Lot 15 | Carl Grossberg | Festung Marienberg bei Würzburg

A concentrated creative phase
Carl Grossberg is one of the most prominent representatives of New Objectivity. His paintings, created during a concentrated creative phase lasting only 15 years, fascinate viewers with their strictly composed, almost entirely deserted scenes of modern industrial and urban landscapes: factory halls, machine rooms, turbines, cooling towers, rolling mills and drilling machines, as well as streets, villages, bridges and urban architecture. With great clarity and formal rigour, Grossberg captures the profound technical and industrial changes of early modernism in his oeuvre. Expressionist pathos takes a back seat in favour of a precise, unadorned visual language in which all traces of the painting process are erased – cool on the surface, yet imbued with a restrained elegance and subtle beauty.

Stages of his artistic career
Born in Elberfeld, he began studying architecture at the technical universities of Aachen and Darmstadt in 1913 before being drafted into the military. Marked by his experiences in the First World War, Carl Grossberg returned in 1919 and initially enrolled at the Weimar Art Academy before transferring to the newly founded State Bauhaus. There, Lyonel Feininger became his most influential teacher. In 1921, he was supposed to travel to Italy, where he hoped to find inspiration for his paintings, but fate had other plans for him: his journey ended in Franconia, where he met his future wife, the violinist Mathilde Schwarz, in Sommershausen near Würzburg and converted the medieval Flurer Tower into a residence.

In addition to his industrial paintings and cityscapes, which impress with their purist clarity and impressive topographical precision, he created surreal, dreamlike worlds reminiscent of the mysterious Pittura metafisica. From 1933 onwards, the artist pursued the ambitious idea of his "Industrial Plan" – a comprehensive cycle of paintings that was to depict Germany's most important industrial enterprises, but was never realised.

Architectural power in a strict composition
The "Festung Marienberg bei Würzburg" (Marienberg Fortress near Würzburg) from 1934 is one of Carl Grossberg’s late and at the same time striking works. The delicately coloured oil painting presents the city’s landmark as a stylised structure that rises powerfully above a calmly structured city skyline. In the foreground, the Old Main Bridge with its characteristic arches and baroque statues runs through the picture – deep shadows and reflections in the water form a rhythmic, almost abstract interplay of sweeping lines and striking surfaces, lending the motif a quiet grandeur. Between compositional rigour and meditative calm, this painting unfolds a timeless monumentality – clear, cool, precise and yet imbued with a quiet poetry.

Doris Hansmann