Brown-Red Summer Celebrates Birthday in Infinity

Literature

Gert Wollheim was a German Expressionist painter who worked after World War I primarily in Dusseldorf and became a member of the artistic movement known as The Young Rheinland. He was labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis in 1933, and especially because he was Jewish, he fled to France.

In Paris Wollheim became one of the founding members of the Free German Association of Artists. In 1938, three of his works were included in the traveling exhibition Degenerate Art. In 1939 he was arrested, but he was again able to leave in 1942 and hid in the Pyrenees. While he was in France, his life partner,  Latvian dancer Tatyana Barbakoff, was murdered by the Nazis in 1944 in Auschwitz. In 1947 Wollheim immigrated to the US and was awarded US citizenship. He never returned to Germany.

Our painting’s title, Braunroter Sommer feiert Geburtstag in der Unendlichkeit, is a poetic paraphrase of the content of Wollheim’s painting, not coincidently reminiscent of Paul Klee’s method to assign associative puns to his own works as titles. In the early Düsseldorf years, there was a fundamental admiration for Klee and his artistic principle; also expressed in the present composition, both ideologically and stylistically. The structures of the internal drawing and scattered symbolic elements recall the style of Klee and Wollheim adds, via a Dadaistcally playful manner, shimmering sun-yellow straws to his collaged landscape.