of Boudin’s style: the scene is his well-loved native town on the coast of Normandy, the boats and seaside attractions are found in innumerable works by the artist, and the striking treatment of the sky shows why Camille Corot called him le roi des cieux. His pastel technique is the gestural but legible one of the mature Boudin, though once the artist had developed this manner it changed little throughout his career. Comparison with a painting on canvas of the same scene (fig. 21)1 allows us to decode the left-hand part of the scene opposite the Honfleur lighthouse. The undifferentiated rectangular mass of cream bordered with black is a building, which in the canvas is windowed, while the triangle reaching up to the sky next to it is a carrousel. Though the scope and content of the scene is substantially the same in painting and pastel, there are some differences in detail. Figures are present in the painting in front of the building at left, crowded around the carrousel, and at the tip of the jetty at the base of the lighthouse. The flag flown on the sailboat is revealed to be the French tricolor—perhaps the red was left out to avoid distracting from the treatment of the sky. The pastel includes one element completely missing from the canvas, a dinghy with figures pulling away from the sailboat at right. The painting has been dated to between 1858 and 1862, at a moment when Boudin’s fame was growing, symbolized by his participation in the 1859 Salon. Though the similarities to the painting may make the pastel seem to be a ricordo made by the artist to preserve the composition, this writer finds it more likely that Boudin made the two separately to record the same bright Honfleur day, given the changes in the figure groups and especially the appearance of the dinghy in the pastel. 7 fig. 21. Eugène Boudin, Honfleur, Le Port, Voilier à Quai, 1858–1862. Oil on canvas, 26 x 37.5 cm. Private collection
127
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129 Adolf Hirschl (Austrian,1860–1933), later Hirémy-Hirschl, was the son of a Jewish merchant in Temesvár in Hungary, now Timisoara in Romania. Of limited means, the family moved to Vienna early in the artist’s life, settling in Leopoldstadt. A scholarship allowed Hirschl to enter the Akademie der bildenden Künste in 1874, where he studied under Leopold Carl Müller and August Eisenmenger. He received many awards there, culminating in the 1880 Hofpreis which, like its French counterpart the Prix de Rome, provided a stipend for study in the Italian capital. The result was three productive years in the city from 1882 onwards, when he lived in Palazzo Venezia, at the time the Austrian embassy to the Holy See.1 Upon his return to Vienna, Hirschl enjoyed great success with canvases in the grand style. Though often tragic subjects, these were colorful, technically advanced, and somewhat conservative in tone. Though his frequent use of allegorical figures in waterrelated subjects led Emperor Franz Josef to call his paintings “Nothing but water-nymphs [Nix als Nixerln],”2 he was regularly awarded prestigious commissions and prizes in the 1890s. His fame gained him acceptance in fashionable society and at aristocratic gatherings. All this came to an end in 1898. In that year, the new Sezession movement, led by Hirschl’s contemporary Gustav Klimt, was formed as a repudiation of the Vienna Akademie. A celebrated exponent of the Akademie’s training and values, Hirschl was implicitly rejected as well—not precisely a modernist, he was left behind somewhat as the avant-garde prepared to move on. The same year he married Isabella Henriette Victoria Ruston. Though their long affair had not drawn social censure on the artist as long as it was concealed, the process of making this liaison permanent brought it into the open, led to the bride’s divorce from her previous husband, and consequently forced them to marry Inscriptions none Marks none Provenance Private English collection; Florian Härb, by 2013; gift of Alan Templeton, 2014 Literature Florian Härb and Katrin Bellinger, Master Drawings, London, 2013, no. 33 32 Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl Venus, n.d. Pastel on buff wove paper, 51.5 x 37.5 cm. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Alan Templeton 2014.59
