ARTIST: Ernst Carl Walter Retzlaff (Germany, 1898 - 1976)
NAME: Alpine Landscape
MEDIUM: oil on canvas
CONDITION: Very good. Minor craquelure. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 20 x 24 inches / 50 x 60 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed
SIGNATURE: lower left
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
SKU#: 117050
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BIOGRAPHY:
Born in 1898, Ernst Carl Walter Retzlaff grew up during the 1900s and 1910s and was inspired by the artistic culture of the time. The first decades of the twentieth century were characterised by vibrant developments in pictorial art. It was the era of post-Impressionism and of experimentation, including the
first forays into Expressionism and Abstraction. Many different groups of artists or loosely affiliated communities of the avant-garde in different major cities around the world developed different modes of these significant innovations. The first major Post-impressionism movement in the early years of the
twentieth century is generally considered to be the Fauves, a group for whom intense, other-worldly colours and vibrant brushstrokes were a key component of painting, and who counted Henri Matisse as a member. In Paris during the same time, a young Pablo Picasso painted his famed Blue and Rose
periods. By the end of the 1920s, along with Georges Braque, he had developed the first fracturing of pictorial reality with Analytical Cubism. Meanwhile, Expressive painting found key followers in various places around the world. In France, the Nabis were among the first at the very turn of the century, and
the German groups Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter included such legendary figures as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. The horrors of the First World War spawned significant developments in the psychological uses of art, including the absurdist stylings of Dadaism which arose in
Paris, Berlin, Zurich and Hannover, and which brought recognition for artists like Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. Many of these ideas would go on to flourish further in Surrealism - the first art movement to fully incorporate psychology, and in particular ideas about the
unconscious which had been established by Sigmund Freud and his follower Carl Jung. The first twenty years of the Twentieth Century can be viewed to be among the most productive, and are noted as the time in art history when modern and modernist ideas began to take hold of cultural production. The
new order and rationality, alongside mechanisation in modes of production, saw art’s parallel discipline of architecture develop extraordinarily in the work of designers such as Le Corbusier and Gerrit Rietveld. It was the era of the Bauhaus and the idea of a common discipline across the creative arts as a
whole. Most, if not all, of the core art movements we associate with modern and contemporary art can be viewed to source many of their crucial founding philosophies in the incredible diversity of art produced during this time.