CONRAD FELIXMÜLLER (1897 Dresden - 1977 Berli... Lot n° 314

"Self Portrait with Woman" Color woodcut on soft Japanese paper. 40,4 x 40,1 cm (58,2 x 45,1 cm). Signed "C Felixmüller", titled and inscribed "Farbholzschnitt". Söhn 234. Provenance: Christie's London, 06.12.1985, lot 498 / European private collection. Literature: Ausst.-kat. Conrad Felixmüller. The Dresden Years. 1910-1934, ed. by Ulrich Kremper, Gemäldegalerie Neuer Meister Dresden, Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1997, p. 45 Splendid print of the large-format work with wide margins. Rare main sheet by the artist, Söhn gives the edition size as 10 copies. Printed in four colors from three plates. The intensely colored woodcut dates from 1920, the year in which the artist received the Grand State Prize for Painting (Saxon Rome Prize) for the painting "The Pregnant Woman". Felixmüller himself had no taste for Italy, but felt it more important to take up studies in the Ruhr coalfield. For years he created motifs from this world in admiration of its people. In the mid-1920s he began to develop a realistic style that eventually led him to the New Objectivity. Motivically oriented to the representational, he resigned from the Dresden Secession in 1919, because he no longer wanted to declare solidarity with Dadaists, Cubists and abstract Expressionists, whose art he judged to be "nonsense and a waste of time and energy" and with whose "hieroglyphics of the most fleeting kind" he could do nothing.