130 as Protestants, all grave sins in Viennese society. No longer respectable, or salonfähig, Hirschl was quickly shunned. These crises provoked a change in name—he added the Hungarian Hirémy at this time—and a self-imposed exile in Rome. Hirémy-Hirschl enjoyed only moderate success there. Cleaving to his original style and subjects, he had a few paintings exhibited in Vienna but otherwise focused on the German-speaking artist’s colony. He seems to have been less inspired than many by his surroundings, as Rome appears mainly as an ideal, generalized ancient world in his works. These included Sic Transit..., considered his last great painting, dating from 1912. Highly symbolic, it is an allegory of Christianity’s triumph over paganism. President of the Deutsches Kunstverein in 1913–1915 and a member of the Accademia di San Luca from 1913, Hirémy-Hirschl was forced to take on illustration work, and by the time of his death in 1933 was largely forgotten. He was later rediscovered through his drawings, including gouaches and pastels, which are brilliant in technique and often as highly colored as his paintings. The Crocker pastel is essentially one of Franz Josef’s Nixerln, as it represents the head of Venus birthed from the waves. The painting, dating from between 1900 and 1910, was sold in Turin in 2010. (fig. 22) 3 In it the nude Venus, combing her hair with her fingers, stands on a rocky seashore populated by infant tritons, dramatically-gesturing putti, and other creatures as winged geniuses witnessing the scene from above. Lit from behind, a glowing veil sets off the goddess’s figure. Slight differences in the angle of the head and the hand gesture make clear that the pastel was not meant to serve as a cartoon. At least five surviving drawings are related to the project. Of these, three are simple posed figures and two also include the veil behind. It seems the artist had taken some care in choosing the pose, as the lone figure drawings differ significantly. The first has the nude figure turned to the left, with hair let loose around her shoulders and the body almost entirely in profile.4 Likely discarded owing to the incomplete and perhaps unflattering view of the goddess, it was then replaced by a second trial pose to the right, more frontal and with arm outstretched.5 A third drawing, which seems based on the previous one, eliminates the outstretched arm and tilts the head so that the face is better lit from above.6 At this point the artist seems to have moved away from a posed model to focus on the veil behind her. A first, rougher version repeats the elements of the previous pose and envelops the lower half of the body in an enormous drape gathered at right, falling vertically from a corresponding gather at left.7 The action of the fabric is such that it could conceivably represent a stiffened, gauzy cloth draped in the studio. Here, in a later version, and in the painting, the outstretched arm has reappeared under the cloth. The later fig. 22. Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, La Nascita di Venere, n.d. Oil on panel, 174 x 98 cm. Private collection
131 version, closest to the painting in drapery but differing in pose, is a billowing, sculptural cloth form that covers the body only below the knee, likely imagined rather than constructed in the studio.8 The Crocker drawing, seemingly from a posed figure, is most closely related to the second posed figure mentioned above, though such a detail study, focused on the action of light on the facial features, is more habitually done towards the end of the process once the final composition is set. The drape, a mix of brilliant blues and greens in the painting, is hinted at by the halo of blue pastel around the head. Hirémy-Hirschl’s technique is bold and sure, with wide, linear strokes of the pastel at the outer contours and carefully blended tints built up to create the smooth planes of the face. However, the real skill displayed here, and the real point of the drawing, lies in the slashes and touches of white and light pink that make up the highlights. Bright flashes in the hair, the arm, and the finger provide a counterpart to the more modulated highlights in the face. 7
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133 Dating from an important moment in Paul Signac’s career, this scene capturing the lively colors of the “pink town” of Albi embodies the artist’s most dynamic watercolor style. Born in 1863, Signac (French, 1863–1935) visited an exhibition of Claude Monet’s work at seventeen years old and, seemingly on the spot, decided to become an artist. The Impressionists, particularly Monet and Alfred Sisley, influenced his early work and, despite training in 1883 under Jean-Baptiste Bin, this did not change immediately. Signac was one of the founders of the Salon des Indépendants in 1884 and soon made a friend and supporter in his fellow artist Armand Guillaumin. Through Guillaumin he met Georges Seurat, and the two worked closely on color theory. The idea of Divisionism, in which patches of pure color were distributed so as to be mixed by the eye of the viewer, was the focus of their work and was manifested in their paintings in different ways. Signac, in contrast to his colleague, emphasized intense, saturated colors. The year 1892 marked a double transition for Signac. With his move to Saint-Tropez on the Mediterranean coast came new experimentation in watercolor. Perhaps inspired by the different light of southern France, it was a congenial way to refine his color theories and, in fact, he abandoned his Pointillist work at this moment.1 He soon included watercolors in his exhibitions with the Salon des Indépendants, as well as other exhibitions, for example