The stone pit

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Marianne von Werefkin: The Stone Pit , 1907

The stone pit is the title of a painting that the Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin painted in 1907. The work is part of a German private collection . There are preliminary studies in the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin in Ascona . Werefkin dated two of the palm-sized sheets with pen and ink "1907" on the lower right edge of the picture.

Technology and dimensions

The painting is a tempera painting on cardboard , 50 × 71 cm.

iconography

The painting shows a seemingly insignificant, indeterminable location in the Bavarian Alpine foothills . The eponymous "The Stone Pit" dominates the picture in the foreground. In the middle of it, a bush-lined meadow slope crosses the painting like a bolt. Behind it you can see blue and snow-capped mountains in the distance.

To the right of the "Die Steingrube" a road leads downhill past a group of conifers. Lanes make it clear that the road surface made of gravel and gravel is still new and relatively unpaved.

On the left side of the road, technical things caught the painter's attention. She made telegraph poles in her landscape painting earlier than her colleagues. B. Kandinsky and Jawlensky , worth a picture. At the time when “Die Steingrube” was built, the telephone was not yet a matter of course in the Alpine region. At that time there were only above-ground pipelines, which poles with white insulators made of porcelain were performed.

Kandinsky four years ahead

In the foreground of the “stone pit” , Werefkin depicts a road worker bent over to do his work with a wheelbarrow. The color scheme of this scene is unusual, because the vermilion red of the road roller, which matches the red cap of the worker, acts like a signal . As bright blobs of color, they are confronted with the surrounding blue, creating an unmistakable disharmony. Werefkin's overarching theme is therefore the representation of the optical effect of the color combination of red and blue at a very early stage in Expressionist painting . Four years later, Kandinsky was to coined the term "dirt", which "has its own inner sound like every other being."

Thus, "Die Steingrube", together with Werefkin's painting "Biergarten", is one of the most progressive paintings that were created in Munich in 1907. Werefkin painted in "dirty tones" at a time when, for example, Jawlensky was still practicing a painting style in the style of Van Gogh or Kandinsky and Münter , doubting the spatula technique, were still looking for their own style. It was not until January 1911 that Kandinsky recognized the extraordinary importance of painting with “dirty tones”. Compared with Marc he confessed at the time: "I want to paint absolutely filthy, and only then my thoughts will express quite what they should."

The Schönberg concert

Kandinsky's intention to “paint dirty” was preceded by a visit to a Schönberg concert on January 2, 1911, which Werefkin attended with Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Münter, Marc and Helmuth Macke . There they had got to know a type of music that renounced the keeping of a key, introduced a dissociative sound language and increased this atonality from sentence to sentence.

In his first letter to Arnold Schönberg on January 18, 1911, Kandinsky stated that he believed that music was ahead of painting when it came to renewing established listening and viewing habits. He said that this development is only just beginning, solutions are still to be sought: “And this path is that of dissonances in art, so in painting as well as in music.” He said to Marc: “You see, I still can't do without the beautiful, pure colors; I still paint against my will, in old color harmonies, about which I am not in the least concerned. Schönberg took this big step beyond me. "

Dirt in the painting

When Kandinsky wrote his book “On the Spiritual in Art”, he was likely to have had several dissonant images of the Werefkin and their explanations in front of and in his ears. His explanations about the combination of the colors red and blue can be seen in Werefkin's paintings “Die Steingrube” or “Biergarten” . Kandinsky said: “In the middle state, like cinnabar, the red gains in the persistence of the sharp feeling: it is like a uniformly glowing passion, a self-assured force which cannot easily be drowned out, but which can be erased by blue, like red-hot iron through water. This red does not tolerate anything cold and loses its sound and meaning through the same. Or to put it better: this violent, tragic cooling produces a tone which is especially [...] avoided and frowned upon by painters as 'dirt' today. And wrongly. The dirt in material form as a material idea, as a material being, has its inner sound like every other being. That is why avoiding dirt in painting today is just as unfair and one-sided as the fear of 'pure' color was yesterday. It should never be forgotten that all means are pure which arise from inner necessity. The outwardly dirty is pure here. "

literature

  • Clemens Weiler : Marianne Werefkin 1860–1938. Exhib. Cat .: Municipal Museum Wiesbaden 1958
  • Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin and her influence on the Blue Rider. In: exhib. Cat .: Marianne Werefkin, paintings and sketches. Wiesbaden Museum 1980
  • Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. Munich 2001, p. 128 f, fig. 133, ISBN 3-7774-9040-7
  • Bernd Fäthke : Marianne Werefkin: Clemens Weiler's Legacy. In: Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle. (Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche eds.), Leiden / Boston 2016 (English), pp. 8–19, ISBN 978-9-0043-2897-6 , pp. 8–19, here pp. 14–19; JSTOR 10.1163 / j.ctt1w8h0q1.7

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Inventory number: FMW 50-5678-b26 / 4-5
  2. ↑ 7.8 × 12 cm
  3. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. Munich 2001, p. 99 ff, Fig. 111, ISBN 3-7774-9040-7
  4. ↑ "Murnau - View with Railway and Castle" , Hans Konrad Roethel and Jean K. Benjamin: Kandinsky, catalog raisonné of oil paintings 1900-1915. Vol. I, London 1982, No. 302, p. 285
  5. ^ Maria Jawlensky, Lucia Pieroni-Jawlensky and Angelica Jawlensky (eds.): Alexej von Jawlensky, Catalog Raisonné of the oil-paintings. Vol. 1, Munich 1991, No. 556, p. 429, Blue Mountains (landscape with a yellow chimney) .
  6. ↑ Wassily Kandinsky: About the spiritual in art, especially in painting. Munich 1912, (2nd edition), p. (The first edition was published by Piper in Munich at the end of 1911 with the imprint 1912), p. 84
  7. ^ Franz Marc: Letters. In: exhib. Cat .: Franz Marc 1880-1916. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich 1980, p. 116
  8. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Marianne Werefkin, Leben und Werk, Munich 1988, pp. 105 ff
  9. ^ Franz Marc: Letters. In: exhib. Cat .: Franz Marc 1880-1916. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich 1980, p. 117
  10. ↑ Gisela Kleine, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, biography of a couple, Frankfurt / M. 1990, p. 365
  11. ^ Arnold Schönberg, Wassily Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents of an Extraordinary Encounter, Jelena Hahl-Koch (ed.), Munich 1983, p. 19
  12. ^ Franz Marc: Letters. In: exhib. Cat .: Franz Marc 1880-1916. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich 1980, p. 117
  13. ↑ Wassily Kandinsky: About the spiritual in art, especially in painting. Munich 1912, (2nd edition), p. (The first edition was published by Piper in Munich at the end of 1911 with the imprint 1912), p. 83