?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
CHARLOTTE BEREND-CORINTH Two Women on the Beach, California.
Watercolor, circa 1945. 535x710 mm; 21x28 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
Provenance: Knoedler Galleries, New York; Mary Margaret Goldschmidt (1916-2003), New York, circa 1945; thence by descent to the current owner, Marc R. Goldschmidt Trust.
Exhibited: Knoedler Galleries, New York, "Exhibition of Water Colors by Charlotte Berend," June 22-July 11, 1945, number 25.
Berend (1880-1967) attended the Royal School of Art in Berlin and gained the notice of international art critic Julius Meier-Graefe early in her career as a Berlin Secessionist. She became further involved in the group when she attended art classes taught by painter Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) in Berlin, and the two married in 1903. Berend and Corinth continued to exhibit with the Secessionists through the 1920s with both artists independently receiving international recognition. Despite Corinth's death in 1925, Berend continued to pursue her artistic career while perpetuating her husband's legacy.
Before Berend relocated to New York in the 1930s, her work was already well-known by Americans, having exhibited at the 30th Carnegie Institute International Exhibition in 1931. After her arrival, she established a studio at 68 West 58th Street, in proximity to the notorious cluster of New York galleries on 57th Street. She occupied this space through her late career until at least 1950, also offering private art instruction. Berend had several solo exhibitions at well-respected New York galleries from the 1930s to the 1960s, including at Kleemann Galleries, Knoedler & Co., Schaefer Galleries, Argent Galleries (which also exhibited Berend's work alongside the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors), Van Dieman Galleries, and the Selected Artists Galleries. In the 1940s, during her brief residency in Santa Barbara, Berend's subjects were primarily California landscapes. On the West Coast, her works were shown in a solo exhibition at the prestigious California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1942. The current work dates from Berend's time in Santa Barbara, of which Donald Bear, then the Director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, wrote in the foreword for the 1945 Knoedler exhibition, "There is a loving glow of life in these water colors of the sea and the sun and the sky."
Margaret Bruening wrote of Berend's work, which seemed to straddle genres, in The Art Digest, volume 26, issue 16, May 15, 1952, "Realism and impressionism are alike absent from Miss Berend's personal artistic language, although, aided by both delicate and brilliant color, she clearly sums up the character of place and often of time. At times objects stand out with sharpness in flooding luminosity." Several critics found Japanese influences in her compositions and use of specialty papers.
Leading a long and successful career, Berend celebrated her eightieth birthday with an exhibition at Selected Artists Galleries, New York in the summer of 1960.
