Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

Wollheim, Gert Heinrich
1894 Dresden - 1974 New York

Die Kartenpieler.
1946. Oil on plywood. 80 x 101cm. Signed on the bottom in the slate: Wollheim. Framed.


Provenance:
Private ownership, London

Literature:
Stephan von Wiese (Ed.): Gert H. Wollheim (1894-1974) - Monographie und Werkverzeichnis,
Cologne 1993, work-no. 337, n. ill.

"Ihr sollt meine Bilder nehmen wie eine Kokusnuss / Die auf den steifen Hut fiel euch /
Und eine Dülle gemacht hat / Aber dann wenn das Malheur vorbei ist / Habt ihr sie in eurer
Hand / Und nun mit Hammer und Messer ran an die Schale / Ich versprech euch's fließt süße warme Milch raus / Aber wartet nicht zu viel tausend Jahre damit / Sonst wird alles faul und stinkt ganz alt und modrig." (Gert Wollheim, 1919)

Gert Wollheim counts among the great individualists in the German art history of the 20th century. Coming from a bourgeois family he feels obliged to revolutionary, rather "proletarian" ideas after WWI. His rebellious speeches and his uncompromising views are equally feared and respected in the Düsseldorf and Berlin art scenes during the 1920s and the early 1930s. Wollheim is an avant-gardist who commits himself vigorously to the "Neue Kunst". And this doesn't change when he escapes the National Socialists in 1933 to his Paris exile or when he is detained in several internment camps in France between 1939 and 1942 or during his subsequent years in hiding.

Wollheim's idiosyncratic opinion finds expression in a painterly manner that is beyond any attribution to a certain concept of style. He keeps trying out new possibilities of artistic articulation consciously referring to "old" traditions in art history. Therefore, his painting is situated between realism, expressionism, surrealism and Dadaism.

But there is one essential quality to all his paintings - turning the inside out. Wollheim always takes a look behind the facade of things and into the inner life of human beings. This also applies to the painting "Die Kartenspieler" that was created in the year of his return to Paris and one year before his emigration to New York. A panopticon of actors is crowded together around a table: in the centre an obese grinning clown looking at his palms. On the left a skinny man musingly stroking his chin. Facing him a vagabond with an upside down parakeet on his shoulder who seems to show with a large gesture that he has seen "it". Is this all about cheating or just a fierce recapitulation of a card game...? The possible witnesses are involved with other things. The tea drinking lady on the left is starring motionlessly into space and the man in the middle doesn't turn towards the players either. Only the dancer who is more or less hidden behind the bodies of the clown and the vagabond is observing what is going on - through her mirror. The beholder has the impression to witness a grotesque theatre play. Due to the close image detail he becomes part of the farce. And neither does Wollheim exclude himself: He places his signature on just that slate on which losses and gains are added up at the end of a game.