MASP

In Sailing Ships in the Storm the subject matter faithfully renders the nihilist spirit that prevailed particularly in Germany at the turn of the century. The direct relationship with nature inherited from the 19th century, from Constable to Van Gogh, was introduced in this environment in a reduced manner. With the rupture of the lyrics of an ideated landscape inhabited by an individual whose spirit thrives on its emotional oneness with the world, nature reveals its elements most hostile and indifferent to man – its elementary fury –, the source for the emerging Expressionism of a new beauty. The brutal violence of the artist’s palette, the frantic brush stroke, the instability of an unframed composition saturated with diagonal lines, and the unbridled and generalized vigor of forms are some of the necessary effects of a radical spiritualization of nature. In this sense, the work has a programmatic character and engages in intimate dialogue with the ideas and the intellectual alertness that gather in Munich, around Kandinsky and Franz Marc, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter (1911-1914), a group with which Pechstein kept in close contact from the very beginning. According to Gorini Esmeraldo (1994, p. 89), the canvas Sailing Ships in the Storm may be dated precisely of 1910, for in those years the artist spent his summer seasons in Dangast, on the Baltic Sea, and on Moritzburger lake, both of them sites that most probably inspired the painting in question.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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