Hermann Max Pechstein - Blühender Apfelbaum

Hermann Max Pechstein

Blühender Apfelbaum
1928

Oil on canvas. 70.8 x 80 cm. Signed and dated 'H Pechstein 1928' in brown lower right. Inscription on verso 'Blühender Apfelbaum/ HMPechstein/ Berlin W. 62./ Kurfürstenstr. 126' (painted over). - Few minor losses of colour professionally restored.

Shining in white and a gentle light pink, the blossoms of the apple tree have been placed on the curving, dark branches and the deep green of the intermingling foliage by means of short, dynamic brushstrokes. Spring also announces its arrival in the turquoise-blue sky stretching above the treetop and the thatch-covered roofs of the fishermen’s cottages around it. Isolated formless clouds are emerging, laid in over the intense blue in bright, broad brushwork.
The painting that is up for auction, “Blühender Apfelbaum”, offers a striking testament to the productive spring and summer months Max Pechstein spent in the Pomeranian fishing village of Rowe (now Rowy, Poland) in 1928. Although he spent the majority of the year in Berlin, where he also joined the Secession in 1928, the everyday life of the city almost never finds its way into his paintings of the 1920s. Instead, as he searched for places to withdraw to create art, it would be the summer-time impressions he initially gathered in Leba and then, from 1927, in nearby Rowe on Lake Gardno that enriched the visual world of his pictures. “It is a forgotten village”, writes Max Pechstein about Rowe in a letter from 12 June 1927 sent to his close confidante and patron, the Swiss art collector Walter Minnich, “some of the houses are 130 years old, didn’t think there was still anything like this in the present day here in Germany. […] The majority of the trees are just as old, and they’ve developed magnificently in their natural growth. The plots of land are freely scattered among each other, there are no streets, and the houses extend all the way up very close to the dunes, I live in one like that myself, it means we can go from home into the sea in our bathing suit …” (cited in: Max Pechstein, Brief an Walter Minnich, 12. Juni 1927, in: Pommerscher Greif e.V. : https://www.pommerscher-greif.de/pechstein-rowe/).
Repeatedly visiting the same places seems to have been deliberately intended to intensify his perception, while the seclusion that Pechstein sought out for himself enabled him to achieve the necessary level of concentration. In this phase of finding composure and inner clarity, an artistic aspiration directed towards longevity articulates itself – towards works “which bear their strength within themselves, which are lasting” (ibid.).

Catalogue Raisonné

Soika 1928/21

Provenance

Leo Spik, Berlin, Auction 501, 17 July 1977, lot 214 ("Rote Fischerkaten"); Private collection, Berlin