Lot 847 | Kurt Kühn | Self-Portrait

KÜHN, KURT
1880 Dresden - 1957 Waging am See

Title: Self-Portrait.
Date: 1903 (?).
Technique: Oil on card.
Measurement: 51 x 33cm.
Notation: Dated (?) lower left in the painting: "VIII 03".

Verso:
Draft of a self-portrait (?)

Provenance:
From the artist's estate.

Art history has always lived on rediscoveries. In the Renaissance, antiquity was rediscovered; in Classicism, the Renaissance; and Historicism drew all its artistic creativity from the past. Again and again, new figures who had fallen into oblivion for various reasons came to the fore. This privilege and claim is also reserved for Fine Art. One of our rediscoveries in the present catalogue is the German impressionist Kurt Kühn.
Born in Dresden in 1880, his passion for art drew him first to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, then to the Academy in Munich. He studied with great artists such as Eugen Bracht, who was to become an important teacher. He maintained close contact with the artist group "Scholle", lived and worked in Paris and finally found his stylistic home there. At the turn of the century, Paris was undergoing a major artistic upheaval - it was a place where various movements and ideas were developing at the same time. The young Kühn was also aware of this dynamic. Unlike most of his colleagues, he remained faithfully committed to Impressionism. His oeuvre nevertheless clearly shows new influences through Cézanne and Fauves.
In the 1910s Kühn exhibited his portraits, still lifes and landscapes mainly at the Paris "Salon d'Automne" and the "Salon des Indépendants". The decision to travel to the north of Africa had serious biographical consequences for him: At the beginning of the First World War, Kühn was taken prisoner in France, from which he was only able to free himself in 1919. Due to the almost 10-year absence in Germany, he lost a large number of valuable paintings, large parts of his parents' fortune, and finally also his reputation as an aspiring artist. Artistically, the so-called "Africa years" are among the most formative of his career. Boldly, he fused Orientalism with Impressionism. He seemed to have difficulty recovering from the consequences of the war and his imprisonment. In 1927 he moved to Düsseldorf - probably to make a new artistic start. In 1943, his studio and flat were completely destroyed. Kühn withdrew and spent the last 14 years of his life in Wagingen am See in Upper Bavaria.
His estate comprises around 600 oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, all of which are influenced by French Impressionism. We are pleased to present five selected works by the artist at our autumn auction on 17 November 2022. The selected works demonstrate the scope of the artistic dimensions in which Kühn found himself and worked. They present the great "palette" of his artistic "know-how" and the many facets of the Impressionist.
"Unlike Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt or Lovis Corinth, who stand for a specific German Impressionism, Kurt Kühn is the unique case of a German representative of French Impressionism." (Mayer, Heike: Kurt Kühn 1880-1957. Ein unbekannter Impressionist. Waging 1999).