Artist Carl Lohse called this impressive portrait Roter Klang – ‘Red Sound’. A daringly bold composition, Lohse simply sets large areas of colour next to each other. The young man’s face is roughly modelled in brilliant red applied in broad brushstrokes, contrasting vividly with the garish green of the lenses of his glasses.
This elegant young man is Arnold Vieth von Golßenau. In 1919, Lohse, an impoverished artist, was staying in Bischofswerda, Saxony with a family who financially supported him. There, he met Von Golßenau, one of the family’s circle of friends. Born into an aristocratic family, Von Golßenau had served as an officer and company commander in the First World War, before studying law and art history. Later, he began to work as an art dealer and also launched a successful career as a writer under the pseudonym Ludwig Renn. Possibly Lohse found Von Golßenau very spirited and feisty in his views, and so painted his face a fiery red.
But certainly Lohse was fascinated by the elongated facial features and prominent cheekbones, since he also took Von Golßenau’s portrait as the subject of a white plaster sculpture. A highly unusual work, as curator Birgit Dalbajewa explains:
“...You can just imagine the sculptor’s hands working the wet plaster. The eye is an opening, something hardly found at all in sculpture, the ear is a deep whorl leading, in a certain sense, into the innards of the head. And with the single scraps of hair, the bulging forehead, the ears sticking out from this overall shape – it creates such a vibrant likeness that the lips seem to be quite literally trembling. And in terms of its size, there is really nothing else like it in German twentieth century art.”
Further Media
Lohse in the First World War
For the generation of artists born in the late nineteenth century, the First World War was a radical break, a watershed in their lives and art – just as it was for Carl Lohse. Born in Hamburg in 1895, he showed considerable promise in his early years. At the age of 15, he was already attending a school of arts and crafts. Two years later in 1912, he was awarded a scholarship to study at the art college in Weimar. But he did not stay there for long. Driven by his quest to find his own artistic voice, he moved to Holland to find a new inspiration in tracing the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh. In 1914, though, with the outbreak of war, he returned to Germany. Lohse applied to join the army as a reserve officer, which might well have spared him front line service.
“The graduates of arts and crafts colleges especially, such as Carl Lohse and Otto Dix, were not deployed at the army bases, but sent straight into the trenches on the front lines, and experienced the war directly at first hand,”
... and, curator Birgit Dalbajewa added, artists who had studied at state art academies tended to be given the rank of officers. In 1916, Lohse, then 20 years old, saw action in the Battle of the Somme, probably the most brutal and deadliest military action on the western front. Lohse’s company were buried when a shell collapsed their trench, and he was the only one to survive. Later he was taken prisoner by the British forces. After three years of heavy work as a prisoner of war in the Calais quarries, he returned to Hamburg. Destitute, he was helped by a young woman painter who had studied art with him. She introduced him to an art-loving factory owner in the small town of Bischofswerda in Saxony. In his new patron’s house, freed from his financial worries, Lohse could return to painting – the start of an intensive creative phase. In audacious, expressionist pictures, he grappled with his traumatic experiences on the front lines. His first paintings show skeletons, bodies split and bursting – a shattered world offering no security, and no fixed point of support.
- Material & Technique
- Oil on cardboard
- Museum
- Galerie Neue Meister
- Dating
- 1919
- Inventory number
- Inv.-Nr. 79/31