Art and its echo
This year’s Hamburg Fine Art Fair offers visitors an unrivalled opportunity to compare themes in art across the centuries, writes Claudia Herstatt.
Claudia Herstatt, Monday, 25th August 2008
Modern art is almost inconceivable without the influence of African ‘primitive’ art and Picasso was not the only artist to be profoundly influenced by its strong forms. Alexei Jawlensky’s Meditation (1934; Fig. 3) with Salis & Vertes gallery can be contrasted with a figure carved by the Baule people from the Ivory Coast, from the first half of the 20th century, on show with Cologne’s Dierking Kunsthandel.
In another response to the theme Bernheimer Fine Old Masters has brought together Old Master paintings and contemporary photography. As a way of introducing a younger clientele to Old Master paintings, Blanca Bernheimer has opened a gallery of photography in father’s Old Master gallery in Munich. In Hamburg she is showing an example of Guido Mocafico’s photography, Vanité et objets de musique (2007; Fig. 1) juxtaposed with Still-life with Lute (1642; Fig. 2) by the Dutch artist Willem van Odekerken.
Works on paper are particularly suitable for a fair that aims to attract younger collectors, since they are often affordably priced. C.G. Boerner, of Düsseldorf and New York, who is participating in the fair for the second time, is offering 15th-to 19th-century prints and drawings, notably works by Dürer and etchings by Rembrandt. Highlights include Trauerndes Mädchen auf einem Friedhof (1833) by the romantic artist Ludwig Emil Grimm, the younger brother of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Hamburg’s Thole Rotermund Kunsthandel is offering an outstanding work by Hans Reichel (1892-1958), Composition 1922-77, in oil and watercolour on board. Reichel, who had a studio at Schloss Werneck Castle in Munich, where Paul Klee also worked, was friendly with the author Henry Miller and gave him lessons in watercolour painting. Thomas le Claire, a Hamburg-based dealer, once again shines in his specialist area of 18th- and early 19th-century drawings and paintings, offering the watercolour Personnage au Jardin du Luxembourg (1908-09) by the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac.
One of the specialities of the Negelein Gallery in Kiel is north German furniture. It is offering a pair of rococo chests of drawers from the Köster workshop in Altona, dated around 1760. If these are tempting, you could match them with a pair of classical mirrors by Köster, also with Negelein.
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