Description:

PAUL KLEINSCHMIDT (GERMAN 1883-1949)
Der Baum, 1927
oil on panel
70 x 90 cm (27 1/2 x 35 3/8 in.)
signed and dated lower left; inscribed on verso by A. Kleinschmidt

PROVENANCE
Erich Cohn Collection
Thence by descent in the family to the present owner
Phillips, New York, November 16, 1998, lot 50

LOT NOTES
The present lot comes from the estate of Erich Cohn, a prolific patron and collector of German expressionism. Born in 1890 in Filehne (present-day Poland), Mr. Cohn emigrated to the United States before the outbreak of the Second World War, where in 1937 he became president of the noodle and matzoh manufactory A. Goodman & Sons.
Art from the Erich Cohn Collection, especially by Kleinschmidt, Grosz, Gottlieb and Kollwitz, is held at the MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums and the Carnegie Museum of Art.
In 1927, the same year this painting was produced, Cohn met with Paul Kleinschmidt at the suggestion of art critic Julius Meier-Graefe and soon became the artist's most important patron. He was instrumental in introducing Kleinschmidt to American audiences by facilitating the artist's first U.S. retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago ( Paintings by Paul Kleinschmidt lent by Erich Cohn, December 14, 1933 - January 21, 1934; the exhibition also traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Of the twenty-four pieces shown, at least five were lent by Cohn and another by George Grosz, a mutual friend whom Cohn also patronaged.
Although the annual stipend provided by Cohn allowed Kleinschmidt to work unencumbered for some time, he soon found himself under attack by the Nazi regime. Proclaimed a "Degenerate" artist -- featured in the infamous Entartete "Kunst" Ausftellungsführer exhibit of 1937 -- and banned from painting, Kleinschmidt fled to the Netherlands in 1936. (His intent to emigrate to his patron in New York was never realized). Kleinschmidt would stay in Holland for two years before moving to France. There he again came under state scrutiny, then interned and forcibly repatriated to Germany in 1943, where he died six years later ( German Expressionist Prints: The Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection, 170).
Der Baum, an early work dating to 1927, is one of Kleinschmidt's finest landscapes to come to market. With its undulating hillsides and the richly applied impasto of the greenery, it is a quintessentially painterly piece. Kleinschmidt's work, as described in the 1933 Art Institute of Chicago bulletin, does indeed recall something of the intensity of Van Gogh, expressed, however, with a very personal palette ("The Winter Exhibitions", Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 27, no. 7 (1933): 120). Here, that palette is one of earthy greens and browns punctuated with a staccato of warm highlights, as rhythmic as the composition itself. Simultaneously, Meier-Graefe remarks, his landscapes, though often splendid, refuse absolutely to be mistaken for realms of phantasy, as we are reminded with the introduction of the railroad and factory smokestacks in the background (Meier-Graefe, trans. R. Manheim, Parnassus 6, no. 1 (1934): 3). This striking interplay between nature and technology, between the swirling brushwork and the robust verticality of the fence and columns, make Der Baum a work of exemplary caliber within Kleinschmidt's oeuvre.

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