JOSEF EBERZ (Limburg an der Lahn 1880 - 1941 Munich), Exotic Dance, 1917

JOSEF EBERZ
(Limburg an der Lahn 1880 - 1941 Munich)
Exotic Dance, 1917
oil/cardboard, 34,9 x 30,3 cm
signed J Eberz and dated 17
depicted in Expressiver Realismus in Deutschland, Vienna 2017, p. 13, N. 18
Provenance: private collection Germany, Griesebach Berlin 2014, Fine Arts Widder

ESTIMATE °€ 15.000 - 25.000
START € 12.000

German painter, graphic artist and illustrator of the 20th century. Studied at the Academy in Munich from 1901 to 1903 under Franz von Stuck and Hugo von Habermann. Then in Karlsruhe and from 1907 to 1912 master student of the color theorist Adolf Hölzel in Stuttgart. Member of the Hölzel circle, along with Gertrud Alber, Willi Baumeister, Paul Bollmann, Hans Brühlmann, Heinrich Eberhard, Maria Hiller-Foell, Ida Kerkovius, Otto Meyer-Amden, Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini, Oskar Schlemmer, August Ludwig Schmidt, Hermann Stenner and Alfred Wickenburg. Married the artist Gertrud Alber in Wiesbaden in 1917. From 1918 in Munich, represented by the art dealer Hanns Goltz. Member of the New Munich Secession, 1919 of the association Das junge Rheinland, 1919 also of the Darmstadt Secession and the Novembergruppe. In the 1920s travels to Italy, Dalmatia and Paris. His works were classified as degenerate art by the Nazis. Stylistically to be assigned to Expressionism, especially influences of Cubism, Futurism and later Pittura Metafisica. Stylistic proximity to the German Expressionists Conrad Felixmüller, Alexander Kanoldt or Emil Nolde. Created expressionist and color-intensive landscapes and figure paintings, strong interest in religious themes.

Born in Limburg an der Lahn in 1880 as the son of a postal clerk, the painter and graphic artist Josef Eberz studied around the turn of the century in Munich, first under Professors Peter Halm and Franz von Stuck, and then in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe (both in 1904). He was first challenged at the Stuttgart Academy, where Eberz was enrolled from 1905 as a student of Christian Landenberger, a positive plein-air painter. For Eberz, this professor was probably the real reason for choosing Stuttgart as a training center. But it was only in Adolf Hölzel, the painter of clay nature and genre paintings, that Eberz finally found the artistic figure that formed him. Hölzel, like Eberz, had come to the Stuttgart Art Academy in 1905 and quickly made a name for himself as a painter who was active in art theory and had his own color theory and color circle. As early as 1907 we find Eberz as a master student in Adolf Hölzel's class, in which he studied until 1912. From his teacher, to whom Eberz felt a strong obligation in terms of composition and color in his early pictures, this master student should above all acquire the ability to construct the picture more constructively and to handle color confidently, detached from the real object.
The painting "The Exotic Dance" from 1917 reflects this intensive examination of his teacher Hölzel. The two dancers with their colorful shadows and their expressively elongated limbs, the male figure with a hat and red beard fitted into the upper left corner of the picture, the dynamization of the forms and the embedding in a cubist-abstract natural landscape are still in the tradition of the Hölzel circle. In this phase of his work he also met the art collector Heinrich Kirchhoff for the first time, who, along with the art dealer Hans Goltz, was to become one of Josef Eberz's great patrons and in whose garden with its exotic character he also painted from 1917. Walter Müller-Wulckow , who wrote about Eberz in his 1917 contribution to the Kirchhoff Collection, also mentions a painting that shows two dancers, as in the present example: “J. Eberz, on the other hand, masters the uniform stylization with no less great use of color (...). A lyrical element, however, which in Eberz's paintings of large format comes to the fore too much, temporarily prevents this artist from creating life-size figures satisfactorily, such as e.g. B. the two "dancers". From the illustrations of small pictures, on the other hand, one thinks one can infer monumental format, which thus still reveals the power of expansion and at least inner size.”

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