Watercolor and pastel over pencil. Signed in upper center and titled in bottom center. Signed and titled on the reverse. 59 x 48.3 cm. , the full sheet.
With a pencil drawing on the reverse that shows a portrait of the lawyer and friend Dr. Rudolf Hertz, probably from 1916. Dr. Rudolf Hertz (1861-1933) was the son of the lawyer and Hamburg senator Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (1827-1914) and the brother of the physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894), father of the hertz unit of frequency (symbol: Hz). Dr. Rudolf Hertz had a keen interest in art; in 1917, for example, he commissioned Georg Kolbe to create a figure in memory of his son Carl Heinrich, who died in the First World War ("Stürzender Flieger / Ikarus", 1917/19, unfinished). [CH].
- Sheet painted on both sides: with a portrait of the lawyer and friend Dr. Rudolf Hertz on the reverse. - Made in the prolific time after Anita Rée had returned from Paris. - Around 1918, she created a few children's pictures, which Rée united in a single scene in the present work. - The artist adopted stylistic elements like asymmetry and deformation from Picasso's "Blue" and "Pink Periods". - The children with their eyes half closed, gazing past the viewer with sadness and melancholy, reflect the forlornness typical of the years after the war. - At the same time, the emotional world so characteristic of her figures is an expression of Anita Rée's unique personality and her emotional disposition. - The painter was particularly interested in figure, form and expression: while the forms in the background are abstracted, the colors are delicate, muted and subdued. - Elaborate watercolors of this kind are very rare on the international auction market.
LITERATURE: Maike Bruhns, Anita Rée. Das Werk, Munich 2018, no. A 27 and Z 37a (each with illu.). - - Maike Bruhns, Anita Rée. Leben und Werk einer Hamburger Malerin 1885-1933, Hamburg 1986, p. 273, cat. no. A 11 a.