Lovis Corinth

(German, 1858-1925)

Weiblicher Akt

Footnotes

Provenance
A. Lüth Collection, Stettin.
Anon. sale, Rudolphe Lepke's Kunst - Auctions, Berlin, 24 - 25 November 1929, lot 172.
Hofer Collection, Munich.
Dr. Conrad Doebbeke Collection, Berlin.
Galerie Meissner, Zurich.
Private collection, Jersey.

Literature
C. Berend-Corinth, Lovis Corinth, Die Gemälde, Munich, 1992, no. 728 (illustrated p. 718).


Painted in 1918, Weiblicher Akt is an expressive yet intimate rendering of the female form realised through the freedom of execution that characterised Lovis Corinth's painting in the years following his stroke in 1911. The physical affliction of the stroke, coupled with his concurrent experience of the human losses of the First World War, prompted an awareness within Corinth of the imminence of death. This sensibility encouraged him to move away from his reputation as a nineteenth century, naturalistic painter and to investigate the possibilities of modern artistic developments, such as Expressionism. Consequently, Corinth turned to more private, intimate subjects such as his friends and family to celebrate both the force and fragility of life.

Confidently executed through dynamic sweeps of a loaded brush, Corinth evokes the fleshliness of his subject through the tactility of swirling, impastoed paint. For the artist, painting was a deeply sensual response to the vitality of the external world: 'As the music evolved by man and the singing of the birds is only really a response to sexual attraction, so too is a painting a purely sensual expression. I would probably say that eroticism, as a purely painterly concept, would be the most profound and the hardest to master.' (L. Corinth quoted in P-K. Schuster, C. Vitali and B. Butts (eds.), Lovis Corinth, (exh. cat.), Munich, 1996, p. 55). The nude therefore was a fitting subject for Corinth to convey his passion for sensuality and, in immortalising his human subject through his work, he sought to capture the transience of life itself.

Turned away from the viewer and presented through an intimate framing device, Corinth depicts his model – head resting gently on her hand, enjoying a quiet moment of reflection. The calmness of the scene is countered however by the animated surface of the canvas in which the artist applies pure colour with gestural and virtuosic brushwork. The dynamic method of execution parallels the youthful vitality of his subject, yet in capturing the sitter lost in thought Corinth enshrines an ephemeral moment forever.

During the years of the First World War Corinth resided in Berlin where, despite the conflict around him, his reputation continued to grow. In 1917, a year before the execution of the present work, major exhibitions of his paintings were held at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim and at the Kestner-Museum in Hannover. In 1918, the Prussian Ministry of Culture honoured him with the title of 'Professor' and later that same year the Berlin Succession opened a large retrospective in celebration of his sixtieth birthday.