Still Life with Tulips and a Skull Karl Peter Röhl

Karl Peter Röhl was one of the founding artists at the State Bauhaus in Weimar. His artistic roots, however, lie in representational painting: after completing an apprenticeship and attending the schools of applied arts in Kiel and Berlin, he studied at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar, under Albin Egger-Lienz amongst others, and painted landscapes of his native Holstein. In Kiel, he founded the Expressionist Working Group with Werner Lange and Peter Drömmer, and his works from his early Bauhaus years were also influenced by Expressionism. In 1919, he designed the first Bauhaus logo, the so-called ‘little star man’. It was only his encounter with Theo van Doesburg, who held his De Stijl course in Röhl’s Weimar studio in 1922, that led him towards consistent abstraction. After years as a master student under Walther Klemm at the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, he took over as head of the preparatory class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 1926. These years in Frankfurt revealed just how versatile Röhl’s oeuvre was. Alongside strictly geometric compositions, he produced paintings in which he returned to the subject – to a visual world familiar to him from his Expressionist beginnings. The still life, one of the most traditional genres of painting, became for him a field in which he experimented with colour, light and composition with great painterly freedom. In this work, Röhl groups a pot of red, white and yellow tulips, oranges and yellow apples, a shell and a skull into a dense arrangement. In doing so, he deliberately draws on the tradition of the vanitas still life: The splendour of the flowers and fruit contrasts with the skull, which, in the semi-darkness at the right-hand edge of the picture, serves as a reminder of the transience of all living things. Against the cool, blue-grey background, the warm splashes of colour shine all the more brightly. In this way, the painting combines a classical subject with the free, modern painting style of the late 1920s. | 1890 - Kiel - 1975 | Moderne Kunst | Gemälde | Nummer: 26x2490 | Provenance: Nachlass des Künstlers; Privatsammlung, Schweiz.

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