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Lot Essay
“I’m now in the thick of it and with some good pieces have even managed to impress,” Heinrich Campendonk reported gleefully to his future wife Adda Deichman in November 1911 (quoted in Der Blaue Reiter: Watercolors, Drawings, and Prints from the Lenbachhaus Munich, exh. cat., Munich, 2010, p. 27). The previous month, just shy of his twenty-second birthday, Campendonk had left his native Krefeld and moved to the tiny Bavarian hamlet of Sindelsdorf, where his close friend from student days Helmuth Macke (August Macke’s cousin) was sharing a studio with Franz Marc. At Sindelsdorf, Campendonk quickly fell under the influence of Marc’s vividly colored and heavily abstracted paintings of animals, which, the two artists both believed, had spiritual values that could counteract the corruption and materialism of the modern age. In December 1911, at Marc and Kandinsky’s invitation, Campendonk participated in the now-legendary first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich, effectively launching the young Rhenish painter on the international avant-garde stage.
Adda joined Campendonk at Sindelsdorf in the spring of 1912, and the couple remained there–living in a close-knit, intellectually invigorating community with Franz and Maria Marc, the Swiss painter Jean-Bloé Niestlé, and his companion Marguerite Legros–until the outbreak of war in 1914. Both Campendonk and Marc were mobilized; Marc was killed in action in March 1916, and Campendonk was discharged for illness shortly thereafter. Profoundly affected by Marc’s death and his own experience during the war, Campendonk retreated to the rural town of Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg and immersed himself in his work, painting bucolic scenes that meld the intense color and expressive surface of the Blaue Reiter with a new interest in the fantastical pictorial universe of Chagall, whose work he had admired at Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm in Berlin. “It was actually only after his return from the war that he became an important painter in his own right,” Peter Selz has written. “Campendonk’s subject matter consists of the most elementary objects of country life–farmers and their wives, their cattle and fowl–but he dismembers this ordinary world and reassembles it into a magic, dream-like place” (German Expressionist Painting, Berkeley, 1957, pp. 308-309).
Campendonk painted Mädchen mit Huhn at Seeshaupt in 1918, the same year that the Armistice was signed, bringing the long and debilitating war to an end. Dominating the composition is a large seated woman with simplified, mask-like features, pendulous breasts, and deeply bronzed skin, her head reaching almost to the top edge of the canvas. This bold nude, her bare skin symbolizing a free and primordial state, harks back to the women that Gauguin–the original, seminal figure of modernist primitivism–had painted in Tahiti some two decades earlier. The rustic setting of Campendonk’s scene, with a white hen pecking from a bowl of grain in the foreground and a simple, red-roofed hut beyond, is equal parts South Seas and Bavarian farmstead, and the lush vegetation that immerses the figure suggests a harmonious communion between man and nature. Although the schematized forms and disparities of scale reflect Campendonk’s long-standing interest in folk art traditions, the overlapping of translucent colored planes creates a complex, cubist-derived space that contradicts this intentional naïveté and lends the artist’s syncretist primitivism a powerfully modern quality.
Adda joined Campendonk at Sindelsdorf in the spring of 1912, and the couple remained there–living in a close-knit, intellectually invigorating community with Franz and Maria Marc, the Swiss painter Jean-Bloé Niestlé, and his companion Marguerite Legros–until the outbreak of war in 1914. Both Campendonk and Marc were mobilized; Marc was killed in action in March 1916, and Campendonk was discharged for illness shortly thereafter. Profoundly affected by Marc’s death and his own experience during the war, Campendonk retreated to the rural town of Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg and immersed himself in his work, painting bucolic scenes that meld the intense color and expressive surface of the Blaue Reiter with a new interest in the fantastical pictorial universe of Chagall, whose work he had admired at Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm in Berlin. “It was actually only after his return from the war that he became an important painter in his own right,” Peter Selz has written. “Campendonk’s subject matter consists of the most elementary objects of country life–farmers and their wives, their cattle and fowl–but he dismembers this ordinary world and reassembles it into a magic, dream-like place” (German Expressionist Painting, Berkeley, 1957, pp. 308-309).
Campendonk painted Mädchen mit Huhn at Seeshaupt in 1918, the same year that the Armistice was signed, bringing the long and debilitating war to an end. Dominating the composition is a large seated woman with simplified, mask-like features, pendulous breasts, and deeply bronzed skin, her head reaching almost to the top edge of the canvas. This bold nude, her bare skin symbolizing a free and primordial state, harks back to the women that Gauguin–the original, seminal figure of modernist primitivism–had painted in Tahiti some two decades earlier. The rustic setting of Campendonk’s scene, with a white hen pecking from a bowl of grain in the foreground and a simple, red-roofed hut beyond, is equal parts South Seas and Bavarian farmstead, and the lush vegetation that immerses the figure suggests a harmonious communion between man and nature. Although the schematized forms and disparities of scale reflect Campendonk’s long-standing interest in folk art traditions, the overlapping of translucent colored planes creates a complex, cubist-derived space that contradicts this intentional naïveté and lends the artist’s syncretist primitivism a powerfully modern quality.