Alexander Kanoldt

Alexander Kanoldt - Visionary of the New Objectivity

Gloria Köpnick

Alexander Kanoldt (1881-1939) is one of the most important representatives of New Objectivity art. Kanoldt, who came from a family of artists, began his artistic career in his native city of Karlsruhe, where he studied at the art academy. In search of his own style, he found particular inspiration in the circle of Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin: during these years, his work developed from the animated brushstrokes of Post-Impressionism to a style of painting that combined forms into areas of colour. However, while the works of this period still testified to a kind of 'group style' and the close exchange between the artists of the "Neue Künstlervereinigung München", founded in 1909, Kanoldt - like the other members of the Munich association - broke away in the following years and soon developed his own characteristic style.

In 1911, Kanoldt - accompanied by his long-time painter friend Adolf Erbslöh - undertook an extended trip to the south, which took him to the small town of Klausen in South Tyrol, around 30 kilometres north of Bolzano: The town and the surrounding hilly landscape of the picturesque Isarco Valley, with Branzoll Castle, the Benedictine Abbey of Sabiona and the parish church of St Andrew, which dominates the townscape, offered numerous picture opportunities. Dürer had already been inspired by the location of Klausen for his copperplate engraving "Nemesis".

Kanoldt stayed in the small South Tyrolean town in 1911 - as well as during his subsequent stays in 1912, 1914 and 1920 - sometimes for several months at the Hotel Walther von der Vogelweide, which still exists today. 1) In the summer of 1914 - before Kanoldt, like many of his fellow painters, was to go off to the First World War - he painted, among other things, the cubistically structured view of the "Stadt". The painting was acquired by Fritz Wichert for the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim the following year.

After the end of the war, Kanoldt returned to Klausen in 1920 and created further views of the town: In "Stadt im Tal III", the trees in the foreground have grown a little higher - in contrast to the 1914 version - and the view of the horizonless sea of houses appears wider, so that the church tower of St. Andreas is now also more recognisable on the left edge of the picture. While the Mannheim version of the motif still formally reflects the cubism of the 1910s, the style of our painting has adapted to the emerging New Objectivity: Kanoldt 'objectifies' the view, which is composed in restrained colours, without simplifying it in a cubist manner. He himself distanced himself from Cubism. In a letter to the art historian Josef August Beringer, he reported:

It is very easy to explain how I sometimes arrive at 'cubic' forms: I usually get my inspiration from buildings of some kind - like others from figurative visions - still lifes, etc. Now buildings naturally have cubic forms and force me to use such and similar ones - in order to achieve a pictorial unity - since houses, for example, do not interest me as such from a painterly point of view, but are only of interest to me as a compositional element, I must of necessity look for a form for the surroundings of the rigid masses of houses that adapts to their physiognomy. If I were to paint heads, for example, it would never occur to me to break up the same cubes, as Picasso and Le Fauconnier, for example, do - that would seem to me like mannerism, and any interiority would be sacrificed to the cubic form. 2)

Five years before Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, Wichert's successor, conceived the " Neue Sachlichkeit" exhibition in Mannheim, the style of a new epoch was already manifesting itself in the painting "Stadt im Tal III". Alexander Kanoldt was to become one of its main representatives. Our painting was probably already shown at Alexander Kanoldt's solo exhibition in February 1921 at the legendary Jenaer Kunstverein, where the artist had already exhibited in earlier years.

Kanoldt, who created like a berserker 3) after his return from the war, took up another theme: Still life became one of the artist's main genres.

In 1919, I actually started anew, or rather, I started where I would have had to if I had stayed at work all those years, he wrote to the art historian Franz Roh and continued: the final rest after almost five years of adventuring tied me to the studio, where I quite naturally fell into the exploration of still life, which I had previously paid little attention to, a task that is becoming more and more appealing to me every day and with which I still see myself far from finished. 4)

For our still life in muted colours, Kanoldt arranged three books lying slightly offset on top of each other, two pipes (Kanoldt was a smoker) and a red picture frame, which - like the pipes - can also be found in other works from these years, on a dark chest of drawers. The artist showed the ensemble in a narrowly framed picture detail and with a slight top view. The art critic Wilhelm Michel summarised Kanoldt's development in 1923 on the occasion of the exhibition of his most recent works by once again referring to Cubism as an inspiration, which Kanoldt had overcome in favour of New Objectivity: His still lifes have a strict, gloomy objectivity, a sharp determination [...]. It is [...] an overly sharp view of the objects, a peering as if with an armed eye, a conscious organisation that does not deny its origins in the Cubist movement. 5)

1 Cf. Michael Koch: Alexander Kanoldt. 1881-1939. catalogue raisonné of the paintings, Munich 2018, p. 24f.

2 Alexander Kanoldt to Joseph August Beringer, quoted from: Koch 2018, p. 25.

3 Johanna Kanoldt to Hugo Troendle, letter of 26 July 1919, cited after: Koch 2018, p. 31.

4 Alexander Kanoldt to Franz Roh, letter dated 17 February 1925, cited in: Koch 2018, p. 25: Koch 2018, p. 25.

5 Wilhelm Michel: Exhibition "Deutsche Kunst 1923" Darmstadt, in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 52nd vol. (1923), July issue, pp. 176-179.