Carlo Mense Lot n° 126

Carlo Mense Park landscape with swans. Verso: Portrait of a man Around 1912 Oil on canvas. 80 x 90.5 cm. Framed. Signed in black lower left 'C. Mense' in black lower left. - In good, fresh condition. Drenker-Nagels 11 and 12 Provenance Max Nienhaus; since then in family possession Exhibitions Munich 1918 (Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz), Carl Mense - Kollektivausstellung, 42nd exhibition, cat. No. 6; Bonn 1979 (Städtisches Kunstmueum), Die Rheinischen Expressionisten. August Macke and his painter friends, cat. No. 336, ill. p. 315 (with label on the reverse); Cologne/Wuppertal 1993 (Kölnisches Stadtmuseum/Von der Heydt-Museum), Carlo Mense. His Life and Work from 1909 to 1939, cat. Nos. 11, 12, with full-page color illus. p. 30 (with labels on the reverse) Literature Ina Ewers-Schulz, Carlo Mense: Kunstentwicklung zwischen 1909 - 1914. Anregungen und Umsetzungen, in: Carlo Mense. Der Fluss des Lebens, exhib. Cat. August Macke-Haus, Bonn 2000, ill. p. 46 The painting "Park Landscape with Swans" by Carlo Mense, which has been exhibited several times with works by the Rhenish Expressionists, shows a wooded park with a lake and numerous walkers in a slight top view. There are swans on the water and on the shore. Mense made the smooth surface of the water particularly attractive: the surrounding trees, the swans and a small section of the sky are reflected on it. Based on old photographs, the park depicted can probably be identified with the Hofgarten in Düsseldorf, where Mense lived and had his studio from 1913 at the latest. The park landscape, created around 1912, is one of the few paintings that reveals Mense's engagement with analytical cubism. In the year of its creation, cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose geometrically fanned-out forms Mense transferred to the park landscape, were on display in the spring and fall at the Rheinischer Kunstsalon Otto Feldmann and at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. The predominantly dark, tonal colors also point to an orientation towards Braque's landscapes created around 1908. However, unlike the French artist, Mense retained the planar forms that ultimately originated from Fauvism, interweaving them with one another and thus creating a deep spatial landscape. On the reverse is a portrait of a man in a tailcoat, white shirt and bow tie. This is probably a portrait of the painter Heinrich M. Davringhausen.