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©
Pechstein Hamburg/ Toekendorf, VEGAP, Madrid
Max Pechstein

Summer

1921
Oil on canvas.
81.3 x 101 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
699
(
1961.4
)
ROOM 36
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Temporary exhibition rooms 54 Temporary exhibition rooms 55 Temporary exhibition rooms 56 Temporary exhibition rooms Rodin Exhibition room

Following Max Pechstein’s first trip to Nidden in the summer of 1909, this small fishing village became the artist’s Nordic paradise. Located beside a coastal lagoon separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land called Kurische Nerhung, at the easternmost end of the Baltic coast of East Prussia, now Lithuania, since the end of the nineteenth century Nidden had been a regular place of pilgrimage for artists, who sought the unspoilt landscape of this faraway land. Just as Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff had discovered the town of Dangast on the North Sea coast in 1907, Pechstein found in Nidden a preindustrial landscape that remained intact, a place where he experienced a perfect at-oneness with nature that led him to explore his creativity without inhibitions and develop his own, mature pictorial style. 

Pechstein returned to Nidden in 1912, and again in 1919 and 1920 after his trip to the South Seas and involvement in the Great War. In 1919, deeply affected by the horrors of the war, in which he fought in the ranks of the German army, the artist was surprised to find that Nidden remained intact after seven years. As he tells in his autobiography, this return caused his works, then ‘somewhat clumsy, hesitant, and angular in form’, to become agile and expressive again, as in this enclave he was ‘once more possessed by the untrammelled freedom that still existed there after all’. 

In 1921, when Nidden ceased to belong to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, the artist set about searching for a new enclave on the Baltic coast. He settled in Leba (Pomerania, now Poland), where he found a landscape that to an extent reminded him of his beloved lagoon. ‘Although other people lived here, other kinds of fishermen, […] the vast area of dunes bore a certain resemblance to the Kurische Nehrung, which made me want to work here’, he recalled years later. 

Pechstein’s first outdoor nudes had been painted at the Moritzburg Lakes during the summer of 1910, but it was on the Baltic coast that he devoted himself more intensively to this genre. There he painted numerous scenes of unclad figures in the landscape or amid the waves, using as models both his wife and the fishermen’s daughters, who bathed naked when the weather was good. The painting belonging to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza displays three figures with angular forms and bronzed skin drying their bodies in the sun amid the dunes. The blazing midday sun infuses the whole composition with golden light. 

The work belonged to Pechstein’s friend Karl Lilienfeld, a German art dealer who emigrated to the United States. After opening his New York gallery in 1932, Lilienfeld successively presented Pechstein’s work to the American public, particularly following the advent to power of the Nazis leading to the declaration of his painting as degenerate art and the consequent confiscation of his works from German museums. 


Paloma Alarcó

20th Century20th Century - European painting. ExpressionismPaintingOilcanvas
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Summer in Nidden. Verano en Nidden, 1919 o 1920
Summer
Max Pechstein

©

Pechstein Hamburg/ Toekendorf, VEGAP, Madrid

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The exploitation rights of the images correspond to the Fundacion Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, F.S.P. The Fundación authorizes the downloading of high-resolution images from its website for private use, use for educational and research purposes and non-commercial uses.

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Any request for educational and research use or for non-commercial use (including academic publications), should be directed by email to the Museum Photo Library through the email address archivo.fotografico@museothyssen.org. This department manages the worldwide distribution of the images of the works of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and the management of their reproduction rights for those uses.

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Summer in Nidden. Verano en Nidden, 1919 o 1920
Summer
Max Pechstein

©

Pechstein Hamburg/ Toekendorf, VEGAP, Madrid

Terms of Use

The Photo Library of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza offers sale and rental service of photographic material of all the works on its Permanent Collection.

To request images or permits for commercial use in academic or research publications, that is, catalogues of other institutions, monographs and other specialized publications, you should contact the Museum's Photo Library by email at the e-mail @email.

To request images or permits for other commercial or advertising uses (general publications, merchandising, exhibitions, audio-visual works, web pages, etc.), you should contact the Museum's Commercial Archive by email at the e-mail @email.

The Photo Library and the Museum's Commercial Archive manage the worldwide distribution of images of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza works, as well as their reproduction rights. The applicable rates are calculated based on the nature and proposed use of the images, as well as the availability of the requested image.

Requests for scans or new photographs will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Once approved, an additional fee will apply. Re-photographing a work will require a minimum of six weeks to complete.

However, photographed works are protected by copyright. Therefore, regardless of the terms of use of the photographs set out below by the Foundation, it will be necessary to obtain a license from  VEGAP (Visual Entidad de Gestión de Artistas Plásticos www.vegap.es) or from the corresponding collective management organizations in the country where the work is going to be used or, where appropriate, from the holder of their rights in order to reproduce or exploit the work.

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