The  AHA!  Event  of  the  Month

Strathmann, Carl (Dusseldorf 1866 – Munich 1939). Ibycus. In meadow-land overgrown with mushrooms and three trees the friend of the gods walking to the right, mightily singing, the lyre in the outstretched left. Black pen, watercolor + gold on strong sketch paper mounted on cardboard, on which the work together is completed and repeatedly bordered. Inscribed with black pen on the sketch paper below right: C. Strathmann. 80 x 58.5 cm.

Literature

Thieme-Becker XXXII (1938), 160; Vollmer VI (1962), 436; Lovis Corinth, Carl Strathmann, in (Art and Artists) 1903, pp. 255-263, reprinted in (Legends from Artist’s Life), 1909, pp. 71 ff.; The same, (My Early Years), 1954, p. 132.; Heusinger v. Waldegg, (Grotesque Art Nouveau – Carl Strathmann … Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Graphic / Catalog of the Exhibition in the Rhenish Regional Museum Bonn March/May 1976 with 4-page selection of exhibitions + literature [Art + Antiquity on the Rhine 63]); Catalog of the Exhibition “Munich 1869-1958 / (Departure into Modern Art)”, Munich, House of Arts, 1958.

Single Exhibitions

Retrospective Exhibitions: 1916/17 Berlin Secession (Special exhibition); 1931 Munich Art Society; 1958 Gallery Wolfgang Gurlitt, Munich; 1976 Rhenish Regional Museum Bonn. – 1902 + 1910/11 Gallery Paul Cassirer, Berlin; 1907 Arnolds Kunstsalon, Dresden; 1911 Munich Art Society; 1914 + 1918 Emperor Wilhelm-Museum Krefeld; 1914/15 Art Society Frankfort on the Main, Augsburg, Leipsic; 1921 Leopold Hoesch-Museum Düren; 1924 Glass Palace Vienna (Special exhibition); 1931 Munich Art Society (Special exhibition).

Group Exhibitions

1892 + 1894 Gallery Fritz Gurlitt, Berlin; 1893-1922 repeated International Art Exhibition, Munich; Munich Annual Exhibition; Munich Secession; Great Berlin Art Exhibition; Berlin Secession; 1894/95 Munich Art Society (together with Walter Leistikow); 1895/96 Glass Palace Dusseldorf; 1905 2nd Exhibition of the German Artists Union, Berlin; 1907 German National Art Exhibition, Dusseldorf; 1958 House of Arts, Munich (Munich 1869-1958 / Departure into Modern Art).

of 1895 (Cat. Bonn ills. 138; Boetticher, Oils, 1; exhibited still in the same year on the Munich Annual Exhibition and the Special Exhibition of the Artists Union Laetitia in the Artist Hall Dusseldorf + 1898 on the Great Berlin Art Exhibition; 1942, not only in 1944 – so Kazuko Ono’s current investigation – burnt in the Munich Neue Pinakothek) as beside Salambo (1894/95) and together with The Saint Franziskus preaching to the Animals of the same year

 main  works  of  the  decorative  ornamental  Munich  Art  Nouveau ,

in which mix different influences of applied art, Symbolism, Byzantinism and Academism (Stuck’s sensational success ‘The Sin’, 1893) “

(Catalog Bonn, 1976, p. 9). –  And  Lovis  Corinth  1903 :

“ At the same time with the ‘Salambo’

his  most  charming  picture

‘Ibycus , the  Friend  of  Gods’

has been made, too. It is not unaffected by the Japanese. Flying gilt cranes occupy the upper part of the subject. To them Ibycus greetingly stretches out one hand; around the head he has a golden gloriole and rich clothes surround his body, a rich vegetation of not existing plants and trees cover the rest part of the picture.

I personally not hesitate to count

this  picture  to  the  best  works  of  our  time “

(quoted after Catalog Bonn, p. 82).

Here then Ibycus apart, in reverse to the right, greeting the cranes not silently, rather moved emphatically, with mighty song at correspondingly curved body, strongly looking up and laurel-wreathed. Adequate hereto the compact instrument held calmly in the left in the oil, but here long stretched in the left stretched up, far-reaching over subject + golden border on the mounting, crowned with bows and entwined with a garland of flowers. If the gloriole of the oil is thought here just so appears doubtfully as shown as a mighty golden half disk, suggesting rather a sunset in respect of the events, placed into the blue of the sky behind the trees, head/breast and the lower part of the lyre marked off by the meadow populated here only sparsely with mushrooms. As then also the garment still without train and kept nearly monotonously. All concentrated freely of any turning off on the just audible mighty voice, the lyre breaking the picture, the mighty gold disk. In contrast to the charm of the oil

the  anticipated  drama  of  the  forthcoming

reflected by the lineaments, the appeal to the cranes not present here as prosecutor: “By you, your cranes there up, If no other voices speaks, May be the suit of my murder!” (Schiller). Shortly, very fine example for the “strictly flat-like arrangement of the pictures during the 1890s” as then generally the works before 1900 are the decisive ones representing the “high art”.

