Saturday, October 12, 2019

MONTE VERITA PAINTED BY MARIANNE WEREFKIN






                  
MARIANNE WEREFKIN (1860-1938)
Monte Verita (332 m-1,089 ft)
Switzerland

In The Sorrowful City, circa 1930, Οil on canvas, Municipal Foundation, Ascona
The hill
Monte Verità (332 m - 1,089 ft) (Mount Truth) is a hill above Ascona. At the end of the nineteenth century, a small group of people, led by the son of an Antwerp industrialist, Henri Oedenkoven (1875-1935) and his girlfriend, German pianist and feminist Ida Hofmann (1864-1926), bought the hill and constituted themselves into a community. The founders then practiced a life close to nature, vegetarian and naturist, openly advocating free love. They stayed on Monte Verità until 1920 and then left for Brazil.
The hill became the meeting place of famous thinkers and artists, such as Hermann Hesse, Bruno Goetz, Carl Gustav Jung, or Erich Mühsam6, then Gilbert Durand, Henry Corbin, Gershom Sholem and many others, who also animated the Eranos Circle, which met near Lake Maggiore in Casa Eranos.
In 1989, the Monte Verità Foundation was created in collaboration with the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which now operates a scientific center that regularly organizes seminars. 

The painter
Marianne von Werefkin (Марианна Владимировна Веревкина) is a Russian-Swiss painter of the Expressionist period. Marianna Vladimirovna Verëvkina is the daughter of the commander of the Yekaterinburg regiment in the Urals. In 1880 she was a pupil of Ilia Repin, the greatest realist painter in Russia.
In 1888, she had a hunting accident in which she pulled herself into the right hand with which she was painting. In 1892, she met Alexi von Jawlensky who then met Helene Neznakomova who came to live with the couple of painters. All three then made a trip through Germany in 1896. For nearly ten years she did not paint anymore.
They then resided in France from 1905 to 1906.
In 1909, Alexi von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, Vassily Kandinsky and others founded the New Association of Munich Artists (NKV), which held its first exhibition at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich in December and which gave birth in 1912 to the group named "Der Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider).
In 1907, she began her expressionist work. It adopts the style of Paul Gauguin and Louis Anquetin.
At the outbreak of the First World War, they emigrated to Switzerland, near Geneva, then to Zurich. In 1918, they separate, and Werefkin settles in Ascona. In 1924, she created the artist group "Großer Bär". In the years that followed, she painted posters. His friends Carmen and Diego Hagmann preserve her from poverty.

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2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau