Wilhelm Morgner Lot n° 507

Blue boy with scythe. Oil on burlap. (19)11. Ca 141 x 172 cm. Monogrammed with ligature "WM" and dated lower right. Dated and inscribed "MORGNER" and "Tpt" by Georg Tappert on verso, and with the old, cancelled estate number "93" and the new estate number "N. No. 117" and measurements. "Nature is a product of my imagination through the collaboration of all possible means of artistic expression. I do not see why I should try to represent nature. Being is illusion and I am truth." Wilhelm Morgner in a letter to Horst Tappert, 27.9.1911, in: Knupp-Uhlenhaut, Christine, Wilhelm Morgner. Briefe und Zeichnungen, Soest 1984, p. 33. Wilhelm Morgner grew up in middle-class circumstances in the Westphalian town of Soest. His father, a former military musician, dies early, and his mother would have liked to see her son become a pastor. But Morgner had other plans: encouraged by the intercession of Otto Modersohn, also a native of Soest and co-founder of the Worpswede painters' colony, he entered Georg Tappert's private art school in Worpswede in 1908. Tappert remained his artistic advisor and friend until Morgner's death. As early as 1909 Morgner returned to his home town of Soest, where he set up studios in the town and the surrounding area and exhibited his works for the first time in the same year. From 1911 he travelled more frequently to Berlin, where he made contact with the circles of modern artists, including Arnold Topp and Wilhelm Wulff. Here he also came into contact with Pointillism and became acquainted with works by van Gogh and early Expressionism. All these new styles had a strong influence on his work - he incorporated the knowledge gained into his works, which from 1912 onwards increasingly broke away from representational depiction and dealt with the effect of pure colour. As a result of his growing reputation, Morgner was able to show his works in important exhibitions. From 1911, at the age of 20, the young artist took part in exhibitions of the Neue Sezession in Berlin, the Blaue Reiter in Munich or the Sonderbund in Cologne. During this period he created the painting "Blauer Junge mit Sense" (Blue Boy with Scythe). In the centre of the painting sits a peasant boy in blue work clothes, with a brown hat and clogs, who is intently checking the sharpness of his scythe with both thumbs. Behind him the sun seems to be rising or setting. The pictorial space around the figure is abstracted and rhythmised by lines, waves, circles and short brushstrokes in bright colours. The colours and forms have become detached from the natural model and form an ornamental frame around the figure in the centre of the painting. The painting belongs to a group of important works from 1911, in which Morgner preferred to paint peasant figures or craftsmen in a still representational style, but set them in a large format in a colourful abstract environment in a style that was all his own. Like the painter Vincent van Gogh, whom he admired, and the French pointillists Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, Morgner also drew his motifs directly from his surroundings - from nature and the simple everyday life of the people working in it. In clearly structured pictures he shows, in cipher-like simplification, people working in the fields or engaged in seemingly archaic activities. The faces are only dimly depicted or completely omitted. Thus Morgner's protagonists seem like timeless placeholders of the most primal human activities. Walter Weihs, the author of the catalogue raisonné of Wilhelm Morgner's paintings, writes in his expert opinion that "Blue Boy with Scythe" is of outstanding importance in Morgner's painterly oeuvre and must be seen in the same line as the two well-known works created in 1911, "The Woodworker" (oil on canvas, 143 x 197 cm, Weihs/Tappert 112) and "Mother with Child on Blue Basket" (oil on canvas, 135 x 192 cm, Weihs/Tappert 119A). These two paintings are important key works by Morgner and can be found in the art collections of the city of Soest in the Wilhelm Morgner Museum. Only two years after the creation of "Blauer Junge mit Sense", in 1913, Morgner had to accept a significant curtailment of his artistic work - he was called up for military service and could no longer create elaborate oil paintings. When Morgner was killed in action at the Battle of Langemark in West Flanders on 6 August 1917 at the age of only 26, many of his paintings remained unsigned. Morgner's typical monogram signature, reminiscent of a butterfly, is applied by his mother, his sister Mari and also by Georg Tappert. The present painting, however, is one of the few works to bear a monogram by the artist's hand, still applied in the fresh paint of the painting. Today Wilh is considered