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Lot description
Signed lower left: Leistikow Lake Grunewald, set among the pine forests of Brandenburg, is among the Secession painter Walter Leistikow’s most common subjects. Within the context of the resurgence in landscape painting around 1900, he sought his motifs in the countryside around Berlin and during his travels. Trained by the Norwegian painter Hans Frederik Gude (1825–1903), he was initially committed to the Nordic version of art nouveau. It was not until 1905 that his palette became lighter and his brushwork freer. The images of the Grunewaldsee seen here combine to create a panorama, although the paintings do not form a pair. Instead, the possibility of uniting them shows the consistency of the compositions Leistikow was painting around 1900. Layers of water, forest and sky are placed on top of one another parallel to the picture plane. The broad surface of the water incorporates the entire spectrum of colours from the surrounding elements: the darkness of the dense pine forest, the green of the leaves, the rows of trees dipped in orange-tinted light near the shore, the shimmering white of the clouds. Here and there the surface of the water forms a smooth mirror image or ripples; the reflections of the pine trunks gently oscillate. These landscapes become completely subjected to the forms and colours and can be recognised as the expression of a mood beyond their topographical identification. The strong contrasts of the fields of colour, the clear contours and the cropping of the trees, water surface and sky – previously unusual in landscape painting – are all reminiscent of the Japanese colour woodcuts that Leistikow discovered for himself during his 1893 stay in Paris. “It is to his eternal credit”, declared Max Liebermann “to have found the style for depicting the melancholy charms of the area around Berlin. We see the lakes of Grunewald or those along the upper Spree with his eyes; he taught us to see their beauties” (cited in: Nationalgalerie Berlin. Das XX. Jahrhundert, Leipzig 2001, p. 228).