Sonntagmorgen in Danzig

Born in Tsarist Russia in 1884, Vladimir von Zabotin was forced to leave the country at the start of the revolution. Settling in Karlsruhe, he initially studied architecture under Hermann Billing, who at the time was occupied with the construction of the Kunsthalle Mannheim (1905–1907). A short time later Zabotin switched to painting, and as the master student of Wilhelm Trübner (1851–1917), developed into one of the leading portrait painters of his day in the southwest of the country.

At the beginning of the 1920s he abandoned the representation of spatial depth, composing his pictures on a planar-linear basis instead, as exemplified by »Sunday Morning in Danzig« from 1921: the picture space appears constructed, while the schematic row of trading houses in the background resembles a frieze. The railings in front of the blue of the river echo the strict arrangement and assume graphic qualities, while the foreground is occupied by the static figure of a woman, like a negative silhouette cutout. In brilliant white, the high-necked dress and stockings stand out from the cityscape. The picture’s almost naive-looking pictorial language displays certain parallels to the New Objectivist painting of that period.