Aloe In Bloom
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Notes : The present lot is dated 1938, the year in which Jentsch left his native Germany for his cousin's farm, Kleepforte, in South West Africa. Jentsch's arrival marked a great watershed in his art. Although temperamentally very different to contemporary Expressionist artists, Jentsch shared their belief that art was primarily a reflection of the artist's inner life. The freedom and harmony he experienced at Windhoek prompted a great surge in his creative output. The harmonious composition of the landscape emphasizes its spiritual quality; the expanse of barren land is balanced by an equally vast sky. The emptiness of such scenes was carefully calculated by Jentsch: "I don't paint anything unimportant by painting it with less attention, or putting it into the background. I just leave it out...the expression of emptiness becomes effective through those things that surround it." It was this process of selection that set Jentsch's landscapes apart from the naturalistic art that had come before, and aligned him with his Expressionist contemporaries. In reducing the South West African landscape to its bare essentials Aloe in bloom conveys the artist's relief at escaping the suffocating oppression of Nazi Germany. Olga Levinson comments, "the painting[s] called 'Aloe in bloom' left the onlooker with a sense of exhilaration in the joyous contact with mountain and veld". It is evident that the subject of this work was a great favourite with Jentsch. An almost-identical oil painting was sold in these rooms (17 October 2012 lot 326) and a watercolour study of the same subject is illustrated in Scholtz (p.57, cat. no. 76). Bibliography O. Levinson, Adolph Jentsch, (Cape Town, 1973). U. Scholtz (ed.), The Levinson Collection: Being the Olga and Jack Levinson Collection of S.W.A./Namibian Art, (Pretoria, 1986).
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