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Lot Essay
Completed over the course of three years, from 1930 to 1933, the ‘Köpfe’ series represent a turning point in Walter Dexel’s artistic career. The artist had started teaching graphic design in Magdeburg in 1928 and progressively turned himself to design for advertisements, which seems to have given the decisive impetus to the series. This is reflected in the rather typographical nature of some of the eyes, noses and mouths of the ‘Heads’, and in their motifs which, due to the dramatic and confused circumstances of the time, were mainly borrowed from politics (such as Lenin, Hugenberg, Papen, Mussolini) or from characters of the society, like ‘The Rabbi’, ‘The Pastor’, ‘The Secretary’, or ‘The Gangster’, the subject of the present work.
Executed in a very graphic, ‘non-abstract’ way, each face is recognisable as a figure with a specific role in Dexel’s contemporary history, through the artist’s skilful use of geometric abbreviations, a style that has been referred to as ‘Synthetic Constructivism’ (W. Vitt, Walter Dexel, Köpfe 1930-1933, Starnberg, 1979, p. 82). Tough filled with wit and whistle, Dexel has always refrained from calling his ‘Heads’ caricatures; the features are not ‘exaggerated’ but rather ‘typified’: the ‘black marketer’ for example is pulling his shoulders, in the act of crouching, showing as devious.
Both Der Schwarzhändler, 1930 and the gouache Ohne Titel, 1969, (lot 321 of the sale), come directly from the Estate of Walter Dexel.
Executed in a very graphic, ‘non-abstract’ way, each face is recognisable as a figure with a specific role in Dexel’s contemporary history, through the artist’s skilful use of geometric abbreviations, a style that has been referred to as ‘Synthetic Constructivism’ (W. Vitt, Walter Dexel, Köpfe 1930-1933, Starnberg, 1979, p. 82). Tough filled with wit and whistle, Dexel has always refrained from calling his ‘Heads’ caricatures; the features are not ‘exaggerated’ but rather ‘typified’: the ‘black marketer’ for example is pulling his shoulders, in the act of crouching, showing as devious.
Both Der Schwarzhändler, 1930 and the gouache Ohne Titel, 1969, (lot 321 of the sale), come directly from the Estate of Walter Dexel.