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Lot Essay
Painted in 1921, Max Pechstein’s Der Mühlengraben is one of a series of boldly coloured expressionist landscapes that dates from a highly productive summer that the artist spent in Leba, a small village on the Baltic coast of what is now Poland. Up until this point, Nidden – a remote fishing village east of Leba – had been Pechstein’s favourite summer retreat, a rural idyll where he could escape the frenzied metropolis of Berlin and immerse himself in nature. But, due to new territorial divisions drawn up in post-war Europe, Nidden was no longer in East Prussia and had instead become part of Lithuania. In the spring of 1921, Pechstein began a search for a new place to paint. Setting off alone, with his materials in a rucksack, he travelled on foot along the coast until he discovered Leba where, struck by the natural beauty of the village, he settled and immediately found renewed artistic inspiration: ‘…the new landscapes, the new people, I gorged myself upon them,’ the artist wrote, ‘I have the farmland behind, a far broader subject than in Nidden’ (Pechstein, quoted in A. Soika, Max Pechstein: Das Werkverzeichnis der Ölgemälde, vol. I, 1905-1918, Munich, 2011, p. 73).
Pechstein’s enthusiasm for the landscape of Leba is reflected in Der Mühlengraben. Here, he has depicted a river flanked by verdant green meadows, overhanging trees and bright orange cottages with a newfound intensity and vigour. Under the luminous blue and turquoise sky, the landscape comes alive with roughly applied, angular streaks of flaming colour, immersing the viewer in Pechstein’s distinctive vision of the world. The angular bridge serves as the perspectival vanishing point of this symmetrical composition, a feature that must have appealed to Pechstein, as he returned to it on a number of occasions over the following years (Soika, nos. 1921/25, 26; 1922/35; 1923/24).
Der Mühlengraben was painted in the midst of a time of great productivity and creativity in Pechstein’s life; a ‘rebirth’, as he called it, during which he was completely devoted to his art. In 1919, two years before he painted the present work, he had passionately declared: ‘I drown everything in colour, my brain is filled only with paintings, and the idea of what to paint drives me from one place to the other’ (Pechstein, quoted in B. Fulda & A. Soika, Max Pechstein: The Rise and Fall of Expressionism, Berlin, 2012, p. 229). Pechstein’s work of this period was met with great critical acclaim and was in high demand; in 1921 alone there were three solo exhibitions of his work held across Germany, and he was hailed by many as the ‘leader of the Expressionists’ (quoted in B. Fulda & A. Soika, ibid., p. 237).
Pechstein’s enthusiasm for the landscape of Leba is reflected in Der Mühlengraben. Here, he has depicted a river flanked by verdant green meadows, overhanging trees and bright orange cottages with a newfound intensity and vigour. Under the luminous blue and turquoise sky, the landscape comes alive with roughly applied, angular streaks of flaming colour, immersing the viewer in Pechstein’s distinctive vision of the world. The angular bridge serves as the perspectival vanishing point of this symmetrical composition, a feature that must have appealed to Pechstein, as he returned to it on a number of occasions over the following years (Soika, nos. 1921/25, 26; 1922/35; 1923/24).
Der Mühlengraben was painted in the midst of a time of great productivity and creativity in Pechstein’s life; a ‘rebirth’, as he called it, during which he was completely devoted to his art. In 1919, two years before he painted the present work, he had passionately declared: ‘I drown everything in colour, my brain is filled only with paintings, and the idea of what to paint drives me from one place to the other’ (Pechstein, quoted in B. Fulda & A. Soika, Max Pechstein: The Rise and Fall of Expressionism, Berlin, 2012, p. 229). Pechstein’s work of this period was met with great critical acclaim and was in high demand; in 1921 alone there were three solo exhibitions of his work held across Germany, and he was hailed by many as the ‘leader of the Expressionists’ (quoted in B. Fulda & A. Soika, ibid., p. 237).