Still Life with a Vase of Flowers and Apples Karl Peter Röhl

Karl Peter Röhl was one of the founding artists at the State Bauhaus in Weimar. His artistic roots, however, lie in representational painting: after completing an apprenticeship and attending the schools of applied arts in Kiel and Berlin, he studied at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar, under Albin Egger-Lienz amongst others, and painted landscapes of his native Holstein. In Kiel, he founded the Expressionist Working Group together with Werner Lange and Peter Drömmer, and the works from his early Bauhaus years are also characterised by Expressionism. In 1919, he designed the first Bauhaus logo, the so-called ‘little star man’. It was only his encounter with Theo van Doesburg, who held his De Stijl course in Röhl’s Weimar studio in 1922, that led him towards consistent abstraction. After years as a master student under Walther Klemm at the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, he took over as head of the preparatory class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 1926. It was during these years in Frankfurt that the versatility of Röhl’s oeuvre became apparent. Alongside strictly geometric compositions, he produced paintings in which he returned to the representational – to a visual world familiar to him from his Expressionist beginnings. The still life, one of the most traditional genres of painting, became for him a field in which he experimented with colour, light and composition with great painterly freedom. In landscape format, Röhl arranges a long row of apples on a light-coloured table, their deep red and warm orange colours masterfully distributed across the picture plane. In the centre stands a dark vase containing yellow and wilting flowers, whose fraying forms dissolve against a dynamic, blue-green background. A dark curtain at the left-hand edge frames the scene and lends it depth, whilst the dynamic brushwork of the composition imparts a vibrant rhythm. | 1890 - Kiel - 1975 | Moderne Kunst | Gemälde | Nummer: 26x2489 | Provenance: Nachlass des Künstlers; Privatsammlung, Schweiz.

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