those of Les XX. Up until his first one-man exhibition in 1902, Signac enjoyed only an uneven critical response. It improved in the early 1900s, and certainly by the time he became president of the Salon des Indépendants in 1908. He moved down the coast to Antibes in 1913, and in 1919 Inscriptions pen and brown ink, lower right corner: P. Signac / Albi 1912 [...] L; conté crayon, upper right: VR Marks none Provenance Henri Felten; possibly CohetFéraud, Montauban, 18 December 1994, lot 12; Galerie de la Présidence; Montgomery Gallery; Dorothy and Norm Lien, by 2012; gift to the Museum Literature Galerie de la Présidence, Signac le marin, Paris, 2001, no. 8 33 Paul Signac Albi, 1912 Black conté, brush and watercolor on buff wove paper, 26 x 40 cm. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Dorothy and Norm Lien, 2012.114
134 returned to Paris. In 1927 he wrote a monograph on Johan Jongkind, taking the opportunity to codify his views on color. He died in 1935. Signac was extremely important in the history of color theory. His art and writings influenced a generation of European painters, including Italians and Germans as well as French artists. During the later part of his career, his theories of color and his work in watercolor were inextricably linked, especially since after 1910 it took precedence over his work in oils. The Crocker watercolor dates from the early years of Signac’s major focus on that technique. During the months of May, June, and July of 1912, he took an extended trip in southwestern France that included such cities as Limoges and Bordeaux as well as many smaller towns.2 He visited Albi twice, on the 13th–19th and the 24th of May, arriving from Montauban and departing to Aurillac. In between, on the 22ndand 23rd of May, he was in Gordes and Lyon respectively, meaning that he traveled hundreds of miles in a short time. The view is in the Place Sainte-Cécile, a short walk from the train station and adjoining Albi’s cathedral, whose apse is to the left outside the picture plane. Bordering the place before us is the thirteenth-century Palace de la Berbie. Originally Albi’s episcopal palace, it now houses the tourist office and, since 1922, the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. Looming over the center is the Donjon Sainte-Cathérine, part of that complex. Signac habitually painted in the studio but preferred plein-air for his watercolors,3 making it likely we see the scene as it appeared before him. Though heightened by the intensity of the tints employed, Signac’s colorism reflects the pinkish tones of the local building stone that earned Albi the name “la ville rose.” Shadows in the square, buildings, and trees are rendered in various dilutions of the same royal blue, used also for the clothing of distant people. Pink and blue dominate the palette, while green is used only for trees and clothing, a proper red only for the trousers of two figures, and a proper yellow only to describe the glint of sunlight on the slate roof of the tall building at right. Occasionally colors are mixed with white to give a sense of solidity where appropriate. The contours are in black conté crayon, which Signac had abandoned in his early watercolors of the 1890s but taken up again.4 At least two other watercolors of the Place Sainte-Cécile are known to survive. The first5 is a more distant view, including the cathedral’s chapel of Saint Lazare et Sainte Marthe at extreme left and lower buildings fronted by what appear to be market canopies below it. Many more people are present. The colorism is notably more varied, with ochers, oranges, and deep yellows, and occasional unnatural color, as in the green wall of the building at right. The tree at right of center is bare in contrast to that of the Crocker drawing, bringing into question a date of May 1912. The other watercolor, dated in the artist’s hand the 13th of May 1912,6 gives more prominence to the Donjon Sainte-Cathérine and is closer to it, showing the lower story of the low building at right obscured in the Crocker drawing. Despite the rainy day—many umbrellas are open in the crowded foreground—Signac has not changed his palette to indicate unfavorable weather. Both contours and colors are somewhat more violent than in
135 the Crocker drawing, though with more warm tones. It is, however, rather more similar to the Crocker drawing than to the first composition. Of the watercolors of Albi’s Place Sainte-Cécile known to this writer, the Crocker drawing is perhaps closest in colorism to the actual scene, and certainly the most restrained in hue. Taken together, the three show an artist working out his color theories in the first years of his major campaign in the medium. 7
