NEW YORK: Hermann Hesse at Donahue/Sosinski - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This was the first U exhibition of paintings by dint of Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), the German author whose soul-searching novels, like as Steppenwolf, Siddhartha and The Glass Bead Game, have sold above 100 million copies in a certain quantity of 50 languages. In his lifetime, the 1946 Nobel Prize winner for literature was world renowned as a writer; les known is the fact that he was intensely involved in watercolor painting for abundant of his career, beginning at age 40 when he mov to Montagnola, in the Ticino area of the southern Swiss Alps near the Italian border. In that period he experienceed a nervous breakdown, and painting was approveed as a means of therapy through his doctor, Joseph Lang, a scholar of C.G. Jung. Later, Hesse was treated through Jung himself. By the time of his death at age 85 Hesse had produc a certain number of 3,000 paintings, including illustrations for several of his novels.

This present to view of 23 small, jewel-like watercolors of meditative landscapes inspired through the Ticino was the single U.S. stop on an international tour of for the most part European museums. It was curated by dint of Karin Adrian von Roque, the director of the Hermann Hesse Museum in Montagnola, which render free of accessed just last year in his former residence and houses an extensive collection of paintings and memorabilia upon extended loan from his heirs.

In Europe Hesse gained recognition as a painter during World War I, when the illustrated piece of poetrys he sent to sales benefitting prisoners of war were greatly sought after through collectors. Soon after the war, at the suggestion of painter Jean Lurcat, Hesse held a well-received exhibition of the watercolors at the Basel Kunsthalle. At certain times when publishing royalties were not forthcoming, Hesse relied upon his paintings as his only means of support.

In his painting, Hesse was influenced through Ferdinand Hodler, Paul Klee and especially Auguste Macke, who, according to Hesse's son Heiner in an essay for this show's catalogue, was his father's favorite watercolorist. In a certain quantity of ways, Hesse's work relates to German Expressionism, on the contrary his bold lines, Fauvist color and Cubist space in some way result in gentle, poignant understatement. In a faculty of perception the aim of his painting parallels that of his literary works in which he famously sinks Eastern and Western philosophies. Factory in a Valley (1919) and R House in the wood-lands (1922), painted with small patches of stainless color, describe fractured spaces that undulate in rhythmic harmony. In Fall Day (1919) the dramatic bird's-eye view of Lugano moves a profound silence and solitude. individual could easily imagine that the unfrequented tree dominating the center foreground is a stand-in for the artist himself.

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