Lovis Corinth
Pink Roses, 1924

Artist
Lovis Corinth

Title
Pink Roses

Year of creation
1924

Technique and dimensions
oil on wood, 81 x 64 cm

Year of acquisition
1983

Labeled top left: LOVis CORiNth. / March 1924

In the summer of 1923, the very successful exhibition to mark the 65th birthday of Secession President Lovis Corinth took place in the New Department of the National Gallery in the Kronprinzen-Palais. Immediately afterwards, Justi showed Lesser Ury's newly acquired works in these rooms, including the Lilac Bouquet, 1922, and a connection was immediately established to the picture The Lilac Bouquet by Edouard Manet, around 1882, in the Impressionist room there, as the press expressly noted. The following summer, Justi acquired the Pink Roses of Corinth, which had just been completed, and thereby strengthened this series of motifs, which had a reconciliatory effect on the general public.

Corinth, who suffered from the consequences of a stroke as well as severe depression in the 1920s, painted a large number of flowers and bouquets precisely because of this danger. Like Manet, who was terminally ill, he was attracted by the combination of brief splendor and transience in these fragile structures, and like Manet, he elicited coloristic charms of great delicacy from their depiction. Under the heading "Last Mastery" Justi describes the Pink Roses from 1924 "as an example of a bevy of wonderful flower pieces that Corinth painted in his last years, mostly huge bouquets of many different flowers, often particularly large shapes and bright tones in them, a real murmur of color that has never been seen before. The roses are more modest in their appearance, but extremely fine in the gradation from cool to burning red; the gray of the glass and the surroundings is also extremely vivid in terms of color and painting.

The series of flower pieces in the Kronprinzen-Palais traced the path from Impressionism to Expressionism; they were still focused on painterly expression, they were still about autonomous painting, color and light, even if the handwriting had become somewhat more violent.

With his reorganization in 1931, Justi severed this visible relationship, he had the impressionist works returned to the main building of the Nationalgalerie, and for the short time until his leave of absence in July 1933, the exhibition began with Munch and van Gogh.

In the summer of 1937 the Kronprinzen-Palais was closed. In the same year there was the infamous confiscation of works of art in German museums; almost 300 works from Corinth were affected. In addition to numerous graphic works, the National Gallery lost ten paintings by Corinth, including the Pink Roses. They were auctioned at the infamous auction “Paintings and Sculptures by Modern Masters from German Museums” in Lucerne in June 1939. In 1983 the Pink Roses were bought back by the Association of Friends of the National Gallery.

Angelika Wesenberg