OTTO FRIEDRICH WEBER (Germany, 1890-1957).
"Landscape with houses". circa 1915.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 51 x 51 cm; 60 x 60 cm (frame).
Otto Weber initially studied at the Werkkunstschule in Wuppertal, where Max Bernuth was his teacher. His first drawings were acquired by Baron August von der Heydt, father of Eduard von der Heydt, who also allowed the budding artist to attend the painting class at the Dresden Academy. In Munich, Weber became a pupil of Hermann Urban, where he learned the technique of wax color, which was still new at the time. A commissioned work took Weber, who accompanied the landscape painter Edmund Steppes on a trip through southern Germany, to Paris, where he was the only German artist to exhibit at the Salons d'Automne of 1911 and 1913. He lived with numerous Cubist artists at the artists' house La Ruche, in the Passage de Dantzig, and, like his compatriot Arno Breker, was a friend of the young Pablo Picasso. In 1914 Weber traveled to Spain. In Barcelona he joined the colony of artists around Robert Delaunay, who like him had escaped military service and who influenced Weber's work. Weber exhibited at the Josep Dalmau Gallery in 1915, and later in Madrid and Toledo. He made a living drawing caricatures for the Spanish press. In 1919, Weber returned with his family to Elberfeld, where Edmund Becher's Galerie Raumkunst offered him exhibition opportunities. In 1927 he returned to Paris, where the city of Wuppertal commissioned him to design a mural. The newspaper Le Soir called him "the greatest German painter of the time." During the Nazi era, Weber was forbidden to travel, which made it almost impossible for him to work, as he often spent several months of the year in Mediterranean countries for preliminary studies. His paintings, including Die Schreitende, were removed from museums, and his studies were destroyed in the phosphorus attack on Wuppertal in 1943, resulting in the loss of a considerable part of his life's work. Weber lived out the end of the war in Eindhoven. Otto Friedrich Weber was a member of the Rhenish Secession, the Bergische Kunstgenossenschaft and the Malkasten in Düsseldorf. The Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal dedicated a memorial exhibition to him in 1958.