115 - Walter Ophey

Walter Ophey Weiße Wolke Circa 1906 Oil on canvas. 61.5 x 88.4 cm. Framed. Signed (indistinctly) 'Ophey' in black lower right. - A tiny retouch in the upper left half of the image; otherwise in very good condition, appropriate for its age. Kraus G120. We would like to thank Stefan Kraus, Cologne. He has assigned this painting, “White Cloud,” to his catalog number G120. He did not have an image available for this entry in his catalog raisonné, which he compiled based on archival information. Provenance Private ownership, North Rhine-Westphalia Exhibitions Probably: Aachen 1907 (Städtisches Suermondt-Museum), Verbindung Düsseldorfer Künstler (the estate includes a handwritten list of the exhibited works, including the piece “White Cloud”) Literature Unknown author in the “Correspondenzblatt des Kreises Eupen” from 31.7.1907: "... bei der 'weißen Wolke' zu erkennen, die sich hinter einer geschlossenen Baumgruppe über Feldern auftürmt." An early painting from Ophey’s time at the Düsseldorf Academy. The densely layered, saturated brushstrokes in clear, barely mixed colours are reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s style. With this technique, Ophey creates an atmospheric, dynamic landscape. One might think this is a view of the countryside around Eupen. He had spent the summer of 1905 there, producing studies of nature (Stefan Kraus, Ophex und die rheinische Kunstszene, in: exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf et al., Walter Ophey. Das Gesamtwerk, 1991, p. 20). Ophey himself describes his homeland as follows: “Undulating meadows, with large old ash and oak trees standing inside the hedgerows, then on to endless forests with mountain streams full of large, round stones that seemed enormous to me. Whitewashed houses without black beams, with slate roofs – white, green, red” (Ophey in: Exhibition catalogue Walter Ophey, Clemens-Sels-Museum, Neuss, n.p.). After several years at the Düsseldorf Academy (1900), Ophey noted that “in 1905, a sudden surge of painterly skill emerged in response to the landscape” (ibid.). Alfred Flechtheim saw it that way too, for it was in that very year that he bought his first painting by Ophey, long before he organised his first exhibition for him in 1920. In the catalogue text for this exhibition, Heinz Koch described what, in his view, Ophey (among others; he also mentions August Macke and Heinrich Nauen in the same breath) had already achieved, namely doing away with “the gradually outdated academic style of painting” and bringing “light, life and personal feeling into painting” (Koch, Walter Ophey, in Walter Ophey and Louise Böninger, exh. cat., Gal. Flechtheim, n.p.).