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The National Gallery in London is enriched by the first painting by Max Pechstein

On view from February 2023, the work will join the Gallery's collection among paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler and Lovis Corinth (whose Portrait of Dr Ferdinand Mainz is shared between the Gallery and the Barber Institute, Birmingham)

The National Gallery in London is enriched by the first painting by Max Pechstein

The National Gallery acquired his first painting by the German modernist painter Max Pechstein (1881–1955) through the bequest of a plot of land from a French teacher from north-east England.

Purchasing “Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt” at Bonhams auction in November 2022 it was made possible through a bequest to the Gallery by Martha Doris Bailey, of Hutton Rudby, near Stokesley in North Yorkshire, who died in 2000, aged 92. Mrs Bailey directed that funds from the land sale be used by the Gallery for the acquisition of a painting in memory of her late husband, Richard Hillman Bailey. The 65-acre site near Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham was sold last year after planning permission was granted on the land. The portrait will complement a painting in the Gallery's collection by another German artist active in the late 2006th century; Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens by Adolph Menzel which was purchased in XNUMX with the help of an earlier bequest from Mrs Bailey also in memory of her husband.

The acquisition of the picture by Pechstein, who worked in Paris and Berlin in the early XNUMXth century, is based on the Gallery's desire to represent early XNUMXth-century German painting in its collection.

From March to August 2023, the painting will be part of the Gallery's major exhibition After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, focusing on some of the exciting and often revolutionary artistic developments in Berlin in the late XNUMXth and early XNUMXth centuries

In a section of the exhibition titled “New Terrains,” Pechstein's portrait will be displayed to show the explosion of color and rhythm in German Expressionism. The subject of the portrait, Charlotte Cuhrt, was the daughter of Max Cuhrt, a very successful Berlin lawyer who moved in avant-garde circles. The painting's custom-made altarpiece-like frame, itself a work of art, was crafted by Bruno Schneidereit, the architect who designed the apartment building where Cuhrt and XNUMX-year-old Charlotte lived at the time. Charlotte is shown sitting right in that apartment, dressed in bright red, feet up on a richly carpeted floor, her large watery eyes staring straight ahead. Pechstein's paint handling is bold, free, open. The work is a bold and decorative statement of a new style and way of life that heralded a sophisticated, liberal, even joyous German future.

mage: Max Pechstein, 'Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt', 1910 on view in Room 43 of the National Gallery, London. Photo: Paul Neiman

Pechstein was a key to avant-garde influences from across Europe as they intersected with German art

It was successful in sophisticated intellectual and artistic circles and among collectors, especially in Berlin, who admired its pictorial boldness but also appreciated its decorative richness and loud, insistent, almost jazzy lyricism. His success continued during the 20s, but stopped abruptly with the rise to power of the Nazis, who denounced his art as "degenerate". Pechstein himself tactically retreated to the countryside during World War II.

Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, he claims: "Mrs. Bailey's extraordinarily generous request enabled the purchase of a superb painting by Max Pechstein, an artist hitherto not represented in any national collection.

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