215 - WILLI SITTE

WILLI SITTE (1921 Kratzau – 2013 Halle (Saale)) Reclining Couple, 1978/79 Oil on hardboard. 85 x 184 cm. Framed. Signed and dated (19)78/79 on the lower left. Titled on the reverse, with dimensions and date, as well as a label. WVZ G 79_15 Provenance: Private collection, Hesse Exhibition history: 1982 Kunsthalle Berlin, “Willi Sitte 1945–1982” Willi Sitte, along with Mattheuer, Heisig, and Tübke, is considered one of the four most important painters of the GDR. After military service, desertion, and joining the Italian resistance, he moved to Halle, where he taught at the Burg Giebichenstein Academy of Fine Arts. As a proponent of Socialist Realism and long-time president of the Association of Visual Artists, he shaped the country’s art scene like almost no other. The human body is the recurring theme in Willi Sitte’s paintings. Alongside his depictions of workers, nude figures constitute his second major subject matter; they made him the most famous nude painter in the GDR. His sculpturally modeled, powerful figures stem from his study of the Old Masters in Italy. Two naked bodies lie entwined on a white cloth: on the left, a woman facing upward; on the right, a man lying on top of her, his ear pressed against her mouth. Their limbs are so tightly intertwined that the figures seem almost to be growing together. The flesh tones are rendered with thick, visibly dynamic brushstrokes, while the background remains undefined. Sitte treats the bodies and the background with the same brushwork, and therein lies the essence of the painting: The bodies are not placed within a space but seem to be made of the same material as everything around them. Where their entwining is most dense, the anatomy dissolves into pure mass of color. As a result, the couple appears less as two people in a specific situation than as a single body; the union comes across not as an action, but as a state of being. The tight framing precludes any sense of distance—one finds oneself within the painting, not in front of it.