Rooted in Symbolism + Art Nouveau Strathmann started as pupil of Crola and Lauenstein in Dusseldorf and from 1886 on in the more modern Weimar of Kalckreuth who lets him a longer lead and whose master pupil he is in 1888/89. On friendly terms with Th. Th. Heine, with whom he belonged to the artists group Laetitia, and Corinth who painted his portrait (Lenbachhaus Munich). Since 1891 in Munich and there a membert in the Allotria and the Cococello Club and from 1894 on in the Freien Vereinigung as a splinter group of the Munich Secession,

“ whose members … form the center group of the Munich Art Nouveau … The academic origin and the device ‘The Overcoming of the Naturalism’ is the common denominator of these paintes ”

(Cat. Bonn, p. 26); 1907 finally of the Berlin Secession. Since 1895 contributor to the just established Pan, since 1896 to the Jugend and the Fliegende Blätter (“Strathmann’s contribution to the book illustration of the Art Nouveau is not very extensive, but of high quality”).

“ Presumably no second one among the successful painters of our younger generation is to be classified more difficulty than Karl Strathmann. He suits in not any of the conventional drawers of the aesthetics … – he has from all somewhat and is at the same time still

a  strangely  own  weighty  closed  personage “

(Wilhelm Schäfer 1904 in [One Hundred Masters of the Presence], quoted after Catalog Bonn, pp. 16 f.).

And “to make evident more intelligibly as hitherto the unjustly undervalued autonomous position of Strathmann within the style trend (of namely the Munich Art Nouveau)” was then also one of the aims of the work-comprising Bonn exhibition increasing therewith together Hans H. Hofstätter’s preceding discussion with Strathmann. As then Brigitte Lohkamp quotes in her catalog contribution “(Strathmann in the Evaluation of Research and Art Criticism)” that voice, too, which sees in Strathmann a

“ draughtsman  and  decorator  inspired  of  genius  up  to  the  outermost  finger-tip ”

(p. 72).

Whose “grotesque” style packed not least those following younger ones, too, whose new stylistic means made respected international reputation to German art of the first half of the 20^th century :

“ Like many modern artists who started at the ‘grotesque illustration’ (Kurt Bauch) of the art nouveau, among them Feininger, Barlach, Nolde, also the young Paul Klee finds in his fantastic-satiric drawings about 1901 … here his starting point … (Strathmann’s) quasi autonomous play with forms tends towards the direction of abstract art in the sense of the ‘Self expression of the artistic medium’ (Juliane Roh) and leads into the ‘Hieroglyph’ of expression (E. L. Kirchner) of the expressionists resp.

Many  expressionists  are  rooted  in  their  creativeness  in  the  art  nouveau

… later Kirchner came to his stylish formal language: it had been reserved for the expressionism to radicalize the abstracting stylistic means of the art nouveau “

(Catalog Bonn, pp. 65 ff., already before, p. 64, reminding of painted postcards by Strathmann whose “fantastic inventions with realistic single forms … let think of Max Ernst-collages”).

In respect of the strong element of gold in the work here may finally pointed out to this as a “symbolism of the Symbolism”, as “a medium standing beyond all colorful naturalness and giving ‘sacral solemn mood’ (to the work of art), by which definition Hofstätter picks up Oswald Spengler to perceive after all in this whole allegorism evaluated in its contens “an admirable sublety”, a “completed invasion of the applied arts into the painting”.

Among the 128 Strathmann pieces of the Bonn exhibition not any one with a recognizable refer to Ibycus, from which the examplary preparatory work here accrues

beside  the  artistic  document  together  an  exceptional  one , too ,

in the result of the destruction of the oil in 1942.

Thinkable fresh in the conservation, nevertheless, the bronze tone of the gold should be conditioned by age. The mounting with its varied border lines in pen + completions of the composition with some weak little smudges and isolated fox-stipples in the left lower field. Coming along by the way with at least a

50-year  absence  from  market  in  the  drawers  of  a  connoisseur .

Offer no. 14,751  /  price on request

„ herzlichen Dank für die rasche und ausführliche Behandlung meiner Anfrage. Ich bestelle hiermit beide o. a. Gebote … bin ich auch mit Vorauszahlung einverstanden “

(Frau R. R., 20. November 2002)