Bernhard Kretzschmar
Bildnis Stephanie Dittmayer
1928
Oil on canvas. 104 x 66 cm. Framed. Signed and dated 'B.Kretzschmar 1928' in black upper left. - In very good condition. A tiny loss of paint left of the lower centre of the image and isolated inconspicuous retouchings in the background of the image.
Bernhard Kretzschmar captured the entire range of life in his home town of Dresden – from monumental cityscapes featuring its Baroque city centre to scenes from its bourgeois cafes to its impoverished suburban housing estates.
The image of Ms Dittmayer is one of Kretzschmar’s few portraits of sitters who were not members of his family. Stephanie Dittmayer (née Hammer) was the wife of Dresden businessman Hans Dittmayer. The couple began collecting works by expressionist artists in the 1920s and, over the years, they built up a significant collection featuring Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Lyonel Feininger, for example. In this painting from 1928 Kretzschmar has depicted her as an elegant and attentively reserved woman with a critical gaze. Dressed up to go out, with a hat, fur-lined jacket and gloves, she seems to have spent only a moment in the painter’s studio; an oblique ray of light picturesquely illuminates part of her remarkable face and sets a pearl earring shimmering.
Due to Stephanie Dittmayer’s Jewish faith, her husband and three sons also increasingly became victims of persecution during the 1930s, and Hans Dittmayer evacuated his art collection to Prague, among other places, in 1944. The location of several of these works still remains unknown today.
Catalogue Raisonné
Löffler 81
Provenance
Estate of the artist (the commissioned work for Hans Dittmayer was not accepted), thenceforth family ownership, Austria
Literature
Mathias Wagner, Die Sammlung Hans Dittmayer, in: exhib.cat. Von Monet bis Mondrian, Dresden 2006, p.127 ff.
Exhibitions
Vienna, 1928, Teilnahme am Wettbewerb um den Georg-Schicht-Preis "Das schönste deutsche Frauenportrait"; Cologne 1929, Ausstellung des Deutschen Künstlerbundes (fragmented frame label); Hamburg/Böblingen 1995/1996 (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe), Bubikopf und Gretchenzopf: die Frau der zwanziger Jahre; Dresden 2006/2007 (Palais Brühlsche Terrasse), Von Monet bis Mondrian. Meisterwerke der Moderne aus Dresdner Privatsammlungen, cat. no. 96 with col. ill. p. 210