RENÉ HALKETT (1900 Weimar - 1983 Camelford) Lot n° 42

Painter in front of easel Oil on canvas. Around 1924. 63 x 54 cm. Provenance: Estate of René Halkett/ Private collection Berlin. Literature: Galerie Bassenge u. Archiv Klaus Spermann, René Halkett. Oil paintings and works on paper, Ausst.-Kat. Galerie Bassenge, Berlin 2015 (ill. p. 16, cat. no. 8). "Already in his early pictorial works, René Halkett performs an independent symbiosis of his 'reality of life', i.e. early inclinations towards role-playing, music, the experience of the Wandervogel movement, with the 'New Theater' and the 'New Dance': his paintings are an inspired, anarchic-surrealistic, sometimes whimsical reproduction of real encounters and experiences, which he creates through imaginative perception, coupled with the mental processing of his impressions and playing with stylistic forms. This early work was created in a decade of upheaval and in places of progressive life reform movements, which, triggered by social collapse, political vacuum and revolutionary events after the end of the First World War, established and consolidated themselves in the emerging Weimar Republic. In the paintings and graphic works René Halkett documents and varies between 1924 and 1935 his impressions as a summer student in Loheland (1922), as a Bauhaus student in Weimar (1923-25), experiences on hiking trips with friends crisscrossing Thuringia or Hesse, his observations as a glider student in Rossitten/East Prussia and on the Wasserkuppe in the Rhön." (quoted from Ursula C. Klimmer, in: René Halkett, Ölbilder und Arbeiten auf Papier, Ausst.-Kat. Galerie Bassenge, Berlin 2015, p. 5). Works from the early creative phase are very rarely found in the art trade.