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31 
of 45
Girl with a Candle
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Hans Otto Orlowski
Girl with a Candle, 1932
oil and mixed media on wood
50 by 29 5/8 inches (127 by 75.3 cm)
monogramed and dated: ‘1932’
Enquire
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Provenance

 Dr. Herbert Antoine, Berlin;

sale Bassenge, Berlin, May 24, 2003, no. 6426;

sale Bassange, Berlin, December 4, 2004, no. 6826;

Private collection, South Germany

Literature

 Fritz Schwarzenberger, Werkverzeichnis Hans Orlowski , Berlin, 1972, no. 41.

 The painter and print-maker Hans Otto Orlowski (fig. 1) was born in Insterburg near Köningsburg

in East Prussia. His father was a tailor and moved the family to Köningsberg, Potsdam, and then

Charlottenburg. Orlowski first studied at the Academy of Decorative Arts in Berlin from 1911 to

1915. But the First World War interrupted his studies and he served briefly as a soldier in Serbia

until he was wounded. He was then employed as a draftsman in the War Ministry, but also began

producing his first independent prints. In 1918 he returned to art school and became a member of

the Berlin Secession, a progressive group whose members included, among others, Lovis Corinth,

Käthe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde. Orlowski graduated in 1919, and in 1921 he began teaching at

the Decorative Arts Academy in Charlottenberg, where he remained until 1945. In 1924 he visited

Paris, and his style evolved away from Expressionism to a more realistic, even classical, manner

applied primarily to nudes. The artist’s first one man exhibition was in Berlin in 1934 at the

prestigious Wolfgang Gurlitt Gallery, which was one of the first in Germany to show Matisse,

Kokoschka, and Corinth. During the Second World War Orlowski was involved with saving the

collection of the Berlin National Gallery. His own workshop and apartment were destroyed and

many of his paintings and prints lost. Beginning in 1945 he taught at the Berlin University of the

Arts and during his last years received a number of exhibitions throughout West Germany.

 

In the early 1920s Orlowski’s nude studies (figs. 2a-b) displayed the angular, intense Expressionist

style that was then current in Germany. But by the late 1920s and into the early 1930s his

paintings of nudes become more traditional and even classical (figs. 3a-c), but with great attention

devoted to the texture of the flesh, the effects of light and dark, and close-up view-points. Girl

with a Candle  is one of Orlowski’s  major surviving works from this period. The nearly full-length

nude stands before a window, and the candle that she shields with her left hand casts provocative

shadows across the rippling plains of her flesh. Lost in her own contemplative concerns, the figure

is both sensitive and sensual.

 

This artistic approach lasted only a short while, Orlowski in the late 1930s and into the 1940s

evolved a grander, broader neo-classical style for his nudes (figs. 4a-b) Due to the painter’s own

editing of his works and the destruction of the War, such early paintings like this by Orlowski are

quite rare.

 

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