Lot 749 | Leo Putz | "Am Fenster"

PUTZ, LEO
Meran 1869 - 1940

Title: "Am Fenster".
Lisl in the artist's studio.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 101 x 86cm.
Notation: Signed lower left: Leo Putz.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.
Verso:
On the stretcher original artist's label with title and date 1920.

Certificate:
Wolfgang Schüller, Munich, 10.03.2022.

Provenance:
Sotheby's auction, New York, 18.11.1998, lot 520;
Private ownership, Germany.

We thank Mrs. Sigrid Putz, Gauting, for verbally confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a high-resolution digital photograph.

Leo Putz was a painter of light and women.
In Munich and Paris, the son of the mayor of Merano had enjoyed an excellent academy education and had become a member of the Munich Secession upon completion of his studies. Leo Putz had early success with works that were strongly influenced by Art Nouveau, before he increasingly incorporated Impressionist elements into his work around 1901. He painted "en plein air" in the parks of Munich and on the Bavarian lakes, often together with fellow artists such as Hans Roth, Edward Cucuel and Frigyes Strobentz.
At the height of a magnificent career, with public and private acquisitions, gold medals, celebrated gallery exhibitions, and a professorship at the Academy of Arts, Leo Putz, at about age 50, painted the present painting.

It shows a standing young woman, Lisl, the preferred model of those years, naked, with only white shoes on her feet. She stands somewhat obliquely in a room, facing the viewer with her legs crossed. The position of the arms, the head slightly propped up in the left hand, but especially the look of the eyes directed to the right edge of the picture give the figure a slightly melancholic, bored impression, which contrasts attractively with her erotic charisma.
An immense charm also emanates from the special lighting situation of the motif. The woman stands with her back to a garden door with a window. An open door can be seen cropped at the left edge of the picture. Consequently, the model's right arm, chest and hip have the brightest colour values of her body. However, her left shoulder and hip are also hit by light, because another window, not visible to the viewer, also lets the light in from the right. It illuminates the bright wall surface on the right behind the young woman, lets the armchair cast a shadow on this wall and lights up the textile mess on the right edge of the picture.
Leo Putz has depicted this particular lighting situation several times and we can locate it precisely. It is Putz's "little studio" in Gauting, south of Munich. There he had acquired a large plot of land in 1917 on which first a smaller log house was built, then in 1922 a large residential house. The nudes "Morning Sun" from 1920 (cat. rais. no. 547, 548) are depicted in this corner of the studio, as is the "Nude Study" from the same year (cat. rais. no. 626), which is so related to the present painting.
In the "Nude Study" the woman looks directly at the viewer of the painting. A chalk drawing (cat. rais. no. 600) mediates between the two paintings: it shows the woman in the same pose, but the gaze of a small head study on the same sheet is directed just as strongly to the side as in the present painting.
The "Nude at the Window" is a sovereign and typical work from Leo Putz's best creative period.