Still Life with Fruit and Book, c. 1911

This still life is probably one of the earliest in a series that Anton Kolig (1886–1950) created between 1911 and 1913. The series is a clear example of the young artist’s occupation with an expressive compositional style, which he developed in 1911 and put into practice over subsequent years. The starting point for this new style was his role model Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). The retrospective exhibition from 1907, organized at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, had exposed the art world to Cézanne’s revolutionary innovations and triggered a veritable wave of euphoria surrounding his painting style in art centers across Europe. His characteristic painting style, in which he rendered individual motifs using an overall hatching pattern, was readily appropriated by Kolig in this early still life. Kolig even developed this method of representation further – by dynamizing the structural elements and expanding the sketch-like daubs of color, he took the forms into a more expressive direction.

AK, 2019