Lot 45 D

The painting “Blühendes Kornfeld” belongs to a series of later landscape paintings created by the Brücke painter Max Pechstein during the summer holidays he spent in Pomerania in the 1920s. After becoming unable to travel to his beloved Nida for political reasons, he initially found new and peaceful surroundings in Łeba and then later in Rowy on Lake Gardno in the district of Słupsk – both of which were not, as he wrote, “overrun with painters, tourists and bathers” (cited in Soika 2011, p. 72). From 1921 until around 1933 these pristine places became a home away from home for Pechstein and inspired him to create numerous landscapes, seascapes and pictures of people working at their simple occupations.
In 1928, when Pechstein was planning to once again go to Rowy to paint, he invited friend and fellow painter Alexander Gerbig to come there, enthusiastically raving: “It is an entirely secluded backwater, but a magnificent landscape and, above all, you can walk around there however you please, without any inhibitions” (ibid., p. 79). That summer he also created two pictures of flowering wheat fields. Pechstein presumably set up his canvas directly in front of the field, because the high stalks block our view and permit us to see only a narrow strip of sky. With confident brushstrokes, he has sketched the lushly green ears of wheat, which merge into a sea of ripe flowers stretching back towards the horizon.