European Art and Old Masters

Literature

Alfred Neumeyer, Josef Scharl, Nierendorf Editions, New York, 1945, no. 41 (illustrated).
Peter Bronner, Andrea Lukas and Andrea Firmenich, Josef Scharl, Monographie und Werkverzeichnis, Vienand Verlag, Cologne, 1999, p. 292, no. 399 (illustrated).

Note

Born in 1896, Scharl trained as a decorative artist at Munich's Malerschule and, thereafter, at the city’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Aligned with the Neue Sezession and Neue Sachlichkeit movements, he immigrated to New York City in 1938 at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art, which was then organizing an exhibition of fellow Germans Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer, Erich Heckel, and Georg Scholz. The artist’s departure also coincided with the entrenchment of National Socialism in Germany, which condemned his work as entartete or degenerate. In Scharl's words, "...die Situation ist reichlich ungemütlich geworden. Und ich will doch arbeiten können! So habe ich denn den Entschluß gefaßt, von hier fortzugehen. [...the situation has become extremely uncomfortable. And I want to work! So I have made the decision to leave this place.]

The present painting (and Wald, Lot 77) date to the mid-1940s, a period of creative freedom for the artist, and of both critical and commercial success. In 1944, the same year the present work was created, Scharl was commissioned by Pantheon Books to illustrate Grimm's Fairy Tales, a project that raised his profile among American audiences. The pair, and particularly Sonnenblumen, is a synthesis of Scharl's formative influences, including, most notably, the compositional and chromatic exuberance of Post-Impressionism, which he absorbed while on scholarship in Paris a decade earlier. The legacy of Van Gogh–whose work Scharl would have seen in Munich’s avant-garde galleries as a youth, and whose Twelve Sunflowers (1888) hung in the Bavarian National Gallery–is readily apparent, as is the riotous palette of the Fauves and coolly stylized canvases of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. The flowers, monumentalized with writhing stems and multi-colored leaves and centers, occupy the entirety of the composition. Against a spare background, they possess an energy and vitality that belie the traditional still life format.