Trient 1870 - 1940 Innsbruck
Birches with Sunflowers
Oil on cardboard
38.2 x 40.7 cm
Signed lower left: Nikodem
Signed, inscribed and dated on the reverse: Artur Nikodem / Innsbruck-Tirol-1921 / No 49
Provenienz:
Private collection, Italy
Family property for a long time, acquired directly from the artist
Literatur:
cf. Exhibition catalogue „Artur Nikodem 1870-1940‚`... Kunst ist Schaffen aus
seiner Seele‘“, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck and
Südtiroler Kulturinstitut, Bolzano 2000, ill. pic. sec. no. 14
cf. Elio Krivdic und Günther Dankl (ed.), Artur Nikodem. Maler und Fotograf der Moderne, Innsbruck 2017, ill. p. 225
When Artur Nikodem painted ‘Birches with Sunflowers’ in 1921, he had only returned to Innsbruck from his stay in Turkey two-and-a-half years before. Unlike countless other men of his generation, the war had not been a traumatic experience for him. During these years from August 1916 to February 1919 working as a telegraph officer for the imperial
and royal (k. k.) command centre in Istanbul, he rather went through an artistic revelation. Influenced by the decorative principles of oriental art, by the splendid colours of their materials, rugs and majolica, he now cast aside all dull colours, placing the tones more directly next to each other, brighter, lusher, more absolute, more Dionysian. Nikodem’s
first exhibition was mounted in the Taxispalais upon his return to Innsbruck in 1919. In this exhibition, the experience of Turkey was unloaded in an almost gorgeous intoxication of colours’, accordingly turning into a minor sensation for the local public. The painter thus moved to the forefront of Tyrolean art creation alongside Egger-Lienz and obtained
early retirement from his daily job as a post office clerk. In ‘Birches with Sunflowers’, Nikodem was original in the way he combined two central motifs in his artwork: the birches with their luminously white trunks and the flowers in all their expressive colourfulness. These colours are kept apart from one another, stemming from a ‘musical sensibility’ as the painter terms it: every brushstroke its own, gleaming like enamel as it were, the rich yellow of the sunflowers, the green of the fence in front of them, the whiteness of the birches; added to this, variously shaded blue, green and brown tones, all spread in a refined arrangement of the surface, a feast for the senses that we indulge in joyfully – even if the erotic feel, that otherwise reverberates through Nikodem’s birch and flower pictures now and then, is apparently absent here. The artist created comparable paintings with sunflowers in
the early 1930s, too, although these lack the immediacy of the present work.
Carl Kraus