Kunsthalle Mannheim / Cem Yücetas
)Walchenseelandschaft mit Lärche
Jugendstil-Bau > Ebene 1 > Galerie 14
Intro
Between 1918 and 1925 Lovis Corinth produced over 60 paintings of the Upper Bavarian Walchensee landscape, which represent a high point of his late work. Like the French Impressionists, Corinth varied his recurring motifs, sometimes depicting the lake and the alpine panorama in morning light, sometimes at dusk, and occasionally even at night. The »Landscape at the Lake Walchen with Larch«, dominated by green and blue tones, provides a wide view of the countryside from a raised perspective (the terrace of the house).
Short, rapidly executed brushstrokes lend movement to the green meadow slopes in the foreground, with a powerfully staged blue-gray sky reflected in the surface of the lake. Corinth visibly turns away from a precise depiction of nature, embracing the full use of color effect and painterly gesture. His landscape possesses an expressive note, uniting emotional excitement with a free use of brushwork. The larch in the center of the painting appears frequently in the Walchensee pictures and was the artist’s favorite tree.
Background
The Kunsthalle Mannheim has a representative collection of works by Lovis Corinth: eight paintings and more than 40 graphic works. After studying in Munich, Corinth spent some time in Paris, where his main focus of interest lay in classical salon painting; in 1915, he then became President of the Berlin Secession. He covered an extremely wide range of subjects, from religious, mythological and historical themes to nudes, portraits and self-portraits, as well as still lifes and landscapes.
The artist’s unbridled vitality, which was not affected by the stroke he suffered in 1911, was expressed in an intense and spontaneous painting style characterised by expressive colourfulness. This can be seen in particular in the late works, which Corinth painted from 1919 onwards at Lake Walchen in Bavaria. Even more strongly than in the works of Liebermann, the painting style here reveals an emotionally charged, inimitable signature, which positions Corinth alongside the younger Expressionist artists and leads through gestural brushwork to the dissolution of the representational.
Kunsthalle Mannheim
