There are paintings that need explaining and there are paintings that simply stop you in your tracks.
This enormous oil painting falls firmly into the latter camp.
Painted in 1944, three monumental female nudes almost completely fill the canvas. One turns her back to us, the central figure stands frontally with her arms raised behind her head, while the third sits alongside them wearing an extraordinary arrangement of blue flowers in her hair.
The scale is fantastic. At approximately 1.5 metres wide, the figures are almost life size and have an extraordinary presence on the wall.
Stylistically, the painting sits within European figurative modernism. The bodies have been deliberately simplified and exaggerated, with strong outlines, flattened perspective and wonderfully strange, almond shaped eyes. There are elements of Expressionism in the distortion, but also something much older and almost classical about the arrangement of the three figures.
And then there is the colour.
The pale flesh tones sit against a fabulous flat teal green ground, punctuated by deep aubergine, black, blue and flashes of yellow. Despite being painted more than eighty years ago, it feels remarkably contemporary.
We think the painting is signed “Huppert” and dated 1944 lower right.
The signature has led us down something of a research rabbit hole. One possible artist is the German painter and art teacher Willy Huppert (1899–1979), who studied at the Karlsruhe Academy between 1919 and 1925 and later taught there. Huppert is known to have painted figurative subjects as well as landscapes, including a recorded oil entitled Die Landarbeiterinnen (The Female Agricultural Workers). He was actively producing signed oils during the 1940s. However, we have not found sufficient evidence to make a firm attribution and would much rather leave a question mark than invent a certainty.
So we are selling this for exactly what it is:
A huge, strange and exceptionally decorative European painting.
Signed lower right.
Oil on canvas.
Max Width - 140cm / 55”
Max Height - 100.5cm / 41.5”
The painting itself presents well, with a wonderfully textured and varied surface.
Canvas stretched on wooden frame. Has been reframed in the last 40 years.
