Im Garten – Frau, Pferd, Ziege, 1915, represents the sum of Heinrich Campendonk’s artistic interests and influences of the early 1910s. Campendonk began his career as the youngest artist included in the inaugural Der Blaue Reiter exhibition of 1911, and his friendships with the movement’s leaders—Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and August Macke—were absolutely formative for him. By the creation of Im Garten – Frau, Pferd, Ziege in 1915, however, Campendonk had synthetized the lessons of his friends, and his wider avant-garde milieu, into a pictorial language all his own. The present work bears the artist’s signature—an extremely rare feature for an early Campendonk painting—as the young artist humbly considered himself an apprentice to his older peers. The signature on Im Garten – Frau, Pferd, Ziege thus reflects the artist’s own confidence and satisfaction with his work.
Franz Marc, The Large Blue Horses, 1911. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Image: HIP / Art Resource, NY
Like his friend Franz Marc, Campendonk lived in a small village in the Bavarian Oberland, which allowed him to take in the beauty of the countryside while staying connected via train to the artistic circles of Munich.i From this rural vantage point, Campendonk developed a visual language of humans and animals in natural settings, related to Marc’s paintings of animals. For Marc, animals had deep spiritual intelligence and emotional depth to express through painting, but for Campendonk, animals were not a painted subject matter on their own.ii Rather, as Gisela Geiger argues, Campendonk’s interest was in the human-animal pair as parallel to depictions of saints with symbolic attributes, like St. Luke with his ox, or St. George riding a horse.iii Campendonk’s animals are symbolic; they are formal openings that connect his avant-garde practice to a rich Bavarian folk tradition and medieval art aesthetics.iv
Robert Delaunay, Crime of Passion, 1914. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. Image: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe / Wolfgang Pankoke / Art Resource, NY
Campendonk’s paintings of women sitting in landscapes, such as Im Garten – Frau, Pferd, Ziege, are “provocatively static,” per Geiger; the genre, called Zustandsbilder, or statal images, uses a surreal sense of idyllic ease to evoke a still, magical feeling.v The statis of the woman—modeled after the artist’s first wife, Adda—and animals in the present work also brings to light, by contrast, the frisson of Campendonk’s brushstroke, as he renders them each in overlapping shapes of varying opacity. His preoccupation with opacity and layers of paint derives from two sources: first, the Bavarian folk tradition of reverse painting on glass, in which details must be painted in reverse order, from foreground to background; and second, Robert Delaunay’s use of white paint to create transparency and more vibrant color in his innovative Orphic Cubist paintings.vi
Here, the fence post overlaps into the body of the horse, and the legs of the goat and trunk of a tree elide together. Only color separates out these disparate elements. Layered and radiant, Im Garten – Frau, Pferd, Ziege represents Campendonk’s synthesis of both the French and German avant-gardes, in a prismatic, expressive interplay of color, space, and form.
i Gisela Geiger, Heinrich Campendonk, Hirmer Verlag, Munich, 2022, p. 16.
ii George Heard Hamilton, The Pelican History of Art: Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940, Penguin, New York, 1967, p. 217.
Private Collection, Germany Private Collection, North Carolina (by descent from the above) Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York (acquired from the above in 2002) Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003
Exhibited
Berlin, Der Sturm, Campendonk: Gemälde und Aquarelle. Zeichnungen / Holzschnitte, October 1916, no. 7 (possibly; titled Gartenbild 1) Stadtmuseum Penzberg, Rausch und Reduktion: Heinrich Campendonk 1889-1957, September 13–November 18, 2007, pp. 55, 172 (illustrated, p. 55) The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Meer dan kleur. Fauvisme en expressionisme uit de collectie van de Triton Foundation, April 11–September 6, 2009, pp. 24-25 (illustrated, p. 24) The Hague, Gemeentemuseum, Kandinsky en Der Blaue Reiter, February 6–May 24, 2010, no. 73, pp. 192, 231 (illustrated, p. 192) Rotterdam, Kunsthal, Avant-gardes 1870 to the present: The Collection of the Triton Foundation, October 7, 2012–January 20, 2013, pp. 16, 193, 196, 214-215, 541 (illustrated, pp. 16, 215; detail illustrated, pp. 194-195)
Literature
Andrea Firmenich, Heinrich Campendonk 1889-1957. Leben und expressionistisches Werk. Mit Werkkatalog des malerischen Oeuvres, Recklinghausen, 1989, no. 510, p. 270
LIVING THE AVANT-GARDE: THE TRITON COLLECTION FOUNDATION