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137 With its dynamic charcoal, Feininger’s drawing transforms a conventional view of a seaside windmill into an almost abstract, motion-filled scene, the wings of the windmill paralleled by the rays of the noonday sun. Originating from a 1911 view, the drawing transforms it based on the artist’s experience of French avant-gardes. Born to a German violinist and his American wife, a singer and pianist in her own right, Feininger (German, born United States, 1871–1956) was originally destined for a musical career and, in fact, composed a series of fugues in the early 1920s. As a teen he was sent by his parents to study at the Leipzig conservatory but never arrived there, preferring to stay in Hamburg where a class at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule put him on the path towards visual art. Later studying at the Berlin Kunstakademie and, in 1892–1893, the Académie Colarossi in Paris, he spent the later 1890s and early 1900s as an illustrator and cartoonist for German and American publications, including the satirical magazine Ulk, the Berliner Tageblatt, and the Chicago Tribune. A 1907 trip to Paris exposed him to the European avant-gardes and upon his return to Germany the next year he devoted himself full-time to painting. In 1910 Feininger exhibited at the Berlin Sezession and in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. The next year, 1912, represented a watershed moment. He met Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the other artists of Die Brücke and had his first New York exhibition at the Photo-Secession gallery. He was also contacted by the organizers of the Armory Show, but in the end did not participate. The following year he exhibited at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon with Der Blaue Reiter. Remaining in Germany during the first World Inscriptions black conté, lower left corner: Feininger; black conté, bottom center: The Mill; black conté, lower right corner: October 12, 1912 Marks none Provenance Israel Ber Neumann, by 1944; Veerhoff Galleries; Mary de Limur Weinmann; bequest to the Museum Literature Feininger/Hartley, ed. Dorothy C. Miller, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1944, p. 47 as Mill in Autumn II 34 Lyonel Feininger The Mill, 1912 Charcoal on buff wove paper, 21 x 26 cm. Crocker Art Museum, bequest of Mary de Limur Weinmann, 2019.145.10
138 War, he was interned as an enemy alien but continued to exhibit. 1919 saw him hired as the first printmaking professor at the Bauhaus in Weimar; he designed the cover of their first manifesto and remained with the institution through its various changes. In addition, he exhibited with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexei Jawlensky in New York in 1925, and was given a solo exhibition at the Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1931. After the 1933 dissolution of the Bauhaus, he remained in Germany until 1937, when his work was included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition. He fled to the United States, teaching briefly at Mills College in Oakland before settling in New York. There he was given a 1944 joint retrospective with Marsden Hartley at the Museum of Modern Art, and was later involved in the experimental Black Mountain College art program in North Carolina. He died in New York in 1956. The subject of the present drawing relates to Feininger’s summer 1911 trip to the island of Usedom in the Baltic Sea, now at the border between Germany and Poland. He spent the summer in Heringdorf on the north side of the island. In the adjacent town of Swinemünde, now Świnoujście in Poland, was a windmill belonging to the Gellendin bakery, which was taken down in 1919.1 The windmill appears in the same view in five drawings, an etching, a painting, and a woodcut, all dated 1919 or before. Feininger shows it from the back, with the strong sun at left, and a dark, cloudy sky at right. The earliest of the drawings, dated September 11, 1911, is created in black chalk or conté, the quick, wandering contours and irregular perspective giving a naïve effect. (fig. 23)2 The darker sky at right is described with broad, linear hatching crossed at various angles, as if to capture the different air currents turning the windmill’s blades. The same view appears in reverse in an etching on zinc of the same year, playfully inscribed by the artist Leionel Einfinger in the plate. (fig. 24)3 The differences are a building added at left and the treatment of the sky, with the rays of the sun and the cloudy sky organized into regular patterns of closely-spaced hatching. A stylistic transformation occurs between these two images and the Crocker drawing. It seems that Feininger’s trip to Paris in May 1911 for the Salon des Indépendants had borne fruit—there he saw the works of Matisse, Delaunay, De Chirico, and others, the first Cubists and Futurists. Feininger’s first experiments in these directions, occurring in the watershed year of 1912, involved other already-existing motifs as well. Here, to fig. 24. Lyonel Feininger, Mühle (The Mill), 1911–1912. Etching on ochre wove paper, 14 x 21.6 cm (sheet). Smith College Museum of Art, Purchased with the gift of Mr. And Mrs. Sigmund W. Kunstadter (Maxine Weil, class of 1924), inv. no. SC 1959.52 fig. 23. Lyonel Feininger, Windmühle, 1911. Crayon on cream wove paper, 15.9 x 20.4 cm. Private collection. Photo courtesy of Karen Bartsch, Berlin
