876 - Albert Hennig, Young Lady, seated figure in gouache, Bauhaus student and Zwickau painter

Albert Hennig, Young Lady, seated figure in gouache, Bauhaus student and Zwickau painter (1907 Leipzig - 1998 Zwickau), gouache on cardboard, signed lower right. A young woman sits on a low bench in a blue-green short-sleeved top and a dark red skirt, barefoot, her upper body slightly inclined and her head lowered; she holds a red object in both hands, a shallow bowl standing beside her on the bench. The ground laid in flat areas of broken brown, grey and olive green, the figure built up from a few broad planes of colour, the contours unemphasised. Age-appropriate good condition, stained. Image 28 x 21 cm (HxW), behind glass, framed, frame bumped, frame width 3 cm. Albert Hennig came from a Leipzig working-class family and found his way to art through photography. From 1932 to 1933 he studied on a scholarship at the Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin under Joost Schmidt, Walter Peterhans, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers, which makes him one of the last graduates before the school was closed. After 1945 he was a founding member of the group of visual artists at the Zwickau Kulturbund; because of conflicts with cultural policy he worked as a concrete builder from 1952 to 1972 and only afterwards returned to freelance work. In 1991 he received the Max Pechstein Prize and in 1996 the Federal Cross of Merit; since 2008 his artistic estate has been held by the Kunstsammlungen Zwickau.