ROWNTREE CLARK

Karl Weschke

1925-2005

Apocalypse

oil on board

152.5 by 112cm

signed, titled, dated 1957 and inscribed on the reverse

PROVENANCE

The Estate of the Artist;

Sale: Bonhams, Bond Street, 28th May 2014, lot 94;

Austin Desmond, London;

Sale: Sothebys, 20th March 2019, lot 177;

Private Collection, London

LITERATURE

Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke: Portrait of a Painter, Petronilla Silver, Ruston, 1998, illustrated p.31;

Martin Bird, The St Ives Artists. A Biography of Space and Time, Lund Humprhies 2016, p.199, illustrated p.200

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£28,000 + ARR

The present work is particularly significant within the formation of Weschke's artistic development. He was quoted as saying it was the closest he got to Peter Lanyon - the stylistic similarities are clear. In early 1958 Weschke had taken this oil to show Helen Lessore at her Beaux Arts Gallery and had hoped that his kinship with the artists Peter Kinley, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff would impress her but was left disappointed. Leaving the gallery he bumped into the artist Denis Bowen in Bond Street and showed Bowen the painting. Bowen immediately offered Weschke what was to be his first solo show, at the New Vision Gallery, later that year. 

Jeremy Lewison notes that 'Weschke adopted the fracture of de Staël's painting in the Apocalypse 1957-8, building up rich impasto but resisting the temptation to expand the range of his palette. In terms of composition, this striking painting of a horse and rider, a warrior of the Thirty Years War, pays homage to Marino Marini whose work Weschke had admired in the Tate Gallery, but in its fusion of landscape with myth and history the Apocalypse had something more in common with the painting of Peter Lanyon – for example St Just 1952-3' (Jeremy Lewison, Karl Weschke, Portrait of an Artist, Tate Publishing, St Ives, 1998, p.30-31).

Karl Reschke photographed by Martin Lanyon

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