Lot 42 D

The fascinating painting “Liegender Akt” belongs to the important phase in Heinrich Campendonk’s work which lasted from 1917 to 1920 in the Bavarian town of Seeshaupt. Here, having deliberately chosen to live in seclusion, he reflected on the themes and painting techniques of his friend Franz Marc, which he developed into a personal style featuring gently flowing forms and large, calm fields of intense colour.
Campendonk’s move to Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg in 1916 was preceded by a general and personal new beginning: his friends and fellow painters Macke and Marc had fallen in the war in 1914 and 1916, Kandinsky and Jawlensky had been forced to leave Germany for political reasons and various groups of artists, including “Der Blaue Reiter”, were in the process of breaking up. Only after Campendonk had got over Marc’s death and the circumstances of his life had become more stable did he find the peace of mind to concentrate on his work again and to develop his previously cubist and angular pictorial idiom through softer, round forms. Thematically, he remained attached to representational motifs and repeatedly created compositions featuring a central human figure surrounded by animals and plants.
In this sense, he has also developed a reclining female nude on the right in our picture and has placed a cow looking in that direction at her side. Behind the suggestive depiction of a tree on the left, we find another woman with a cow entirely immersed in red. Diagonal lines running across the picture plane define and dynamise the composition. Suggestions of prisms and circles lead in contrary directions and convey a sense of depth. Proceeding from the watercolours of those years, he has selected red, blue, green and yellow as expressively bold primary colours, which he understood how to further intensify by means of brighter spaces defined by light. The two women and animals, who are completely unconnected with one another, seem to hover on top of the canvas, and they transform the painting into a paradisal dream image removed from any sort of temporality. More than almost any other work from this period, “Liegender Akt” mesmerises viewers while nonetheless preventing them from fully grasping its motifs. With this painting, Campendonk began a process of development that would lead him far beyond the principles of “Der Blaue Reiter”.