?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ELFRIEDE LOHSE-WÄCHTLER Group of 5 prints.
Die Spinne, lithograph, 1917. Artist's proof. Signed, titled and inscribed "Probedruk" in pencil, lower margin * Ohne Titel (Nächtliche Szene), lithograph, 1917. Artist's proof. Signed, titled and inscribed "Probedruk" in pencil, lower margin * Londa Felixmüller, woodcut, circa 1917 * Die Nachwandlerin, woodcut on Japan paper, circa 1919 * Autoportrait, woodblock, circa 1919. Various sizes and conditions.
Lohse-Wächtler (1899-1940) was a German Expressionist artist whose stark and somber work reflected the artist's struggles with poverty and mental illness and her preoccupation with post-World War I social reform. She moved to Dresden at age 16 to train to be an artist. She joined the Dresden Sezession Group 1919, befriending Otto Dix, Otto Griebel and Conrad Felixmüller, among other activist artists. Due to her political activism and the content of her work, she was declared a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis. The current lot demonstrates the impact of German Expressionism and the avant-garde on her artistic output. The abstracted and simplified human forms in the woodcut portraits convey the tension and hardship of living in Germany during this fraught political period. Her focus on the psychological and violent is clear in the imagery of the chained man in Die Spinne.
Due to anxieties surrounding her emotional and financial hardships, she had a nervous breakdown in 1929 and was admitted to a Dresden psychiatric hospital. She was released and then readmitted to a phsychiatric hospital in 1935 where she underwent a forced surgical sterilisation on the grounds of Nazi eugenicist policies. In 1940, she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Pirna, where she and a majority of the residents were killed as part of the Nazi program allowing German physicians to euthanize "incurably sick" patients.
