196 - Otto Hettner, ‘Frühlingsfest’, egg tempera, a large-scale, Impressionist masterpiece from 1905, exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1906 and at the Emil Richter Art Salon in Dresden, in its original gilded stucco frame. Rediscovered from an old private collection in Baden; includes a copy of the catalogue of the eleventh exhibition of the Berlin Secession with a description & photograph of the work

Otto Hettner, ‘Frühlingsfest’, egg tempera, a large-scale, Impressionist masterpiece from 1905, exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1906 and at the Emil Richter Art Salon in Dresden, in its original gilded stucco frame. Rediscovered from an old private collection in Baden; includes a copy of the catalogue of the eleventh exhibition of the Berlin Secession with a description & photograph of the work Otto Hettner, 1875 - Dresden - 1931, German Impressionist painter, graphic artist, sculptor and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden; here: ‘Spring Festival’, a scene featuring numerous figures set in a Tuscan-Mediterranean landscape with classical-style buildings. In the foreground, an elderly man, honoured with a wreath of flowers, is being rowed in a boat by a young, naked man; at the bow stands a female nude and another naked man. In the centre, a large group of naked and scantily clad women and men are dancing and making music. Mixed media (according to inscription on the right: “Tempera: egg yolk, poppy seed oil, a little vinegar and water - varnish: mastic in turpentine oil with a little copal oil”) on Eternit board, 120 x 180 cm, signed and dated lower right 1905, on the reverse an old original label from the ‘Secession Berlin 1906’ bearing the number 489, as well as an original label from the ‘Kunstsalon Emil Richter, Dresden’ bearing the number 393. The following artists were represented at the Secession exhibition in Berlin in 1906: Max Liebermann, Walter Leistikow, Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, Hans Baluschek, Lesser Ury, Käthe Kollwitz inter alia; in its original frame, from an old private collection in Baden. Lit. Secession Catalogue 1906, pp. 20, 84 https://archive.org/details/katalogderausste1119berl About the artist: Otto Hettner studied under Robert Poetzelberger at the Karlsruhe Art School from 1893, attended the Académie Julian in 1895, and lived in Paris as a freelance artist from 1896 to 1903. In 1897, through the Ernst Arnold Gallery in Dresden, he arranged the sale of prints by Edvard Munch, whose Paris studio he looked after during Munch’s absence in 1903 and 1904. From 1904 to 1911, Hettner lived in Florence; in 1913, he moved with his family to Berlin-Charlottenburg, where his studio was located on Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin-Tiergarten. During the First World War - having been discharged from the military following a severe bout of tuberculosis - Hettner accepted a post at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden. In 1916 he was on the executive committee of the Freie Secession; the following year he became head of the nude drawing studio at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he served as a professor from 1918 to 1927 and, at times, as president. Hettner’s works were deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. In 1937, as part of the ‘Degenerate Art’ campaign, 15 of his works were confiscated from the Kunsthütte in Chemnitz, the Municipal Museum of Art and Crafts in Dortmund, the Museum of Art and Applied Arts in Stettin, the Castle Museum in Weimar, the National Gallery in Berlin and the Municipal Art Gallery in Mannheim. Stylistically, Otto Hettner operated within a highly dynamic milieu characterised by Impressionism, Symbolism, Neo-Impressionism and Expressionism. Although he was a driving force behind early Modernism during his lifetime and left behind a diverse body of work comprising around 4,300 pieces, his oeuvre was severely depleted by subsequent confiscations and the destruction of the Second World War, and is today largely overlooked by scholars. Today, his rare surviving works can only be found in a handful of public collections. In this respect, the work offered here can be regarded as a very special rarity and an art-historical discovery. (No dispatch via DHL; specialist art transport recommended)