HANS VON MARÉES

Hans von Marées is represented in the current auction with five drawings. They are mostly small-format spontaneous sketches, drawn on the leaves of a small sketchbook, a notebook, one sheet is of somewhat larger format. The drawings date to the artist's later work in Rome. 

The relatively short artistic life of Hans von Marée, who died at the age of barely 50, was marked by great zeal for work and a constant search for "his" art. In his case, this search was marked by self-doubt, which caused him to destroy many works (including drawings), brooding development of new ideas and deep artistic as well as personal crises. Marées: The poles of his artistic life could be called "realism" and "idealism". Like any abbreviation of developments that extend with ups and downs over a longer period of time, such a simplification would be unfair to an artist who must be regarded as one of the most formative artistic personalities of his time, whose artistic striving was also directed, among other things, towards what was an inner concern of many of his comrades-in-arms: the liberation of the arts from the academism of the 19th century. This striving finally created an official forum in the German-speaking world a few years after Marées' death with the founding of the "Secessions".

Hans von Marées on the situation of art in his time and the nature of the artist:

"Times are bad, and art is increasingly lying fallow. And unfortunately, almost the only hope for a better future for it lies in its being completely suffocated by today's rotten taste and silly dilettantism. The weeds have sprung up too high for healthy germs to be seen and nurtured." 

"I would call him a born artist to whom nature has sunk an ideal into his soul from the outset, and it is this ideal which represents to him the place of truth, in which he absolutely believes, and which becomes his life's task to bring to the contemplation of others, to the purest consciousness of himself."

(Zitate nach Briefen von Hans von Marées an seinen Freund und Förderer Konrad Fiedler. Abgedruckt in: Konnerth, Hermann (Hg.), Konrad Fiedlers Schriften über Kunst. Bd. 1. München 1913, S. 406 und 410).