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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF CARL GEMZELL, STOCKHOLM, SOLD TO BENEFIT THE MEDEVI BRUNNS FOUNDATION Carl Gemzell, retired Professor Emeritus in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Uppsala University, Sweden, was a warm, creative and humourous man whose groundbreaking and internationally acclaimed work in the field of reproductive research changed, and indeed created, millions of families around the world. After inventing the first reliable pregnancy test in the 1950s, Professor Gemzell developed 'the Gemzell Method' of treating infertility in women through hormone therapy, which is the basis of all infertility treatments used today including in vitro fertilisation. In 1960 Professor Gemzell delivered healthy quadruplets, the first of many babies conceived using this method. The seeds of Carl Gemzells prestigious collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces were sown in the 1930s when as a young medical student he started purchasing works of modern art from Stockholm galleries including Färg och Form, Svenska-Franska, Galerie Blanche, and Samlaren, many of which allowed the young man to pay for many of the works in installments. With time, his research took him abroad to live in the United States and Puerto Rico for many years, where he further extended his collection of paintings, works on paper and sculpture. Professor Gemzell wanted to live surrounded by his art, and the small and exquisite works he favoured were easy to move - he took pride in being able to pack his collection in a few suitcases. Carl Gemzells collection was exhibited at the Moderna Museum in Stockholm in 1996. Professor Gemzell was a great supporter of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to which he donated seven paintings by Paul Klee in 2004, one of the most significant donations to the museum in a generation and in particular to the development of its collection of early modernism. Some of these carefully-collected and long-loved works are now on the market for the first time in over seventy years, and are being sold to benefit Stiftelsen Medevi Brunns Framtid, the charitable foundation to preserve Medevi brunn, Scandinavia's oldest spa, of which Carl Gemzell, like his father and grandfather before him, was a lifelong supporter (see lots 122-123 & 126). PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF CARL GEMZELL, STOCKHOLM, SOLD TO BENEFIT THE MEDEVI BRUNNS FOUNDATION

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)

Zeichnung für Punkt und Linie zu Fläche

Details

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944)
Zeichnung für Punkt und Linie zu Fläche
signed with the monogram and dated '25' (lower left); signed, dated, numbered and inscribed 'Kandinsky 1925 no. 25 Zeichnung zu "Punkt und Linie zu Fläche"' (on the reverse of the artist's mount)
brush and India ink on paper laid down on the artist's mount
sheet: 15 1/8 x 12 1/8 in. (38.4 x 30.8 cm.)
mount: 19 5/8 x 17¼ in. (50 x 43.7 cm.)
Executed in 1925

Provenance

Nina Kandinsky.
Carl Gemzell, Stockholm, a gift from the above in 1956.

Literature

The artist's 1932 list of drawings: '1925, no. 25'.
W. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, Munich, 1926, p. 181 (illustrated pl. 20).
XXe Siècle, nos. 5 & 6, 1939, p. 50 (illustrated).
F. Whitford, Kandinsky, Watercolours and Other Works on Paper, Exh. cat, The Royal Academy, London, 1999, fig. 48 (illustrated p. 68).
V. Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky Drawings, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, Munich, 2006, no. 634 (illustrated p. 307).

Exhibited

Stockholm, Galerie Samlaren, Kandinsky: maalningar, akvareller, teckningar, March 1956.
Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Carl Gemzells samling, 1996, p. 14 (illustrated p. 15).

Special Notice

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Lot Essay

Zeichnung für 'Punkt und Linie zu Fläche' is one of the black-and-white drawings that Wassily Kandinsky executed to illustrate his 1926 treatise Pünkt und Linie zu Fläche. Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente, which represents the summation of the artist's methods and teachings during the period he spent at the Bauhaus in Weimar, when he sought to use geometric abstraction as a means of expressing a spiritual dimension in art. These drawings are amongst the most analytical and refined in the artist's abstract oeuvre. Dispensing with colour, each line and shape holds an emotional significance, and within the abstraction, movement and rhythm is created from the relationship between the geometric forms.

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