An eye on the avant-garde

The star of Berlin art dealer Thomas Derda's stand at this year's ART COLOGNE will be a relief painting by Carl Buchheister. It is an assemblage from 1931 - oil and wooden wedge on wood - which bears the title ‘Bild mit schwarzem Keil’. By Derda's standards, who usually deals in smaller, delicate works on paper, it is relatively large at approx. 62 x 75 cm. And he is also very fond of the painting: ‘I come from Hanover, so Buchheister is my household god alongside Schlemmer. This painting is a kind of prototype of his work, the original Buchheister, so to speak, of which he then produced further versions until shortly before his death.’

For those who are not so familiar with the subject matter, here are a few brief explanations: Carl Buchheister (1890-1964) had settled in Hanover as a freelance painter after the First World War and, under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky and Kurt Schwitters, quickly advanced to the forefront of the German avant-garde with his abstract works at the end of the 1920s. Denigrated by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’, he withdrew into inner emigration and only resumed his abstract phase in the post-war period. Perhaps this is why his name is no longer quite as familiar as that of his avant-garde colleagues at the time: ‘The picture was featured in the second issue of the Parisian magazine “abstraction-création” in 1933, alongside works by Kandinsky or Calder - you have to imagine that.’ The provenance of the painting is also impressive - for many years it belonged to the renowned Langen Collection in Meerbusch in the Rhineland. The best prospects for a successful sale at the fair.

But Thomas Derda, who has been running his art dealership in Berlin's Fasanenstraße since 2015, also has some other gems on offer. His main speciality is the Bauhaus, and five masters from the legendary art school in Weimar and Dessau are accompanying him to Cologne: eight works by Wassily Kandinsky (including from the portfolio ‘Small Worlds’ from 1922) as well as other works by Lothar Schreyer, László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche and Paul Klee. They are joined by a sculpture by Hans Uhlmann, who is regarded as a pioneer of metal sculpture in Germany, and a finely balanced lithograph (‘The Horseman’, 1918) by Bart van der Leck, who, alongside Mondrian, was one of the co-founders of the powerful De Stijl movement in the Netherlands.

Thomas Derda is one of those art dealers who has at least two hearts beating in his chest at the same time. After all, his intensive research and his work as an art historian and researcher give him just as much pleasure as a good deal. In recent years, for example, he has made a major contribution to rediscovering the work of the Rhenish artist and graphic designer Gerd Arntz (1900-1988). In the 1920s, Arntz was a member of the ‘Cologne Progressives’, a politically left-wing group of artists, and is regarded as one of the inventors of the pictogram. (This basic form of modern visual communication gave rise to the emojis that are so popular today). Two years ago, Derda dedicated a wonderful cabinet exhibition to Gerd Arntz and now looks after his estate.

He rendered similar services to the artistic legacy of Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), the first wife of the Bauhaus master. For a long time, she stood in the shadow of her famous husband, whom she assisted as a photographer. Derda has vehemently drawn attention to the fact that her artistically composed photographs of architecture and teaching results, focussed on the essentials, played a significant role in establishing the Bauhaus aesthetic. With success: a major exhibition at the Kunsthalle Prague is currently dedicated to the work of Lucia Moholy, which will then be shown in Winterthur next year.

Perhaps he will succeed in doing the same with an artist he is also bringing to Cologne. Carry van Biema (1881-1942) was a Jewish artist from Hanover with Dutch roots. She studied at the Stuttgart Art Academy under Adolf Hölzel, whose colour theory had a lasting influence on her. Thomas Derda is showing an ‘Abstract Composition red/green’ by her, which was created around 1930. Carry van Biema had her first solo exhibition in Barcelona in 1933, nine years later she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. The Sprengel Museum in Hanover recently acquired a painting by her, which is now on display there in the permanent collection. a lot with young collectors, mainly from the USA.

Thomas Derda sees his appearance in Cologne as an ‘independent, curated exhibition’. And hopes that the works of lesser-known artists will be strongly illuminated by the ‘beacons’ Buchheister, Kandinsky and van der Leck.