Le chiffonier

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Le Chiffonier (Marianne von Werefkin)
Le chiffonier
Marianne von Werefkin , 1917
Tempera on cardboard
67 × 97.5 cm
Fondazione Marianne Werefkin , Museo comunale d'arte, Ascona

Le Chiffonier (German: The rag collector ) is the title of a painting that the Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin painted in 1917. The work belongs to the holdings of the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin (FMW) in Ascona . It has the inventory number FMW-0-0-39 there.

Technology and dimensions

The painting is a tempera painting on cardboard , 67 × 97.5 cm.

iconography

Werefkin “painted for the sake of painting and, above all, because a thought oppressed her. She almost always placed people in her landscapes. [...] Like an ETA Hoffmann figure of the 'rag collectors'. Bizarre in poor greed he stands in front of strangely shaped, blue mountains on a lake. Plus a tiny, stooping female creature in the background. ”That was the comment from 1958 on the painting “ Le Chiffonier ” for the first Werefkin exhibition in Germany after the Second World War. It was organized in the Wiesbaden museum by Clemens Weiler . Black clouds appear at the top of the picture. Countless red dots glow in them, announcing an approaching storm. Beneath it, poisonous yellow clouds waft over the mountain peaks. Even the green, black and red in the lake do not signal anything comforting. A white sign has been stuck in a mound of rubbish . Werefkin made a garbage dump on a Swiss lake worth a picture. She can therefore be seen as the forerunner of those artists who dealt with and visualized ecological issues in the 1960s and 1970s. They include u. a. KP Brehmer with his “Color Geography N. 8 - the Red Rhine” from 1972, Haus-Rucker-Co with their “Infusion-Rheinsanierung” from 1971 or Klaus Rinke , with his “Twelve Barrels of scooped Rhine water” . They denounced the industrial pollution of the Rhine and were exhibited on the occasion of the critical exhibition "Why is it so beautiful on the Rhine?" In the Wiesbaden Museum in 1975.

Date and title

The FMW has a drawing dated “1917” for the painting in the sketchbook g 15. Since there is also a b / w photo of the painting dated “1917” by Werefkin and labeled “Le Chiffonier”, its original title is also available together with the dating for 1917.

Lake Geneva or Lake Zurich?

Werefkin lived with her cook Helene and Jawlensky with their son Andreas in 1917 both in Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva and in Zurich on Lake Zurich . A report on the visit of the poet Yvan Goll to Werefkin provides z. B. Certainty of their presence in Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva by September 16, 1917 at the latest. About eight days after Goll's visit to Werefkin, Jawlensky from Zurich was able to report to Cuno Amiet in Oschwand that he had an “apartment on Drosselstrasse in Zurich - Wollishofen ”. Before the onset of winter in 1917, Dada supporter Han Coray arranged an exhibition for Jawlensky in his gallery in Zurich at Bahnhofstrasse 19. The following can be learned from Jawlensky's memoirs about his stay in Zurich: “In 1917 a very serious flu epidemic broke out in Zurich. [...] The doctors sent me to the south, to Ascona. We all moved to Ascona at the beginning of April 1918. ”Two sentences later it then reads differently:“ We came to Ascona at the end of March. ”Unfortunately, it remains to be seen whether the painter Lake Geneva or Lake Zurich inspired her painting.

literature

  • Clemens Weiler : Marianne von Werefkin. In exh. Cat .: Marianne Werefkin 1860-1938. Municipal Museum Wiesbaden 1958, cat.no.46, undated (p. 10)
  • Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. Munich 2001, p. 194, fig. 216, ISBN 3-7774-9040-7
  • Brigitte Roßbeck: Marianne von Werefkin, The Russian from the circle of the Blue Rider. Munich 2010.
  • 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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ TPH: Marianne von Werefkin's work in the Städtische Galerie: Painting things that are not.
  2. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: A picture of the Rhine. In: Wiesbaden International. Issue 3/1975, p. 7 f.
  3. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: The picture of the Rhine. In: Is it still beautiful on the Rhine? Documentation of an exhibition. Museum Wiesbaden 1975, issue 7, p. 3
  4. ↑ Barbara Glauert (ed.): Claire Goll / Iwan Goll, Meiner Seele Töne. The literary document of a life between art and love recorded in her letters. Bern 1978, p. 17 ff.
  5. ↑ Angelika Affentranger-Kirchrath: In exh. Cat .: Jawlensky in Switzerland 1914–1921, encounters with Arp, Hodler, Janco, Klee, Lehmbruck, Richter, Teubler-Arp. Kunsthaus Zürich 2000, p. 89.
  6. ^ Maria Jawlensky, Lucia Pieroni-Jawlensky and Angelica Jawlensky (eds.): Alexej von Jawlensky, Catalog Raisonné of the oil-paintings. Vol. 1, Munich 1991, p. 502
  7. ↑ Alexej Jawlensky: Memorabilia In: Clemens Weiler (ed.), Alexej Jawlensky, Heads-Face-Meditations , Hanau 1970, p. 119