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GEORG TAPPERT (1880-1957) Sängerin (recto) signed "Tappert" (upper right) oil on canvas 29 7/8 x ...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:200,000.00 - 250,000.00 USD
GEORG TAPPERT (1880-1957) Sängerin (recto) signed Tappert (upper right) oil on canvas 29 7/8 x ...
GEORG TAPPERT
(1880-1957)
Sängerin (recto)
signed "Tappert" (upper right)
oil on canvas
29 7/8 x 26 3/8 in. (75.8 x 67 cm)
painted ca. 1917
Landschaft (verso)
painted ca. 1915-1917
Estimate: $200,000-250,000 <p>Provenance
Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin (acquired in 1967)
Dr. Vance E. Kondon, La Jolla, California (by 1975)
Anon. sale: Christie's, New York, May 16, 1990, lot 386
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner <p>Exhibited
Berlin, Galerie Nierendorf, Georg Tappert, October 1963-January 1964, no. 37 (illustrated, p. 8)
La Jolla, Museum of Contemporary Art, Collection of Vance E. Kondon, M.D., December 19, 1975-February 1, 1976, n.n.
Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum and San Diego, Fine Arts Gallery, Out of Sight, September 9-November 4, 1977
San Diego, The Museum of Art, Early 20th Century German Art from the Vance E. Kondon Collection, January 28-March 11, 1984, n.n.
San Diego, San Diego Art Center, Georg Tappert, September-November 1985 <p>Literature
Gerhard Wietek, Georg Tappert 1880-1957, Ein Wegbereiter der Deutschen Moderne, Munich, 1980, no. 183 (illustrated, p. 186)
Tappert was an important member of the short-lived Berlin Neue Sezesson, which was led by Max Pechstein and included artists of the Brücke, such as Nolde and Rohlfs. Tappert's finest work typifies the ideas of the group through his daring use of color and radical manipulation of form. This can be seen by comparing the ideas written in the preface of the catalogue of the 1911 Neue Sezession exhibition with the striking stylistic experimentation evident in this powerfully expressive canvas: "Areas of color are placed side by side in such a way that the incalculable laws of balance imposed by color quantities abrogate the rigid, scientific laws of color qualities with a new personal freedom of movement and expansion of available space. These areas of color do not destroy the basic lines of the objects represented, but line is once more consciously used as a factor, not to express or shape forms, but to describe forms, to characterize the expression of a feeling and to place figurative life firmly on the surface...Each and every object is only the channel of a color, a color composition, and the work as a whole aims, not at an impression of nature, but at the expression of feelings..." (quoted in Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Expressionists, London, 1998, p. 159).
In 1912 Tappert became associated with Kandinsky's Blaue Reiter. The present picture is one of the most powerful quintessentially Expressionist paintings in Tappert's oeuvre, comparing favorably with the work of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter. What it shares with the former movement is its strident, spontaneous outpouring of fauvist color. But it also compares with the Blaue Reiter artists Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinky in its accentuation of the internal dynamics of pure form, without, however, letting go of figuration.
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