Bidspirit auction | Wilhelm Lachnit

Wilhelm Lachnit - Wilhelm Lachnit, Still Life with Dahlias. 1934.. Wilhelm Lachnit 1899 Gittersee/Dresden – 1962 Dresden Tempera on strong, structured ”PM Fabriano” paper. Signed and dated ”Lachnit 34” lower left. Upper left, with a dedication in pencil by the artist's hand and dated ”37”. Mounted in a passe-partout and behind UV glass in a black interchangeable frame. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, a rigorous crackdown on politically active artists also began. Lachnit, politically left-leaning, was soon to feel this. His studio was searched, he himself arrested and only released due to the intervention of Erich Fraaß. In the following period, Lachnit painted more and more still lifes alongside portraits, from which his typical mythological figure compositions developed. Perhaps these themes allowed an escape from and within the reality surrounding him – a desperate clinging to beauty, preserved in the present work in a delicate yet powerfully colored bouquet of flowers. Sheet edges recto all around with defects from older mounting, sheet edges with small marginal lesions and partial indentations. Paint layer with inconspicuous, smallest defects, in the upper quarter of the image a horizontal (25 cm) and a vertical pressure mark (9 cm). Verso remnants of older mountings. Frame verso with individual drill holes. Dimensions: 57.3 x 39 cm, Frame 72.3 x 52.3 cm. Wilhelm Lachnit 1899 Gittersee/Dresden – 1962 Dresden After an apprenticeship as a sign painter and varnisher, Lachnit initially worked as a decorative painter from 1918 and simultaneously attended his first courses at the Dresden School of Applied Arts, among others with Richard Guhr and Georg Oehme, before beginning his studies at the Art Academy there with Richard Dreher from 1921. From 1923, he worked as a freelance artist. Together with Hans Grundig, Otto Griebel, and Fritz Skade, he founded the ”Neue Gruppe” in 1928. In 1929, he was a co-founder of ASSO, in 1930 of the Dresden group ”Aktion”, and in 1932 he appeared as a member of the ”Neue Dresdner Sezession 1932”. During the National Socialist regime, Lachnit was massively denounced and could only work to a limited extent. In 1947, he was appointed professor of painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden, followed by freelance work from 1954.