894 - Walter Gemm, Light-Flooded Forest Path in Spruce Forest, Harz painter from Halberstadt, dated (19)59

Walter Gemm, Light-Flooded Forest Path in Spruce Forest, Harz painter from Halberstadt, dated (19)59 (1898 Halberstadt to 1973 Osterwieck), oil on hardboard, signed and dated (19)59 lower right, forest path in a spruce forest with sunlight, tall spruce trunks to the left, beyond a view of a green slope, to the right the path leads into the forest, clearing with shrubbery in the centre, in the foreground the sunlit path in reddish brown and orange, good condition, upper edge with small holes in the hardboard panel, image 54x46 cm (HxW), framed, frame with knocks, frame width 6 cm Walter Gemm (1898 Halberstadt – 1973 Osterwieck) was a landscape and veduta painter and graphic artist. After an apprenticeship as a decorative painter he studied from 1919 at the Kunstgewerbeschule Magdeburg in the class of Adolf Rettelbusch and attended evening classes at the Karlsruhe Academy of Art in 1920/21; from 1923 he worked as a freelance painter in his home town of Halberstadt. He found his motifs in the medieval architecture of Halberstadt and in the landscapes of the Harz mountains and the northern Harz foothills, which he recorded in a realist manner rooted in 19th-century painting. His oeuvre comprises around 6,000 works; his town views are now regarded as pictorial records of Halberstadt before its destruction in April 1945, which earned him the epithet "chronicler with pencil and brush". In 1966 he received the Art Prize of the City of Halberstadt, and in 2023 the Städtisches Museum Halberstadt devoted a special exhibition to him. This woodland picture of 1959 belongs to his Harz landscapes, in which spruce forest, forest path and sunlight determine the pictorial effect.