139 accent the fragmentation of space, Feininger straightens the objects’ contours, simplifying the landscape into a series of planes and the figures into wide vertical strokes. Using the side of the charcoal as much as the rather blunted point, he turns the former areas of hatching in the dark sky into foreboding geometrical clouds. Similarly, the form and shading of the windmill and buildings are built up with slashing strokes of the charcoal. The Crocker drawing is significant for being the first known exploration of this motif in Feininger’s new style, dated October 20, 1912. He returned to it again a month and a half later in a similar drawing. (fig. x)4 Here, with less reliance on the side of the charcoal, he intensifies the jagged linear quality, in the process amplifying buildings and landscape. By 1916, the date of a third depiction, buildings, landscape, and the windmill itself are displaced in simultaneous views from different angles, as in analytical Cubism. (fig. x)5 Black ink underneath the charcoal heightens the contrast in textures and thereby the sense of spatial fragmentation. Two years later Feininger returned to the motif in a painting now in the Múzeum Sztuki in Łodz. (fig. 25)6 Here, the addition of naturalistic color for the mill and landscape differentiates them from the dramatic light effects in the sun and sky; by removing the buildings the artist focuses better on the real subject. Finally, Feininger’s 1919 woodcut, published in the Jahresgabe der Verbindung zur Förderung deutscher Kunst, takes the idea one step further, dividing the composition into halves, the storm (now at left given the reversal from drawing to print) appearing as a vast expanse of black relieved only by a few gashes in the block. (fig. 26)7 Windmills were a major element in Feininger’s personal mythology. According to Birte Frenssen, he regarded them with almost the same reverence he did churches.8 Beginning in 1901 with a mill on the island of Rügen, he sought them out as inspiration again and again, especially those on the island of Usedom. This large Baltic barrier island, characterized by dunes and low hills, is still a holiday destination as it was in Feininger’s time and before. An avid bicyclist, over the course of many summers the artist visited and sketched the mills of Neppermin, Benz, Bansin, and both mills in Swinemünde. Tower mills, post mills, and smock mills such as the one in the Crocker drawing were all represented. 7 fig. 25. Lyonel Feininger, Windmill, 1918. Oil on canvas, 39.5 x 49.5 cm. Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź fig. 26. Lyonel Feininger, Windmill, 1919. Woodcut, 30.6 × 47.3 cm (sheet, irregular); 25.4 × 30.5 cm. (image). Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sylvan Cole, Jr.. Inv. N.: 80.55.2
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141 Of great interest for his central role in the Worpswede artists’ colony, which included artists such as Otto Modersohn, his wife Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Fritz Overbeck, as well as the writers Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Vogeler (German, 1872–1942) was more influential early in his career than later. Born to a wealthy family in Bremen, he studied art in Düsseldorf before moving to Worpswede, northeast of his native city, in 1895. There he joined the circle of artists around Fritz Mackerson, founder of the colony. With his inheritance Vogeler built a house he called Barkenhoff (Birch Cottage), now a museum, which quickly became the gathering-place for the entire group. At this time he met Martha Schröder, the teenaged daughter of a local schoolteacher, whom he married in 1901. Inspired by Art Nouveau and the various Sezession movements, the artist focused on dreamy, almost Symbolist scenes in a distinctive style, exhibiting while also doing commercial work that included architectural projects such as the town’s 1910 train station. Beginning in 1906, Vogeler traveled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Poland, and Britain, during which time his sympathies for the working classes were awakened by the writings of Maksim Gorkiy and his own observations. During his World War I service, he was placed under house arrest for a pacifist letter he had directed to the Emperor. From this point Vogeler lived as he believed, joining the Communist party and turning Barkenhoff into a working commune which soon failed. Martha, after an unhappy decade in the marriage, left him in 1920 though they divorced only in 1926. Vogeler visited the USSR in 1923 in the company of Sonja Marchlewska, daughter of a Spartacus League founder and herself a revolutionary. A year later, he deeded Barkenhoff Inscriptions graphite, lower right corner: H. [cipher] V. Marks none Provenance Galerie St. Étienne, by 2016; gift of Alan Templeton Literature Paula Modersohn-Becker, Art and Life, exh. brochure, New York, 2015, n.p. 35 Heinrich Vogeler Portrait of a Woman, n.d. Graphite on green wove paper, 31.1 x 24.1 cm. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Alan Templeton, 2016.32
