7110 - Wollheim, Gert Heinrich

Wollheim, Gert Heinrich Fruits (Portrait of Carla Boucneau, née Berger) Oil on hardboard. 1928. 100 x 80.5 cm. Signed “Wollheim” in black paint at the lower left and dated; marked “362” in black paint on the reverse, lower left. Euler-Schmidt/Osterhof 171. Gert Wollheim, a multi-talented artist from Loschwitz near Dresden, was one of the thinkers and proponents of the new art movement in the Rhineland. After studying under Egger-Lienz in Weimar and Lovis Corinth in Berlin, he gained recognition during the “wild years” between 1919 and 1925. He was a member of the “Junges Rheinland” and joined the Berlin November Group in 1925. Defamed as “degenerate” during the Nazi era, he fled to France in 1933 and emigrated to the United States in 1947. Little is known about the subject of the portrait, Carla Boucneau (née Berger). In the biography of resistance fighter Otto John, she is described as a friend of Margot Sauerbruch and as a sympathizer of the resistance against Hitler. According to this account, she warned Hans John not to reveal his political views in the presence of Wilhelm Wohlgemuth, Ferdinand Sauerbruch’s assistant, so as not to arouse unnecessary suspicion: “[...] Carla Boucneau, a friend of Dr. Margot Sauerbruch, had warned my brother to be cautious in Wohlgemuth’s presence. He could put us in danger because of his reckless railing against the Nazi state [...]” (Otto John, *I Came Home Twice: From Conspirator to Defender of the Constitution*, Düsseldorf 1969). Hans John was a member of the Resistance and was executed after the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Otto John, too, had ties to Resistance circles; his later role in the so-called “John Affair” remains controversial to this day. Wohlgemuth later turned out to be a KGB agent. Boucneau thus emerges as a woman who moved in the circles of the German Resistance and, with keen insight into human nature, recognized dangers early on. Wollheim, who, after his return to Berlin, moved in both artistic bohemian circles and high society, depicts her here in warm, earthy tones—in a style reminiscent of the French Impressionists—as a fashionable young lady in modern, casual garden attire, presenting a fruit basket. Provenance: Van Ham, Cologne, Auction Dec. 1, 2005, Lot 662 Lempertz, Cologne, Auction May 30, 2014, Lot 544 Private collection, Hesse - Please request condition reports for the lots, as the condition is usually not specified in the catalog. - Please ask for condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog.