184 - Robert Michel

Robert Michel London-Paradies 1931 Watercolour and white bodycolour, partly sprayed on, together with pencil and colour pencils as well as India ink on card, collaged, mounted on card. 51.5 x 59.8 cm. Framed under glass. Monogrammed and dated “RM [joined] 31” in black on the left of the drawing and titled “London - Paradise” OZ-TU + AQUA" in pencil lower left. Signed, titled, and inscribed 'Robert Michel: 1931. Ffm. "London-Paradies". (film-achsiat) OZ-TU + Aqua. auf HAMMER-CARTON. Hö 51.5 x Br 59,0 in cm gem. - einschl. ELEF-HAUT- und SPERRHOLZ-MONTAGE' in black and red India iink verso. Inscribed 'Chaninpoint [Chainpoint?] vom 17.2. und vom 5.9.1965' upper right. Stamped “Heimatmuseum of Modern Art SCHMELZ near 6239 GERMANY.” - Excellent condition. Superficial trace of a scratch at lower margin. Provenance Villa Grisebach, Berlin, auction 157, 31 May 2008, lot 226; Private collection, Brussels “They are very significant as artists,” wrote Kurt Schwitters in a letter in 1927 about Robert Michel and his wife Ella Bergmann-Michel. This assessment can only be confirmed today, for despite the fact that the artists created most of their works in the remote village of Schmelzmühle in the Taunus region, Robert Michel developed a personal, highly modern style by transforming engineering drawings of engines into concrete-abstract works. In the interwar period, his innovative works established him as a leading figure in the German avant-garde. Even as a young man, Robert Michel was fascinated by aeroplanes and their engines. At the start of his vocational training, he worked in a railway carriage factory and an aircraft hangar, and when the First World War broke out, he enlisted in the Air Force full of anticipation. When his aeroplane crashed in 1916, Michel survived only with the most serious of injuries. The long period of convalescence led him to art; initially, for a short time, to the newly founded Bauhaus, where he met his future wife, Ella Bergmann. After engaging with Dadaism, Futurism and Constructivism, and fuelled by his enduring fascination with engines, he developed technoid figurations in the 1920s, the elements of which were drawn from motifs of the mechanical world, including cogs, piston engines and aircraft parts. Technically speaking, Michel drew, painted and collaged his visually imagined worlds, conceived both emotionally and rationally. With scientific precision, he noted the materials used on the backs of the pictures in highly stylised handwriting, so that the front and back can be read as a single work of art. Ella Bergmann-Michel generally explored organic forms, which she juxtaposed with geometric planes and distinguished from one another using parallel and cross-hatching. In addition to Ella Bergmann-Michel’s characteristic paper work "Handdruck", four early and highly distinctive works by Robert Michel are on offer, which demonstrate the breadth of his style in terms of both technique and colour.