Discover Top Posts Tagged with #museum folkwang

Woman with parasol in front of a hat shop, 1914, Museum Folkwang, Essen - by August Macke (1887 – 1914), German

Caspar David Friedrich never had a patron problem. He had something worse: a market that didn't want what he was selling. "Woman at Dawn" - now hanging in Museum Folkwang, Essen - is one of those works that likely never had a commissioner standing behind the easel, tapping their foot. Friedrich worked largely on speculation, painting what possessed him and hoping Dresden's small circle of collectors would bite. Sometimes they did. Often they didn't. His most reliable buyer was the Russian royal family - Tsar Nicholas I acquired several canvases - but the German bourgeoisie found his work increasingly strange. Too still. Too empty. Too spiritual for parlors that wanted conversation pieces. So here stands this woman, alone against a salmon-pink sky, arms slightly open, palms turned outward as if receiving something invisible. The puffed sleeves suggest the early 1820s. A distant spire barely breaks the treeline on the left. The peat mounds flanking her like sentinels, the layered mountain ridges dissolving into atmospheric haze - Friedrich painted all of this for no one in particular. No contract. No deposit. Just the conviction that what he saw mattered, even if no collector was asking for it. By the time he died in 1840, nearly forgotten, it turned out the buyer was the twentieth century. Quelle: meisterdrucke.com

Lenk, Mack, Pfahler, Uecker, 35a Biennale di Venezia, Text by Dieter Honisch, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 1970 [Saint-Martin Bookshop, Bruxelles-Brussel. Art: © Thomas Lenk, Heinz Mack, Georg Karl Pfahler, Günther Uecker]