142 to the Rote Hilfe (Red Aid), an organization devoted to helping German Communists, as a home for children of political prisoners. Six years later, having married Sonja, he moved to Moscow with her, living across from the Kremlin as he worked in propaganda while she worked for International Red Aid. Unable to return to Germany after 1933, Vogeler continued his artistic activity, changing to Social Realist style and subjects in keeping with official policy. Lacking a Soviet passport, after Germany’s invasion of the USSR in 1941 he was interned as an enemy alien in a Kazakhstan labor camp, where he was essentially worked to death within a year. The Crocker drawing is from Vogeler’s early maturity, when his lyric style was at its height. The sitter, with low, bead-bordered décolletage and braided coiffure, casts her eyes downward pensively. A low landscape, with farmhouses at right and trees at left, serves as backdrop. A verso image, of a woman in profile reading, has a similar angle to the head but hair gathered differently. In this period Vogeler frequently portrayed his wife Martha, both in portraits and as a model in other scenes, though sometimes the degree of idealization makes identification difficult. A similar sitter and pose to those in the Crocker drawing are found as early as 1898, in a bookplate for Adele Wolter.1 In the etching, the view is in profile and the braid replaced by flowers. Perhaps the closest parallel, however, is a secure portrait in etching and drypoint of Martha Vogeler, dated 1905. (fig. 27)2 Here, though the etching technique slightly hardens the shading of the face, the features are quite similar, as are the coiffure and décolletage, though the latter is unbeaded. The pensive angle of the head is similar but not exact, taking into account the print’s left-to-right reversal. The composition, on the other hand, is more elaborate, with a forested background and the addition of the sitter’s hand holding a flower. By the time of a 1909 portrait etching,3 Martha’s face has matured into something more matronly, her features harder, her chin determined. Similarly to the younger 1905 portrait etching, a painting of the same date, now in a private collection,4 supports the identification of the sitter as Martha, her features similar, her head bent in the same way. The image on the Crocker verso, though the face is obscured, has similarities in clothing and pose to an undated drawing of Vogeler’s wife.5 The purpose of the Crocker drawing is somewhat ambiguous. Almost certainly representing Vogeler’s first wife, as we have seen, it is not precisely a portrait. Stylized, pensive, perhaps she is being used to represent an ideal figure in Vogeler’s world of dreams and not his wife at all. This would be especially in keeping with the artist’s early work, fig. 27. Heinrich Vogeler, Portrait of Martha Vogeler, 1905. Etching and drypoint on cream wove paper, 29.8 x 24.2 cm. Private collection
143 such as the 1898 etching Die sieben Schwäne(The Seven Swans) and its associated drawing in Dresden.6 In it, a maiden weeps by a forest lake as swans approach inquisitively, the scene bordered by Art Nouveau orchids. In fact, because of the degree of idealization, the younger physiognomy—appropriate to the sitter’s 1898 age of eighteen—and the detail of the beaded décolletage, the present author believes that a date closer to this etching than the 1905 portrait print should be considered. 7
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145 Born to an Austrian father and Czech mother in Tulln, northwest of Vienna, Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890–1918) was obsessed with drawing from an early age. This caused conflict with his authoritarian father and over-concerned mother, who burnt his early drawings but eventually came around.1 From 1902, when Schiele was twelve, his father’s health declined from the effects of tertiary syphilis, while the family’s finances were already precarious. Two years later, after being suspended from his job at the Austrian State Railway, Schiele’s father attempted suicide, and died on the first day of January 1905.2 The family moved to Klosterneuburg where an art professor, Ludwig Karl Strauch, recognized the young man’s talent and mentored him, along with other local artists. Leopold Czihaczek, Schiele’s wealthy uncle, became his co-guardian in 1906. The same year, after failing several subjects, he left school in Klosterneuburg and moved to Vienna, where he enrolled at the Allgemeine Malerschule of the Akademie der bildenden Künste. The curriculum was a traditional one: first drawing after the antique, the pupils progressed to the head and human figure, drapery, and composition, interspersed with other compulsory subjects