Conrad Hommel

1883 – 1971 Mainz

 

„Lady in Blue“, 1914 Oil on Canvas, 101 x 93 cm, signed and dated

„Lady in Blue“, 1914 Oil on Canvas, 101 x 93 cm, signed and dated

 

She, who sprawls with relish on a flowery drapery in this art nouveau painting by Conrad Hommel, is a lady just like Swann’s wife Odette de Crécy in Marcel Proust’s „In Search of Lost Time.“ She had a pronounced fondness for exquisite bathrobes, just like the one the woman is wearing in the picture. Following the fashion of her time, the Japonism, the redheaded figure holds an Asian appearing fan in her right hand. Her head rests on the left hand, which, following the whole arm, is bent in direction of the shoulder. Exhausted and yet provocative looking, the woman seems to gaze into the void. Could she be a cocotte?

Conrad Hommel, an industrialist’s son, studied at Jean-Paul Laurens studio in Paris from 1906 to 1910 and then, from 1911 to1913, he went to the Munich Academy where Hugo von Habermann became his teacher. Hommel was member of the Secession and temporarily even president of the movement. Being a portraitist of the upper industrials, financiers, as well as the nobility and leading politicians, he painted the President of the Reich, Hindenburg, in 1927, Franz von Papen in 1932, just as Hermann Göring a few years later and finally Adolf Hitler in 1940. He received the Lenbach Price in 1936 and was appointed to become professor at the Berlin Academy in 1939. While he turned towards an impressionist style of painting in the 1910/20s, he returned to a manner of painting that was denser in form and close to the tendencies of New Objectivity. After the Second World War, Hommel still remained a renowned portraitist.