Negro boy Mursi
Negerjunge Mursi is a 1914 portrait painting by the German painter Max Slevogt . It shows the boy Mursi as a half- length figure, a Nubian who served Slevogt as a helper during his stay in Aswan . The 57 cm × 38 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, belongs to a group of 20 Egyptian motifs that Slevogt sold to the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden a few months after it was created. Today it belongs to the collection of the Galerie Neue Meister .
Image description
The painting shows a half-length portrait of a young Nubian with a slightly twisted upper body. Slevogt modeled the facial features with a moving brushstroke, developing the dark flesh from red and blue tones. The three-dimensional effect of the portrait is underlined by reflective highlights on the closed lips, broad nose and forehead. With his head turned slightly to the right of the picture, the boy's gaze is not entirely clear - he may be fixing a point outside the picture. The high level of abstraction of the execution only gives an idea of certain details such as the eyebrows, while the right ear in the picture does not appear natural.
The boy wears a white robe - possibly a Jallabiya - and a white turban . This light-colored clothing is in stark contrast to the dark complexion of the sitter, but also to the multi-colored background. Little can be seen of the backdrop behind the boy. On the left edge, next to the head, you can see a plant with green leaves and purple flowers. Other areas to the left and right of the head with color variants of yellow and green indicate other plants in the background. In the lower left corner, a dark green area could indicate the back of a chair. A dark brown area in the upper left corner may show a shadow area. The signature “Slevogt 14” can also be found here.
Portrait of a young African
Egypt has been a popular travel destination for artists since the 19th century. The painter Jean-Léon Gérôme had already traveled to Egypt in 1868 and his colleague John Singer Sargent was also drawn there from 1890–91. In 1911, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke also visited Egypt. Slevogt's painter colleagues August Macke , Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet also set out on a trip to North Africa in April 1914 , but traveled to Tunis instead of Egypt. What they all had in common was the search for a place of longing in the Orient that promised exoticism and encounters with foreign cultures.
Slevogt's journey began on February 11, 1914 in Berlin and took him via Trieste by ship to Egypt, where he visited the towns of Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor and Aswan along the Nile. For Slevogt, the 39-day stay in Egypt meant a climate that was pleasant for his health with warm temperatures and dry air. He was also fascinated by the deep blue sky and the lighting effects of the high sun in the south. Above all, however, Slevogt was attracted by the strange residents, who for him and his travel companions Eduard Fuchs , Johannes Guthmann and Joachim Zimmermann represented an example of unadulterated life. Johannes Guthmann noted in his travel diary: "We want to get away from what was ours, we want new, foreign, wonderful, we want Egypt and Africa!"
In the paintings from Egypt, Slevogt shows little interest in the culture of the pharaohs, although he visited various temples during the trip. The buildings, ornaments and figures from ancient Egyptian times are missing as motifs in his pictures. Instead, people and views of contemporary Egypt with its Arab-African culture were among his subjects. In these paintings Slevogt shows a picture of an Orient, as it is conveyed from stories such as the Arabian Nights . So he painted desert landscapes with camels, old town streets with bazar, veiled women or beggars on the roadside. Even as a young artist he was interested in such motifs of a fairytale orient. Years before the trip to Egypt, for example, pictures such as Scheherazade, telling the stories from 1001 nights to the caliph ( Neue Pinakothek , Munich) were created. Even before the trip to Egypt he showed an interest in the physiognomy of black Africans. In 1912 he chose a Somali as a model for the main character in the painting Der Sieger ( Museum Kunstpalast , Düsseldorf). In this picture, a tall young African is standing on a lance in front of three tied, fair-skinned naked women.
During his trip to Egypt, Slevogt repeatedly chose black Africans as the motif for his pictures. In Aswan, he had hired a group of young helpers to carry the equipment and do minor relief services. Mursi, whom Slevogt was particularly fond of, also belonged to this group. He wrote accordingly on March 8th to his wife Antonie: “Mursi, who is the nicest of all with his black lacquer snout and the like. the beautiful teeth ”. At the beginning of the 21st century, this crude description of the boy's external appearance and the title of the negro boy Mursi are generally seen as derogatory for people with dark skin, but in 1914 this was not necessarily the intention. Rather, in this way Slevogt underlined the painterly charm of his exotic model.
Slevogt first painted Mursi as part of the crew of a boat in the painting pirates . Against the backdrop of the Nile landscape with the desert bank in the background, Mursi can be seen on the left edge of the picture. The portrait of the negro boy Mursi , on the other hand, was created in the garden of the hotel Slevogt lives in. It is known from Eduard Fuchs's diary that the picture was taken on March 9, 1914 between 10:00 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Two days earlier Slevogt had suffered a bruise in a riding accident. The forced rest phase and restricted mobility may have been the reason for the portrait of Mursi in the garden. For the portrait, the boy von Slevogt was dressed in a new white robe. In the shade of the garden he found the right lighting conditions for the contrasting juxtaposition of brownish-violet skin tone and light clothing. Despite a sketchy painting style and a high degree of abstraction, Slevogt managed to paint a sensitive portrait. On March 24th, he wrote to his wife from Cairo about the continuing affection: "I almost brought the little Moor Moursi with me, - but it's too risky". On March 14, 1914, Slevogt and his German companions left Aswan.
