Bernhard Kretzschmar Lot n° 150

Bernhard Kretzschmar Portrait of Stephanie Dittmayer 1928 Oil on canvas. 104 x 66 cm. Framed. Signed and dated 'B.Kretzschmar 1928' in black upper left. - In good condition. With a tiny loss of color to the left of the lower center of the image and individual inconspicuous retouches in the background. Löffler 81 Provenance Estate of the artist (the commissioned work for Hans Dittmayer was not removed), since then family property Austria Exhibitions Vienna 1928, participation in the competition for the Georg Schicht Prize "The Most Beautiful German Portrait of a Woman"; Cologne 1929, exhibition of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (fragmentary frame label); Hamburg/Böblingen 1995/1996 (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe), Bubikopf und Gretchenzopf: die Frau der zwanziger Jahre; Dresden 2006/2007 (Palais Brühlsche Terrasse), Von Monet bis Mondrian. Masterpieces of Modernism from Dresden Private Collections, Cat. No. 96 with color illus. p. 210 Literature Mathias Wagner, The Hans Dittmayer Collection, in: exhib. Cat. From Monet to Mondrian, Dresden 2006, p.127 ff. Bernhard Kretzschmar captured life in his hometown of Dresden in all its diversity, from large-scale vedutas of the baroque city center to bourgeois café scenes and the poor suburban settlements. The portrait of Mrs. Dittmayer is one of the few portraits by Kretzschmar outside his family. Stephanie Dittmayer, née Hammer, was the wife of Hans Dittmayer, a Dresden entrepreneur. The couple began collecting works by Expressionist artists in the 1920s and over the years built up an important collection of works by Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Lyonel Feininger, among others. In this work from 1928, Kretzschmar depicts her as an elegant woman with a critical gaze and watchful reserve. Dressed in her formal attire with hat, fur-trimmed jacket and gloves, she appears to linger only briefly in the painter's studio; a ray of light shining in from the side effectively illuminates part of her striking face and makes a pearl earring shimmer. Due to Stephanie Dittmayer's Jewish faith, her husband and three children also increasingly fell victim to reprisals in the 1930s, and in 1944 Hans Dittmayer evacuated his art collection to Prague, among other places. The whereabouts of some of these works remain uncertain to this day.