Otakar Kubin (Othon Coubine) Lot n° 30

Otakar Kubin (Othon Coubine) In thoughts 1914 Oil on canvas 55 x 46 cm Framed. Signed lower left in black 'O. Kubin'. With printed gallery label on the reverse "Der Sturm / Zeitschrift / Herausgeber Herwarth Walden", inscribed on it in typewriter "Otakar Kubin/ Paris/ In Gedanken". The painting was examined for art technological reasons by the CICS (Cologne Institute of Conservation Sciences), Technical University of Cologne. An examination report dated 3 May 2021 is available. Provenance Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin (1914; label on reverse); private collection Berlin; Kuno Kallenbach Collection, Tann; private property Baden-Württemberg Exhibitions Berlin 1914 (Galerie Der Sturm), Otakar Kubin, Cat. No. 21 without ill. In his legendary Berlin gallery Der Sturm, which opened in 1912, Herwarth Walden presented an international group of leading avant-garde artists, including several painters and sculptors from the Czech Republic. These included Emil Filla, Otto Gutfreund, and Vincenc Beneš, whose works were presented several times in the gallery's group exhibitions. However, the only Czech artist for whom Walden organized a solo exhibition was Otakar Kubin. It took place in April and May 1914 as the gallery's 25th exhibition and featured 30 of his recent paintings. Under number 21, the exhibition catalogue also lists - without illustration - the work offered here, "In Gedanken". Otakar Kubin, who was educated in the Czech Republic, was initially influenced by French Post-Impressionism. The artist travelled through Belgium, France and Italy from 1904 and settled in Paris in 1912. In a brief period spanning only the years 1913 and 1914, Otakar Kubin combined Cubist and Expressionist stylistic means to create a very reduced, unmistakable expression. The subjects, mostly representations of figures and still lifes, possess a mystical impression in their archaic simplicity. They are kept in angular, crystalline forms, dominated by blue and yellow. "It points to the unusual distinctiveness of Kubin's construction of the new people of new worlds, something like pagan prophets of the new age of humanity. They have strange stiff pantomimic gestures and from their truncated, angular and cubic forms there radiates a magical light, a kind of aura, which emphasizes the spiritual disposition of the paintings", Vojtech Lahoda aptly describes these extraordinary works (in: Der Sturm - Zentrum der Avantgarde, Ausst.Kat. Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal 2012, vol. II, p. 511). In the 1920s Kubin found his later neoclassical-lyrical style. The painting offered in this auction is a rare example of Kubin's important cubist creative phase, which set groundbreaking accents within the Sturm circle.