26 - Werner Heldt

Werner Heldt Pfingsttag 1952 Oil on canvas. 55.3 x 65.3 cm. Framed. Monogrammed and dated 'WH.[joined] 52' in grey lower left. - Very good condition. Seel 737 Provenance Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft; on loan to the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (since 1953) Exhibitions Berlin 1954 (Haus am Waldsee), Gedächtnis-Ausstellung Werner Heldt. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, cat. no. 49; Hanover 1957 (Kestner-Gesellschaft), Werner Heldt, cat. no. 42 (label on stretcher); Hanover/Düsseldorf i.a. 1968/1969 (Kestner-Gesellschaft/Städt. Kunsthalle i.a.), Werner Heldt. Malerei und Zeichnungen, cat. no. 99 with ll. (label to stretcher); Berlin 1980 (Akademie der Künste), Der gekrümmte Horizont. Kunst in Berlin 1945-1967, ill. p. 38 (label to frame bar) Literature Christina Thomson/Petra Winter (Hrsg.), Die Galerie des 20. Jahrhunderts in Berlin 1945-1968. Der Weg zur Neuen Nationalgalerie, Berlin 2015, p. 317 Werner Heldt devoted almost his entire oeuvre to his hometown of Berlin. The city’s chasm-like streets, its facades and squares run through his work, which is defined by a sombre and cool visual idiom. After the early anecdotal street scenes from the 1920s, which are still centered around the inhabitants of Berlin, from 1930 his views become largely devoid of people. It is in his depictions of the city during the post-war period that the painter ultimately arrived at his unmistakably distinctive style: “A Berlin that seems as if it were constructed out of a box of children’s building blocks and which nonetheless possesses a bewitching magic; a Berlin with Potemkin facades and windows opening into nothingness which nonetheless possesses a gripping reality” (Wieland Schmied, in: exhib. cat. Werner Heldt, Städt. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 1968, p. 3). From the mid-1940s, Heldt begins placing cubist bits of scenery, that become increasingly abstract, in the foreground of his cityscapes, most of which are composed in the form of views from windows, and the rows of houses become flat, seemingly uninhabited theatrical backdrops. The surrealist-looking “Pfingsttag” from 1952 presents an interweaving of naturalism and abstraction that is particularly striking for this late phase of his work. Monolithic, non-objective forms – above all, a U-shaped, black block – obstruct our view of the square. The church towers and row of buildings in the background and the delicate, springtime green of the trees and lawns establish the naturalistic counterpoints to these massive block-shaped forms, which can be interpreted as the ruins of a city still marred by the war.