ALEXANDER KANOLDT

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture -by Gautam Shah

Post -329 (originally published on Face Book on Dec 9 2018, but now no trace of it, so republished on my Blog site.)

Alexander Kanoldt (1881-1939), was a German Painter. In the early phase, he worked as a realist, drawing potted plants, angular tins, fruit and mugs on tabletops. His portraits were also in the same ‘statuary style’. During the stay in Munich in 1908, he met several of the modernists such as, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. He was involved with several German Expressionists movements.

He evolved a style of own, over a period of thirty years, often labelled as ‘magic realism’. It was, unlike the Surrealism that presented cerebral, psychological, and subconscious reality, whereas the Magic realism was about material-objects and ordinary-subjects, with a distance and detachment.

Kanoldt, during his stay in Italy (1924), produced ‘multi-perspective architectural landscapes and serene interiors’. Kanoldt 's architectural landscapes are bound in geometry and the solidity of the cubists, but more emphatically through the colour compared to Paul Cezanne. During the Nazi period in 1933, he attempted to accommodate the political situation, by painting in a romantic style, but many of his works were seized in 1937, as the degenerate art. 

 

 

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