Rote Häuser. 1919.
Watercolor and ink pen.
Lower right signed (partly in ligature) and dated. On delicate laid paper. 47.6 x 60 cm (18.7 x 23.6 in), the full sheet. [CH].

• Document of the artist's lasting love of the small Baltic coastal town of Nida, which Pechstein described as his "painter's paradise" in retrospect.
• With a consistent provenance that goes back to the 1920s.
• Pechstein shows the characteristic northern brick architecture of Nida and Leba in an expressionist manner and in a strong red - also in several paintings from this creative period.
• The composition is almost geometrical-abstract, clear forms, strong colors and contrasts prevail.
• Pechstein's creativity in the post-war year of 1919 was like an artistic renaissance after the cruelties and miseries of World War I.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Great Britain (acquired in Berlin in the 1920s, family-owned thereafter).
Private collection Southern Germany (acquired from the above in 2005, Villa Grisebach Auctions, Berlin, November 26, 2005).

LITERATURE: Villa Grisebach Auctions, Berlin, 131st auction, Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, November 26, 2005, lot no. 174 (with illu.).

"I went up to Nida in spring 1919, anxious whether I would find conditions up on the Curonian Spit that are still bearable for a painter. And I was also anxious about seeing the landscape and the people again that I had discovered as a fruitful and uncharted land in 1909. Certainly, a lot had changed, but it felt good to be well received by the old fishermen friends. Luckily, the war had not had any impact on the water of the Courland Lagoons and the Baltic Sea, the changing light impressions of this northern piece of land, on nature with its ever same rhythm and the colors changing with the seasons."
Hermann Max Pechstein, in: Erinnerungen. Stuttgart 1993, pp. 106f.