The New Lake in Berlin's Tiergarten
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| The New Lake in Berlin's Tiergarten |
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| Lovis Corinth , 1908 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 76 × 100 cm |
| Kunsthalle Mannheim |
The New Lake in the Berlin Tiergarten is a painting by the German painter Lovis Corinth from 1908. The picture shows a scene at the "New Lake" in the Great Tiergarten in the Berlin district of Tiergarten . It is currently owned by the Kunsthalle Mannheim .
Image description
The picture shows a jetty decorated with flags on the Neuer See in Berlin's Tiergarten. The boathouse in the background is deserted, the doors and windows are closed. There are no people in the picture and the boats take up the entire area, there are no gaps. The boat hulls are designed with rough brushstrokes, and there are colorful pennants at the ends facing the water surface. On a hanging cord between the trees hang 10 large flag cloths of different nations, including several times the flag of the German Empire ( black-white-red ), the flag of Switzerland , the flag of France , the flag of the Netherlands and the flag of the United States . The flags are reflected out of focus on the surface of the water in the foreground of the picture, whereby the individual flags are blurred with each other.
The coloring of the picture is very muted in shades of green and brown, which are broken up by the colors of the flags, pennants and reflections. The sky, which is only vaguely recognizable between the trees, appears cloudy and milky. The bank divides the picture into two horizontal halves, the upper half being characterized by the colorful flags against the background of the trees and the lower half by the water surface and the blurred colors of the mirrored flags.
The picture is signed with the name in the upper right picture field without the year
- Lovis Corinth
Background and classification in the work
The New Lake is located in the Great Tiergarten in Berlin and was a popular local recreation area in the middle of the city. It was laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné between 1833 and 1839 and, with its beer garden and jetty, became a popular excursion point for the Berlin bourgeoisie as early as the 19th century. It was very close to Corinth's studio on Klopstockstrasse. Corinth chose a cloudy day for his picture when the boat rental was closed. For this reason there are no people on the offshoot and instead of a representation of leisure time, the pier with the flag decorations and the contrast to the lake and the trees are in the foreground of the representation.
Lovis Corinth was very fond of painting flags, as his wife Charlotte Berend-Corinth wrote in her autobiography "My Life with Lovis Corinth":
"The flags! This is an extra area! If there were flags anywhere, he was quick to hand with paint. "
The blurring of the flag colors in the reflection in the water leads to an abstraction of the colors and light values that were particularly interesting for Corinth. With his quick and coarse painting style, he particularly emphasized the light and color impression in the water and thus created a double abstraction of the flags, which leads to an “almost free composition of pasty dabs of color”. According to Haug 2008, “the reproduction of the mood of color and light goes hand in hand with an aesthetic reflection on the relationships between objectivity and abstraction as well as art and nature”.
In addition to this depiction of the jetty, Corinth painted another picture with the “Ice Rink at the Berlin Tiergarten”, which depicts the New Lake. In contrast to the “New Lake in the Berlin Zoo”, this is a winter depiction on which the lake is frozen over and is used by ice skaters. Flags are also shown in this picture, but they are not so clearly in the foreground. In the graphic cycle “Der Tiergarten” from 1920/21 Corinth again took up the New Lake as a motif, this time for two views of the lake, which are limited to the representation of nature in a few lines. Another depiction of flags took place at the "Emperor's Day in Hamburg", in which he depicted the flag-adorned houses, boats and banks on the Alster in Hamburg.
Creation, exhibitions and provenance
The time of the creation of the picture is unclear: after the memory of Charlotte Berend-Corinth , the picture was originally painted by Lovis Corinth in 1903 under the title “Bootplatz” and exhibited in 1904 by Paul Cassirer . In her catalog raisonné, however, it is dated 1908 and was first seen in 1914 by Paul Cassirer. Due to the great differences to the picture “Eisbahn am Berliner Tiergarten”, which is dated 1909, the earlier creation is considered plausible.
In 1915 there was an exhibition in Fritz Gurlitt's art dealership , whose son Wolfgang Gurlitt was one of the later owners of the picture. In 1950 the Landesmuseum Hannover and in 1964 the Gallery of Modern Art in New York City showed the painting. It was also shown in 1974 in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and in 1976 it was part of an exhibition in the National Gallery in East Berlin (today's Alte Nationalgalerie). The Folkwang Museum in Essen and the Kunsthaus of the Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich showed the picture in 1985/86. Further exhibitions took place in 1996 in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin and in 2008 in the retrospective for the artist's 150th birthday, which took place in the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), the Museum of Fine Arts (Leipzig) and the Art Forum Ostdeutsche Galerie (Regensburg). In 2010 it was part of the exhibition Liebermann, Corinth, Slevogt - The Landscapes, which was shown in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston .
The first owner of the picture was H. Wolff in Hamburg. It later became the property of Wolfgang Gurlitt , Munich, and W. Hahn, Grossau. Today the picture is in the possession of the Kunsthalle Mannheim (Inv.-No. 1098).
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d e Götz Czymmek: The New Lake in the Berlin Tiergarten, 1908 (?). In: Götz Czymmek, Helga Kessler Aurisch (eds.): Liebermann, Corinth, Slevogt - The landscapes. Exhibition catalog for the exhibition in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (Cologne) and Museum of Fine Arts (Houston). Arnoldsche Art Publishers Stuttgart, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Museum of Fine Arts 2010; Pp. 152-153. ISBN 978-3-89790-322-7 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g Steffen Haug: The new lake in the Berlin zoo, 1908. In: Ulrike Lorenz , Marie-Amélie zu Salm-Salm, Hans-Werner Schmiedt (ed.): Lovis Corinth and the birth of modernity . Kerber Verlag Bielefeld 2008; Pp. 258-259. ISBN 978-3-86678-177-1 .
- ↑ a b c d Charlotte Berend-Corinth : Lovis Corinth: The paintings . Revised by Béatrice Hernad. Bruckmann Verlag, Munich 1992; BC 363, p. 109. ISBN 3-7654-2566-4 .
- ↑ a b c Lothar Brauner: The New Lake in the Berlin Tiergarten In: Peter-Klaus Schuster , Christoph Vitali, Barbara Butts (ed.): Lovis Corinth . Prestel Munich 1996; 189. ISBN 3-7913-1645-1 .
- ↑ Charlotte Berend-Corinth : My life with Lovis Corinth. List books No. 113, 2nd edition. Paul List, Munich 1960; P. 66.
literature
- Charlotte Berend-Corinth : Lovis Corinth: The paintings . Revised by Béatrice Hernad. Bruckmann Verlag, Munich 1992; BC 363, p. 109. ISBN 3-7654-2566-4 .
- Götz Czymmek: The New Lake in the Berlin Tiergarten , 1908 (?). In: Götz Czymmek, Helga Kessler Aurisch (eds.): Liebermann, Corinth, Slevogt - The landscapes. Exhibition catalog for the exhibition in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (Cologne) and Museum of Fine Arts (Houston). Arnoldsche Art Publishers Stuttgart, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, Museum of Fine Arts 2010; Pp. 152-153. ISBN 978-3-89790-322-7 .
- Steffen Haug: The new lake in the Berlin zoo, 1908. In: Ulrike Lorenz , Marie-Amélie zu Salm-Salm, Hans-Werner Schmiedt (ed.): Lovis Corinth and the birth of modernity . Kerber Verlag Bielefeld 2008; Pp. 258-259. ISBN 978-3-86678-177-1 .