Two girls on a blue sofa

Details

Wietek 257.

Exhibition:

Rediscovery of an expressionist. Georg Tappert. Paintings 1906-1933, BAT-Haus, Hamburg 1977, cat. no. 51, with illus. (dated: C. 1928);

Georg Tappert. Ein Berliner Expressionist, 1880 bis 1957, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin 1980/81, cat. no. 39, with illus., label on the reverse of the frame;

Georg Tappert. German Expressionist. Stiftung Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesmuseen, Schloss Gottorf, Schleswig/ Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg 2005, cat. no. 67, with ill. p. 109.

Provenance:

Gerhard Wietek, Schleswig;

Private collection, Southern Germany, until 2008;

Grisebach, Berlin 30 May 2008, lot 51;

Private collection, Europe, acquired from the aforementioned.

Description

– Women from the exotic demimonde of Berlin are a frequent subject of the artist in the 1920s/30s

– Tappert shows the two girls with an undisguised gaze at eye level and without criticising social issues

– Two real people are depicted, unmistakable individuals whose facial expressions and postures clearly show the artist’s empathy

The fascination with the glamour of the Golden Twenties remains unbroken to this day. In the midst of extreme tensions between social opposites and the doomed young Weimar Republic, Berlin became a metropolis of enormous attraction – a cosmopolitan city in a frenzy with all its facets. The rich leisure offerings of variety theatres, dance bars and cinemas characterise the nights, as do drugs and prostitution. Large sections of the population live in abject poverty and try to escape everyday life in the evening. The Kurfürstendamm becomes a boulevard and the centre of the pleasure-seeking masses. Berlin in the 1920s is the largest industrial centre in Europe and by 1929 already has over four million inhabitants. Berlin is a city that guarantees adventure, a den of iniquity, wicked and dangerous, a magnet and centre for all those who want to have fun, and a stronghold of crime. A city with a distinct upper class and underworld in equal measure, which challenges its inhabitants, frightens and fascinates them at the same time and which no cultural creator of the time can ignore.

Born in Berlin in 1880, Georg Tappert was one of the first German artists to discover the metropolitan world of entertainment as a pictorial theme. Growing up in Friedrichstrasse, the city’s entertainment mile at the time, he came into contact with Berlin’s demimonde as a child.

In his works from the 1920s and 1930s, the artist mainly focussed on women from the exotic milieu who worked in cafés, variety shows, nightclubs and circuses, as in the present painting. Tappert shows two young women, dressed in lingerie and lounging on a blue chaise longue, waiting bored and tired for the next suitor with empathy and an unobstructed gaze, without falling into the cool detachment of New Objectivity or the socially critical verism of the time.