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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Christian Rohlfs

Garden in Soest

ca. 1905
Oil on Cardboard.
68 x 96 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.2000.46
)
Room 34
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 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room

Rohlfs completed his studies at the Grossherzogliche Kunstakademie in Weimar in 1884, remaining there with interruptions until 1900. In 1901 Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder of the Folkwang Museum, persuaded the artist to take on a studio at Hagen in Westphalia-part of his campaign to make his collection there a focus for everything that was new in contemporary art. Significantly, Osthaus had been among the first museum directors in Germany to buy paintings and drawings by Van Gogh, examples of whose work he exhibited in Hagen during September-October 1905. 1905 also saw a major international exhibition of Van Gogh's work which was shown in several German cities, among them Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. This exhibition, organised by the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer in collaboration with the artist's sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, did much to establish Van Gogh's international reputation, especially among younger artists of the German avant-garde. Rohlfs's knowledge of Van Gogh at this time is evident from the heavily-impastoed, expressive brushstroke, and seemingly vertical piling-up of partly non-naturalistic colours, which are the characteristic features of Garden in Soest.

Rohlfs was never especially enamoured of Hagen, but on an excursion from there which he made in 1904, he discovered the picturesque old Westphalian town of Soest with its many churches and ancient streets with timber-framed buildings. Rohlfs was immediately impressed by Soest, which was to play an enormously important role in his life and art, and he returned to spend the summer of 1905 there. It was probably on this occasion that he painted the present canvas, which is thought to show a view from the window of his house, looking on to the garden. He visited Soest again in the summer of 1906, and in later years painted numerous pictures of the town and its principal buildings, many of them from memory. Among these is another work in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Street in Soest of 1907, which depicts a street of half-timbered houses, with the tower of St Peter's church visible in the background.

At a superficial glance, Garden in Soest also appears to show a remarkable similarity in both style and composition to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's painting The Loam Pit, probably done the following year, which is also in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The similarity is, however, almost certainly coincidental. Rohlfs was considerably older than the artists of Brücke-in fact, much closer in age to Nolde (born 1867), whom he met in Soest in 1905, and whose manner of painting was also affected by Van Gogh's art at this time. Affinities with the work of the younger Dresden artists, with whom Rohlfs had no direct contact, are to be explained rather in terms of the common influences to which German painters responded during the early years of the 20th century, above all Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the example of French neo- and post-Impressionist painting.

Peter Vergo
 

20th CenturyPaintingOilCardboard
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Garden in Soest. Jardín en Soest, c. 1905
Garden in Soest
Christian Rohlfs

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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Garden in Soest. Jardín en Soest, c. 1905
Garden in Soest
Christian Rohlfs

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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