LFor a long time, the agreement between London’s National Gallery and Tate was that the former would more or less stop at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the Tate would take care of post-1900 art. A number of interesting acquisitions, however, show how the National Gallery consistently stretches the term from the long nineteenth century into the twentieth century, in order to also include the period of dramatic upheaval before the First World War in the chronological presentation of Western painting since the late Middle Ages. At the same time, the National Gallery is concerned with modern German art, which is poorly represented in England for historical reasons.
The latest acquisition from this area has been hanging there since the beginning of this week: Max Pechstein’s colorful portrait of fifteen-year-old Charlotte Cuhrt from 1910. With a wide hat and bright red dress, sitting on an armchair with her legs slightly apart, the Berliner’s daughter seems to be businessman and building contractor Max Cuhrt to strive for ladylike affectation. Her wide eyes reinforce the impression of youthful innocence. The museum recently bought the painting at Bonhams auction house in London for £630,000.
The auction route of the painting
The picture, which was owned by Max Cuhrt’s descendants until 2008, achieved a price of 825,000 euros at auction house Ketterer in 2015. A few months earlier it had failed at Sotheby’s in London with an estimate of 600,000 to 800,000 pounds. The somewhat variable reception in trade can be explained by the fact that the portrait, as Pechstein’s early work, does not yet correspond to the artist’s more mature style, which collectors of classical expressionism are keen on.
But the attraction of this work for the National Gallery lies precisely in this. On the one hand, the 1.75 meter high painting, like Gustav Klimt’s portrait of the Viennese Hermine Gallia, which he acquired in 2006, ties into the tradition of full-length European portrait painting, which the London museum is presenting in a central room with a series spanning four centuries, which is presented in the Late Renaissance begins with Moretto da Brescia and Giovanni Battista Moroni and continues through Anthony van Dyck, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence to Eugène Delacroix in the later nineteenth century. On the other hand, Pechstein points the way to the future: with intensive areas of color and economical use of lines, the portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt demonstrates the fresh impetus that emanated from the French avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century and ultimately led to an increasingly non-representational language of form.
Pechstein’s place in modern art history
Pechstein was the first member of the artist group “Die Brücke” to go to Paris. In 1908 he came into contact with the new art movements, especially the Fauves. Returning to Berlin, he had the opportunity to take a closer look at works by Matisse and Cézanne through the individual shows at the Cassirer Gallery. It was also during this period that he became acquainted with the Berlin architect Bruno Schneidereit, who built a large corner house on Kurfürstendamm for Max Cuhrt. The family moved into an apartment there, and Pechstein helped furnish it.
Trained as a decorator, he was on the threshold of his breakthrough as a freelance painter. However, his financial situation was so tight that he sometimes could not even afford painting materials. Hence the willingness to make compromises, especially since Pechstein was able to live in a roof studio in the Cuhrt apartment building free of charge for a while. Not only was he commissioned to paint the stairwell, but he was also commissioned with the portraits of Cuhrt’s wife and their daughters to fit into Schneidereit’s lavish furnishings.
A recent National Gallery auction preliminary drawing for the painting shows that Pechstein conceived it from the outset for the bombastic, dark-stained frame Schneidereit designed along with a chest on which the portrait rested. The intense colors of the interior resonate with the background of the canvas, as do the baroque shapes of the frame. They give the depiction the character of a mirror image, which is reinforced by Charlotte’s watery gaze.
The portrait was shown in 1911 in the third exhibition of the New Secession. The critic of the magazine “Cicerone” found it effective, but saw “no reason for the coloring based only on the most garish, unmixed tones”, which he regarded as pure arbitrariness. This assessment is contradicted by the temporary hanging of the new acquisition in the gallery with works of Post-Impressionism, which is one of the most visited rooms in the museum.
She places the image between Matisse’s 1908 portrait of the sculptor Greta Moll and a loan from Picasso from 1901. Pechstein also enters into a dialogue with Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat and other innovators of European art, the “sincere sentiment”. trying to convey new creative styles. The new acquisition, which comes just in time for the exhibition “After Impressionism” opening at the National Gallery on March 25, in which the picture will also be shown, now complements this aesthetic exchange with German Expressionism.