Max Slevogt:
The Winner , 1912
Max Slevogt:
Pirates , 1914
Provenance
The painting Negro boy Mursi is one of a series of 21 paintings that Slevogt created during his trip to Egypt in 1914. It was his concern to sell the pictures from this trip to a museum. For this he commissioned the art dealer Ludwig Gutbier, owner of the Ernst Arnold gallery in Dresden. He initially started negotiations with the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, but also considered selling it to the museums in Leipzig or Hamburg. Gutbier's negotiations with Woldemar von Seidlitz as a representative of the Dresden Museum were very positive from the start. Initially, Slevogt asked for the sum of 92,000 marks for the paintings from Egypt. Both parties finally agreed on the amount of 67,500 marks for 20 paintings in the series, including the negro boy Mursi . State funds were not available for the purchase, but the art-loving Saxon King Friedrich August III. had signaled his approval for the acquisition. The pictures were finally purchased with funds from the Dresden Museum Association and the Pröll Heuer Foundation, the latter of which financed, among other things, the picture Negro boy Mursi . On May 17, 1915, the 20 Egypt paintings arrived at the Royal Art Collections in Dresden. The series of pictures was first exhibited in the Sempergalerie in the Zwinger and from 1931 in the secondary school . After being relocated during World War II, the painting Negro boy Mursi was initially in Pillnitz Castle . It has been on display in the Neue Meister gallery in Dresden's Albertinum since 1965 .
literature
- Heike Biedermann: Max Slevogt in the Dresden gallery . Sandstein, Dresden 2012, ISBN 978-3-942422-71-0 .
- Andreas Dehmer (Ed.): Max Slevogt, the trip to Egypt 1914 . Sandstein, Dresden 2014, ISBN 978-3-95498-080-2 .
- Berthold Roland (ed.): Max Slevogt, Egypt trip 1914 . Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1989, ISBN 3-8053-1094-3 .
- Horst Zimmermann: Gemäldegalerie Dresden New Masters: 19th and 20th centuries; Inventory catalog and directory of the confiscated, destroyed and missing paintings . State Art Collections, Dresden 1987.
- Johannes Guthmann: Pictures from Egypt, watercolors and drawings by Max Slevogt . Cassirer, Berlin 1917.
- Christoph Otterbeck: Leaving Europe, artist trips at the beginning of the 20th century . Böhlau, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-00206-0 .
Web links
- Information on the painting Negro boy Mursi on the website of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Individual evidence
- ↑ In the literature, the boy’s robe is called burnous , although it is a cloak that cannot be seen in the picture. See Heike Biedermann: Max Slevogt in the Dresdener Galerie , p. 38.
- ↑ The color of the flower is also described as purple. See Heike Biedermann: Max Slevogt in the Dresdener Galerie , p. 38.
- ↑ Horst Zimmermann: Gemäldegalerie Dresden Neue Meister: 19th and 20th centuries , p. 297.
- ↑ Johannes Guthmann: Pictures from Egypt, watercolors and drawings by Max Slevogt , p. 12.
- ↑ Christoph Otterbeck: Leave Europe, artist trips at the beginning of the 20th century , 141.
- ^ Heike Biedermann, Susanne Hoppe: Max Slevogt and the Orient; Fantasy and Impression in Andreas Dehmer: Max Slevogt, Die Reise nach Egypt 1914 , pp. 18-27.
- ^ Letter from Max Slevogt to his wife Antonie dated March 8, 1914, reproduced in Andreas Dehmer: Max Slevogt, die Reise nach Egypt 1914 , p. 71.
- ↑ Andreas Dehmer: Max Slevogt, the journey to Egypt 1914 , p. 97.
- ↑ Eduard Fuchs' travel diary of March 9, 1914, reproduced in Andreas Dehmer: Max Slevogt, die Reise nach Egypt 1914 , p. 64.
- ^ Letter from Max Slevogt to his wife Antonie dated March 24, 1914, reproduced in Andreas Dehmer: Max Slevogt, die Reise nachgypt 1914 , p. 71.
- ↑ Only one painting from Egypt did not make it to the Dresden gallery. Slevogt sold the painting Bazarstrasse in Aswan I in 1915 to the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer . It is now in the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt . See Andreas Dehmer: Max Slevogt, the trip to Egypt 1914 , p. 104.
- ^ Horst Zimmermann: Gemäldegalerie Dresden New Masters: 19th and 20th centuries; Inventory catalog and list of seized, destroyed and missing paintings , p. 297.