such as anatomy, perspective, styles, and color theory.3 Though his grades were average, Schiele was an ambitious student and a prolific draughtsman. The director of the school, Christian Griepenkerl, recognized this but disliked him—when Schiele’s mother asked, “Does my boy have talent?” he replied “Yes, much too much, he disrupts the entire class.”4 In his second year, 1907, Schiele found a more congenial mentor in Gustav Klimt. Along with Oskar Kokoschka and Max Oppenheim, Klimt had a great influence on Schiele and his career, introducing him to a network of patrons.5 Schiele and a group of fellow artists formed the Neukunstgruppe, or New Art Group, exhibiting together in 1909. Their manifesto took the form of thirteen Inscriptions black chalk, upper left corner: SCHIELE- / 20·II·07 Marks none Provenance Serge Sabarsky, by 1996; Vally Sabarsky, until 2002; Vally Sabarsky Trust; Galerie St Étienne, by 2019; gift of Alan Templeton Literature Agnes Husslein-Arco and Jane Kallir, eds., Egon Schiele, Self-Portraits and Portraits, Munich, 2011, p. 63 and plate 9; Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele, The Complete Works, New York, 1990/98, no. 94; Serge Sabarsky, Egon Schiele, vom Schüler zum Meister, exh. cat. Vienna, 1984, no. 2; Serge Sabarsky, Egon Schiele, exh. cat. Rome and Venice, Milan, 1984, no. 33 36 Egon Schiele Portrait of a Lady in Profile, Facing Right, 1907 Charcoal on cream laid paper, 52.4 x 34.6 cm. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Alan Templeton, 2019.61
146 questions to Griepenkerl, with whom tensions had risen to the point of no return, the director saying to Schiele “You-you-the Devil shit you into my school! [Sie-Sie-Sie hat der Deubel in meine Schule gekackt!]”6 From this point Schiele moved into the Expressionist period for which he is best known: not only his nudes but also his landscapes reflected the angst that became a hallmark of his work. His many nudes, a large number of them self-portraits but more of them drawn after local models, reflected a morbid sexuality as well. In 1911–1912 he exhibited successfully with Der Blaue Reiter in Munich but faced personal difficulties, being essentially expelled from Krumlau, now Český Krumlov, on morality charges and briefly imprisoned. After this he moved to a suburb of Vienna. The next several years, as his works focused more and more on suffering and the evils of life, he started to achieve success in exhibitions and with critics. Married in 1915, he immediately entered military service, but was stationed near Vienna and in prisoner-of-war camps where he held office jobs while continuing his artistic success. In 1917 alone, he sold work to the Austrian state, sent paintings to the Munich Sezession exhibition, and organized a war exhibition with other artists. In 1918, Klimt’s death left Schiele as the most important living Austrian modern artist. Tragically, the Spanish flu took his wife in September of that year, and Schiele himself died of it on October 1. The present drawing does not show the angst-ridden Schiele of later years, being rather a precursor to it. Dated February 20, 1907, it fits into the “Head and Human Figure” semester at the Vienna Akademie, though given the artist’s obsession with portraiture during this time, it is not necessarily a product of that class. In the first three months of 1907 Schiele drew a variety of sitters, judging from surviving drawings, nearly all of them half-length or simple heads. They range from farmers to businessmen, Schiele’s sister in peasant costume, his mother, and this sitter in a fur-collared coat. She is not a member of the artist’s family, as indicated by comparison to known portraits. Nor is she a maidservant, given her relatively rich clothing; Schiele had portrayed a maid on September 24, 1906,7 as well as on other occasions. The strict profile pose and rather formal signature and date argue in favor of the drawing being an exercise at the Akademie, but as Christian Bauer points out Schiele at this time also created large numbers of portraits of “family members, friends, and acquaintances” of high quality, “continuing, as it were, his academy classes at home.”8 The sitter’s distinguishing feature is the light-haired coiffure with rolled curls at the temple; she appears from another angle in a drawing that has been dated to around the same time.9 This second drawing was discovered in an attic in Tulln in 1968, perhaps made as a gift from the artist to a woman of his native town, who could have been the sitter of the both the drawings herself. Given the timing—towards the end of 1907 Schiele’s drawing exercises stop, or stop surviving—this drawing represents precious evidence of the artist’s budding talent in a critical year of his training. While it gives little hint of the angst-ridden nudes and morbid eroticism to come, the artist’s introspection and attention to emotion are important elements of his art. 7
