Lot n° 83
Estimation :
1500 - 2500
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 2 470EUR
Frédéric FIEBIG (1885-1953) - Lot 83
Frédéric FIEBIG (1885-1953)
Undergrowth at Taennchel
Oil on cardboard, signed lower left.
H_19 cm W_17.5 cm
Frédéric Fiebig occupies a singular place in the history of early XXᵉ century European painting. Born in Talsen, Latvia, at the end of the 19th century, he trained at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts at a time when Russian artists were excelling in the artistic tradition of portraiture. Nevertheless, deeply influenced by the Impressionists and Monet in particular, Fiebig aspired to a career as a portrait painter. So, in the early 1900s, he moved to Paris and came into contact with the avant-garde artistic circles that were exploring new ways of conceiving color and form. He frequented such now emblematic figures as Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Signac, with whom he exhibited in 1912 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. From an early age, Fiebig was interested in drawing and linocuts. His linocuts were regularly published in Tendances Nouvelles until 1912, alongside those of Vassily Kandinsky. These works on paper display remarkable technical mastery and already a unique style, as demonstrated by his best-known etching of The Great Tolstoy, which made him a household name in Paris in 1910.
His early works show the influence of Impressionism, but also of certain trends in German Expressionism. This dual influence manifests itself in an almost "sculpted" style of painting (Fiebig painted with a knife, and his early works feature a very thick paste), in which color plays a central role in the organization of space. His landscapes and urban views are characterized by great chromatic intensity.
In Fiebig's work, color not only describes reality, it becomes a structuring element of the composition. Vivid, contrasting tones are organized into large surfaces that energize the pictorial space. This approach lends his works a particularly marked energy and visual dynamism. Over the years, Fiebig's style evolved from a resolutely abstract search to a stylized objectification of the world around him. In the early 1930s, Fiebig moved to Alsace. It was then that he painted his famous atmospheric views of the Alsace Plain and the Taennchel forests, where he lived in autarky for over a year.
Today, Frédéric Fiebig's work can be seen in Alsace at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar and the Bibliothèque Humaniste in Sélestat, as well as abroad at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Latvia, the Talsi Regional Museum and the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow.
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