Nathan GRUNSWEIGH (1880-1956)

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Lot n° 32
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Nathan GRUNSWEIGH (1880-1956)
Self-portrait, 1916 Oil on panel, signed and dated upper right. 44,8 x 55 cm. PROVENANCE . Daniel and Rose GRUNZWEIG Collection. NATHAN GRUNSWEIGH (Krakow 1880 - Paris 1956) MASTER OF THE FIRST ECOLE OF PARIS Until recently little was known about Nathan Grunsweigh. The emulation of his works, their entry into renowned international institutions, the multiplication of monographic exhibitions, and the rise of his market value have led researchers to clarify his biography. The editors of the fascinating catalog of the recent Grunsweigh exhibition at the Villa La Fleur in Warsaw have conducted a real investigation that allows a better reading of his life and work. Nathan GRUNZWEIG (spelling of his birth name) was born in Krakow on April 2, 1880, to an accountant father. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wolanka, in the Drohobych district of present-day Ukraine, probably in search of a better income, as the development of oil drilling attracted a mosaic of nationalities, half of them of Jewish origin. But new legislation granting oil exploration only to the owners of the land drove out the small operators. The family returned to Krakow and then moved to Antwerp in 1893, where Nathan's father was registered as a diamond merchant. Nathan, at the age of thirteen, enrolled in drawing and painting classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and exhibited in 1908 at the Maison de Sion. But it is likely that he held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1906, according to the mention he made on the back of a painting by spelling his name Grunsweigh. And then, in 1908, it was Paris, a beacon for artists who came from all over the world. His two children, David and Adéline (Rebecca), were born there in 1912 and 1913, after his marriage to Fanny Edinger, a native of Alsace. The family probably spent the period of the First World War in Amsterdam, where their last son, Daniel, was born in 1914. Very few paintings from this period have come down to us. They show the painter's inclination for artistic experimentation and his mastery of the different currents. This is the case of the magnificent Self-portrait of 1916 (n°32) and Portrait of Daniel (n°33). The family returned to Paris in the 1920s and settled in the nearby suburb of Le Vésinet. Maurice Utrillo, who was reviving landscape art as a new modernity, captivated Grunsweigh with his views of Montmartre. The latter began to travel around Paris and its suburbs (nos. 36, 37, 41, 42, 44), planting his easel to sketch the streets, crossroads, squares and boulevards. In 1924, the new Pierre Gallery, run by Pierre Loeb (who was to become one of the great promoters of Surrealism), hosted a Grunsweigh solo exhibition, in collaboration with the poet Gustave Kahn, whom Grunsweigh admired, just after the inaugural exhibition of Jules Pascin. It featured landscapes and still lifes with precise, firm, linear contours, in the vein of Utrillo, all of which were hailed by critics, such as Gustave Kahn in the preface to the catalog, or by Florent Fels: "His works, beautiful and nuanced, represent suburban streets, the small gardens of the Parisian suburbs, and landscapes where the city and the countryside seem to be fighting for supremacy. This is where he lives, in a small house on a sad street. In the morning, people go to work in Paris and the streets are empty. In the evening, the figures return by train, and so on. There is no joy here. Yet Grunsweigh is a conscientious and simple man, and sometimes a flash of gray, a lovely silvery gray, shimmers through his melancholy images, like the glint of a pearl." The paintings Montmartre (n°34) and Fête foraine (n°35) are among the most colorful of this period. Hailed by critics as a landscape painter, he exhibited in 1925 at the Galerie de la Maison Blanc, alongside Utrillo and other landscape painters. He even exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1926 a painting treated in the manner of Naïve art, which he entitled The Landscape Painter, which represents an artist (probably a self-portrait), oversized, painting in a street, under the gaze of passersby. Gustave Kahn likes his still lifes (n° 38, 39, 40, 47, 48). In 1925, he wrote in Le Mercure de France: "... they are curious, composed with the greatest precision, almost in a straight line, animated with a charming color". The firmness of the contours, the colors used reveal a subtle influence of the art of Paul Cézanne. There are a number of Cubist motifs reinterpreted by the artist, such as a typographic element or the use of several perspectives in a frame to make the painted space unreal. The flat plane of a table extends across the entire
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