Man with a red top hat and woman Heinrich Campendonk

• This large-format watercolour was painted in Sindelsdorf, Upper Bavaria, where Campendonk had been living since October 1911 at the invitation of Franz Marc • This work belongs to the artist’s early Expressionist period • Campendonk explores the profound longing for a paradisiacal unity between humans, animals and nature The gouache portrait ‘Man with a Red Top Hat and Woman’ was created during Campendonk’s early years in Sindelsdorf, Upper Bavaria. He had been living there since late 1911, having been introduced by August Macke and his cousin Helmuth Macke, in the neighbourhood of Franz Marc, whom he greatly admired. Through the two Macke cousins, Campendonk, aged 21, had recently come into contact in Munich with the ‘Blue Rider’ circle centred on Kandinsky, Marc and Gabriele Münter. For the young artist, this move from his isolation in Krefeld into the milieu of the emerging avant-garde of Expressionism and Abstraction marked a decisive turning point in his search for his own means of expression. In April 1912, Campendonk’s girlfriend Adda Deichmann, whom he had already met as a fellow student at the School of Applied Arts in Krefeld, also moved to Sindelsdorf. Campendonk rented two large rooms especially for this purpose in a ‘large, clean farmhouse, one with three or even four windows, high-ceilinged and airy, with a view across the whole moor as far as the mountains’. During these first happy years, he produced some of his most beautiful and intimate watercolours, depicting him and Adda as a couple. In ‘Man with a Red Top Hat and Woman’, they stand out prominently at the forefront of the picture as a young, smartly dressed couple in a rural setting of colourful, lyrically abstracted forms; between their figures, drawn from a slight low-angle perspective, and the small house in the background, a garden table placed at an angle mediates in the middle ground. The bright red of the top hat and tie is echoed in the headdress and dress of the dark-haired Adda; the gestures of their arms reveal the couple in a tender embrace. The influence of the mature watercolours of the admired Franz Marc is clearly evident here, in the slightly refracted, prismatic forms, the stylised tree on the left and, above all, in the transparent layers of paint applied one over the other, which make this sheet quite special. Two further watercolours belong to these early testimonies of their love and their early days in Sindelsdorf: ‘Lovers (Adda and Heinrich)’, Firmenich 158A, and ‘Couple on the Balcony’, WVZ 150A; here too, Adda is recognisable by her dark, slanted eyes; on the balcony of her house, she is also wearing the light red dress and, together with her companion, is set within a setting strongly reminiscent of Marc’s animal visions. In June 1913, Heinrich and Adda Campendonk were married; Maria Marc wrote to Elisabeth Macke about this: "Sindelsdorf is now under a special sign. The three pairs of friends are all getting married at the same time – the banns have been read. Campendonk, Adda Deichmann, Niestlé and Legros in Sindelsdorf, and Franz and I in Munich. (…). It’s simply marvellous that we’re now joining in with the others once again." During the First World War, the artist felt increasingly isolated in Sindelsdorf; Marc was on the Western Front, whilst his friend, the animal painter Jean-Bloé Niestlé, had moved to Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg. In 1915, Campendonk’s son Herbert was born whilst they were still in Sindelsdorf; in early 1916, the family also moved to Seeshaupt. It was here – and soon during many stays in neighbouring Penzberg – that Campendonk began to devote himself more intensively to oil painting. In numerous, imaginatively rich paintings, he now typically depicts couples as nudes – and here, too, one often thinks one can recognise Adda as the model – set against colourful, fairy-tale-like backdrops in which the Bavarian landscape, memories of Franz Marc and his depictions of animals, and his own world of figures intertwine to form a mysterious unity. ‘Man with a Red Top Hat and Woman’ was created during a creative period in which Campendonk produced only a few oil paintings and regarded his large, pictorial watercolours or gouaches as being of equal value, as the author of the Catalogue Raisonné, Andrea Firmenich, has emphasised on several occasions. This particular sheet – much like the two other early depictions of couples, which remain in private hands to this day – exudes youth, inspiration, self-discovery, tender connection and a sense of new beginnings. Dr Annegret Hoberg | 1889 Krefeld - Amsterdam 1957 | Moderne Kunst | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x2329 | Provenance: Nachlass der Künstlers, auf dem Unterlagekarton mit dem Stempel und der Signatur von Herbert Campendonk, dem Sohn des Künstlers; seitdem durch Erbfolge in Familienbesitz, Rheinland.

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