52 - Heinrich Campendonk

Heinrich Campendonk Stillleben mit Mädchen und Papagei Circa 1922 Reverse glass painting. 32 x 27 cm. Framed under glass. Unsigned - Professionally restored old glass breakage. Geiger/Bretz 31; Firmenich 922 HGB Provenance Galerie Vömel, Düsseldorf, 1963; Dr. Büchner; Private ownership, Romania Exhibitions Probably Mainz 1962 (Gutenberg-Museum), Hinterglasmalerei im XX. Jahrhundert, cat. no. 3 ("Stilleben mit Papagei"); Düsseldorf 1964 (Galerie Vömel), cat. no. 12 Literature Virginie Devillez, De kunstpromotor Paul-Gustave Van Hecke (1887-1967) en de avant-garde, Gent 2012, p. 174 In 1911 the artists of “Der Blaue Reiter” began to occupy themselves with reverse-glass painting, a form of folk art that these painters saw as a captivating way to expand their possibilities for artistic expression. Unlike his colleagues, for whom their engagement with this technique usually remained a brief and experimental phase, Campendonk was still devoted to painting on glass during his late work. He used reverse-glass painting to create his own, independent pictorial universe: the distinctively refracted light that is inherent to this technique and which causes the colours to glow underscores the lyrical impression that he sought. He utilised special methods to expand the expressive possibilities of this demanding technique and develop his own unique visual idiom. For example, he sometimes added dabs of colour with his finger tips to generate a vibrant texture, and he used a sgraffito technique to insert fine contour lines as well as hatching and stippling. Campendonk’s reverse-glass painting first flourished in an early phase between 1919 and 1924; the recently resurfaced “Stillleben mit Mädchen und Papagei” was also created during this period. Here, a still life featuring fruits and plants is combined with a female nude and images of a parrot and cow to form an enigmatic and surreal scene. The female nude is among the most frequently recurring subjects from this phase in the artist’s work, but he also depicted the motif of the parrot multiple times. The jewel-like shimmer of the bird’s plumage is brought out in a particularly spectacular way in our reverse-glass painting, and it sparkles in diverse shades of green. The composition derives its special charm by combining diverse nuances in the colours of various passages, fields of opaquely monochrome colour and extremely finely engraved graphic details. Early reverse-glass paintings by Heinrich Campendonk are extremely rare on the market.