Swirls of snow

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Snow Eddy (Marianne von Werefkin)
Swirls of snow
Marianne von Werefkin , 1916
Tempera on cardboard
52 × 68 cm
Lentos Art Museum Linz, Linz

Snow whirls is the title of a painting that the Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin painted in 1916. The work belongs to the inventory of the Lentos Art Museum in Linz . Two design sketches are in Ascona in the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin , inventory numbers d 10 and g 15.

Technology and dimensions

The painting is a tempera painting on cardboard , 52 × 68 cm.

Bridge of Suicides

Probably the best known work by Füssli Nachtmahr exists in different versions.

The bridge in the painting Snow Eddy is the Pont Bessières in the center of the city of Lausanne . Werefkin painted the left part of the bridge railing in the color combination green and white, the heraldic colors of the canton of Vaud , whose capital is Lausanne. The arch of the bridge spans the old district of Rôtillon with a height of about 23 meters and connects the districts around the cathedral with the Château on the left and the Rue de Bourg on the right. The bridge construction, which was modern at the time, was opened to road traffic in 1910 after two years of construction. In Werefkin's time, when she lived in Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva , it was popularly known as the “Bridge of Suicides”. The abnormally high, round arched bridge arch cuts through the picture. Two faceless people dressed in black climb the bridge on it, a woman is closely followed by a man. To protect against the inhospitable weather, both wear hooded jackets . A railing with struts protects you from falling into the depths. Unreal Bengali light illuminates the multi-storey houses below. Whirlwinds sweep snow and rain through the canyons and the air above the bridge. The scenery is reminiscent of threatening, nightmare-like images, e.g. B. Goya's The Sleep of Reason gives birth to monsters or Füssli's Nachtmahr , which Werefkin quoted again in 1916 when she scourged the First World War with her painting entitled La Démance - madness. In the meantime, Jawlensky closed himself off from the outside world in his painting and hung on to his moods in his so-called variations on a landscape theme .

Bridges with increased soffit

left: Hiroshige , "rain shower over the great bridge in Atake"
right: Van Gogh , "bridge in the rain"

Not only what happened on the Pont Bessières caught Werefkin's attention, but also its construction. Werefkin's angle of view of the bridge is unusual. On the left half of the picture, it shows the steel construction in an “elevated view from below”, like the “supporting framework of the large bridges” in Japanese woodcuts. On the right, under supervision, you can see the steeply rising pavement, the sidewalk. The struts of the railing are made of solid material before the crown of the bridge. Werefkin gave the lower, continuous edge of the bridge the color yellow. It promotes associations with van Gogh's painting The Bridge in the Rain as a model. For his painting, he used Hiroshige's color woodcut Sudden Rain on the Great Bridge at Atake . The artist, who together with Jawlensky collected Japanese colored woodcuts , seems to have had several motifs from his woodcuts in mind while composing her snow vortex, e. B. by Utagawa Hiroshige , but also bridges by Hokusai , who likes to show bridges from below, influenced Werefkin's paintings. Especially his woodcut The Drum Bridge at the Tejin Shrine seems to have influenced Werefkin to the Pont Bessières . Hokusai shows the unusually high arched bridge from above and below as a prime example of Japanese carpentry. Werefkin had become acquainted with high-arched Japanese bridges as reproductions at the latest in 1902 through number 2 of the Russian magazine Mir Iskusstwa .

Dating

Werefkin depicted the Pont Bessières on a stormy winter evening. Two sketches in the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin in Ascona precede the painting Snow Whirls, which are dated with inventory number g 15 ("1915"). Andreas Jawlensky followed the creation of the picture in Saint-Prex and informed Clemens Weiler on "3.11.58" that "this picture was made in St. Prex in 1916 based on the model of a bridge in Lausanne."

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. ↑ On an old photo, Werefkin names the title “Tourbillion de Neige”.
  2. ↑ Werefkin shows the colors green and white in the reverse, wrong sequence from top to bottom.
  3. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Von Werefkins and Jawlensky's weakness for Japanese art. In: exhib. Cat .: "... the tender, spirited fantasies ...", the painters of the "Blue Rider" and Japan. Murnau Castle Museum 2011, p. 125, note 208
  4. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Marianne Werefkin. Munich 2001, p. 188, fig. 208, ISBN 3-7774-9040-7
  5. ↑ Alexej Jawlenski: To P. Willibrord Verkade . In: The work of art. 2nd volume, issue ½, 1948, p. 49 f
  6. ↑ Gerhard Kölsch: Ten miniatures, Japonisms in European graphics around 1900. In: Cat. Exh .: Japan, source of inspiration, Japanese art and European modernism around 1900. International days in the old town hall of Ingelheim, Ingelheim 2001, p. 28.
  7. ^ Siegfried Wichmann: Japonism. East Asia - Europe. Encounters in the art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Herrsching 1980, p. 145.
  8. ^ Catalog of the Van Gogh-Museum's collection of Japanese prints. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 1991, p. 13, Fig. 7.
  9. ↑ Exhib. Cat .: Jawlensky's Japanese woodcut collection. A fairytale discovery. Edition of the Administration of State Palaces and Gardens, Bad Homburg vdH, No. 2, 1992.
  10. ^ Matthi Forrer: Hokusai, Prints and Drawings. Cat.Exh .: Royal Academy of Arts, London 1991, Cat.Nos. 15, 35, 78.
  11. ^ Siegfried Wichmann: Japonism. East Asia - Europe. Encounters in the art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Herrsching 1980, p. 144.
  12. ↑ Bernd Fäthke: Von Werefkins and Jawlensky's weakness for Japanese art. In: exhib. Cat .: "... the tender, spirited fantasies ...", the painters of the "Blue Rider" and Japan. Murnau Castle Museum 2011, p. 126, Fig. 51