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149 F ernand Léger (French, 1881–1955), a multifarious artist who worked in film, theater, and architecture as well as painting, came from a middle-class family in northwestern France. As a teenager, he was apprenticed to an architect in Caen for his draughting skills, then in 1900 moved to Paris. There, after completing his military service, he was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts but accepted to the École des Arts Decoratifs. To supplement his study there, he attended the Académie Julian and took lessons from Jean-Léon Gérôme. He entered avant-garde circles shortly before 1910, the year he signed a contract with Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. Working partly in a Cubist style, he exhibited in Paris, Berlin, and at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. After the first World War, Léger’s interests turned towards mechanization and its effects on the modern world, though he continued with figure painting as well. 1923 was his first major theater collaboration, for Blaise Cendrars’s ballet La création du monde, and 1924 his first major film Le ballet méchanique. By the 1930s he was famous enough to receive state commissions and participate in the Brussels and Paris expositions. He came to the United States in 1931, 1935, and 1938, the last trip made with the purpose of decorating an apartment for the Rockefeller family. In 1940 he was forced to emigrate from France, as his left-wing sympathies were well known, and stayed two months in Marseilles before departing for New York. In 1941 he taught a summer session at Mills College, returning to the East Coast in October. He Inscriptions graphite, lower left: 14086; graphite, upper left corner: 13 (upside-down); graphite, upper right corner: n; verso, graphite, upper center: 25 Marks none Provenance Mary de Limur Weinmann, by 2007; bequest to the Museum Literature unpublished 37 Fernand Léger Étude pour Les Plongeurs, 1941 Pen and black ink, brush and white and colored opaque watercolor on buff tracing paper, 33.7 x 43.5 cm (folded). Crocker Art Museum, bequest of Mary de Limur Weinmann, 2019.145.21 “...It was no longer five or six divers, it was two hundred at once. It was impossible to tell whose this head, this leg, and that arm were. So then I mixed the limbs in my picture together...”1
150 made friends with many other émigré artists during the war and had continued success, such as the Museum of Modern Art’s 1942 acquisition of Le grand déjeuner. Returning to France in 1945, he took up theatrical work again, returning to work with Serge Lifar after collaborating on his ballets in the 1930s. Major retrospectives in 1940 at the Tate in London and in 1953 at the Art Institute of Chicago and MOMA capped his productive career. He died in 1955. The present drawing of Divers fits into one of Léger’s major subjects during his time in the United States. The questions of multiplicity, fragmentation, and movement raised by the “two hundred at once” mentioned in his quote above, continued to fascinate him. During his two months in Marseilles, Léger had seen men diving and swimming in the harbor. The contrast between these few figures and the organized chaos of a New York swimming pool led to an entire series of paintings. He found his tangles of limbs “much closer to the truth than Michelangelo when he occupied himself with every individual muscle.”2 Léger exhibited his first studies for the Divers series in 1941, at Mills College, the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA), and the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles.3 It is entirely possible this is one of them, since a gouache dated 1940 with these identical figures survives.4 It is inscribed to Harry Holtzman, an abstract artist and intimate of Piet Mondrian in this period, who kept it until his death. As these are the only two known drawings with this composition, and the Crocker tracing-paper drawing is squared for transfer, it may have been preparatory to the gouache. A large number of canvases in the Divers series survive. Early paintings include shading in the bodies similar to that in the Crocker drawing, but this is eventually eliminated in favor of simple outlines. Most of the series is brightly colored like the 1940 gouache. Surroundings are sometimes reduced to simple geometric forms, overlapped by the figures. In a flight of fancy, Léger superimposes birds on one composition. The Crocker drawing is unique in the Divers series for including no spatial context, only bodies falling through the air—even the gouache places the figures against a patchy blue background with a wavering contour to represent water. Along with the gouache, it is the only one to include the chain of ball-like objects seen at lower right. This has the form of a lane marker common in American pools, a rope with cork or plastic floats. With the relationship to the 1940 gouache near which it must be dated, the drawing may be the earliest surviving full composition for the Divers series. 7