This watercolor on paper demonstrates Walter Gramatté’s stylistic evolution toward a lyrical abstraction imbued with Expressionism.
The work depicts the landscape of Hiddensee Island in the Baltic Sea, where the artist stayed on several occasions. The watercolor technique is employed with great freedom: the pigments diffuse, blend, and create effects of transparency and layering. The palette oscillates between deep turquoises, emerald greens, and delicate mauves, punctuated by yellow touches that convey the lunar reflection on the water. Cool colors dominate, establishing a contemplative nocturnal atmosphere. The artist favors suggestion over description, emotion over faithful representation, positioning this work within an Expressionist approach where landscape becomes a projection of the soul.
Further information
- Walter Gramatté, Moonrise (on Hiddensee), 1922, Bavarian State Painting Collections – Modern Art Collection of the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich
- Watercolor, 36.5 x 49 cm
- https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/de/artwork/apG9nQZq4Z/walter-gramatte/mondaufgang-auf-hiddensee
Walter Gramatté (1897-1929), German painter and draftsman, embodies the sacrificed generation of German Expressionism. Born in Berlin, severely wounded during World War I, he underwent an amputation that did not diminish his artistic determination. Trained at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, he developed a personal style blending Expressionism, Symbolism, and tendencies toward abstraction. His works, marked by an intense palette and nervous handling, explore themes of landscape, portraiture, and self-portraiture with psychological intensity. Hiddensee Island, a refuge for artists and intellectuals, became for him a privileged place of inspiration where he captured the changing atmospheres of the Baltic. His career, abruptly cut short by his premature death, left a significant body of work testifying to a constant search between figuration and abstraction.
Hiddensee as Expressionist Laboratory
Moonrise (on Hiddensee) is one of the most poetic works by Walter Gramatté (Berlin, 1897 – Hamburg, 1929), a German expressionist painter who died at thirty-two from intestinal tuberculosis. The island of Hiddensee in the Baltic Sea attracted many Berlin artists of the period seeking isolated and untamed landscapes. Gramatté visited it several times, producing a series of nocturnal and twilight landscapes in which color ceases to be descriptive and becomes the vehicle of interior experience. In this Moonrise, deep turquoises, water greens, and delicate mauves punctuated with yellow touches evoking reflected moonlight diffuse across the paper with the freedom and transparency characteristic of expressionist watercolor.
A Brief Life between War and Illness
Gramatté’s existence was marked by the double sign of his era’s violence and his body’s fragility. Drafted during the First World War, he was frequently exempted from combat due to poor health. He married Russian pianist Sonia Fridman in 1920, she would later become a noted composer and musician in Canada, and joined the Die Brücke group the same year. He worked across Germany, from Berlin to Hamburg by way of Hiddensee, and traveled through Spain and Italy, with an intensity of production that his short life did not allow to fully mature. He died in Hamburg in 1929. His works were designated “Degenerate Art” by Nazi authorities in 1933 and remained unexhibited until after the Second World War, a suppression that long delayed his recognition within German art history. The Pinakothek der Moderne holds this watercolor as a rare and valuable example of Berlin expressionist landscape painting from the 1920s.
