Lajos von Ebneth

Maria d'Ebneth Scholten (wife of the artist)
A gift from the above to the parents of the present owner in 1986

Cologne, Galerie Bargera, 1977, no. 19

Walter Vitt, Von strengen Gestaltern, Cologne, 1982, p. 67, illustrated

The canvas has not been lined. Ultraviolet light reveals a handful of scattered tiny pinhead-sized spots which fluoresce green, possibly corresponding to minor retouchings. The work is otherwise in good original condition. Presented in a modern black-painted frame with a silver-gilt inner accent, the edges of the canvas visible.
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Painted in 1929.

Following his artistic training under Franz von Stuck in Munich, Lajos von Ebneth began a formative grand tour of the European modern art centres in 1922. Associating himself with the Der Sturm circle in Berlin, the Constructivist and De Stijl groups in Holland and later the Bauhaus in Dessau, he formed lifelong bonds with the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Ebneth also made a significant contribution to artistic literature, founding the architecture magazine i 10 which featured pieces by Mies van der Rohe and Piet Mondrian, as well as publishing Dynamische Kompositionen in 1927. The latter is a treatise on motor-driven spatial constructions, exploring the relationship between motion, light and form, in contrast to paintings which are ‘an image of one moment, containing no movement but at a standstill’. In this light, the present work becomes a snapshot of elements in constant flux. It is an image of paradoxes: staticity and movement; forms drifting together or apart; order and chaos; and the infinite background versus the rigid constraint of colour within geometry. 

The work is at once indebted to the stripped-down functionalism of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Construction series and the Russian Suprematists’ intricate compositions of scattered elements. By liberating colour and form from objectivity, Ebneth adopted Kasimir Malevich’s new artistic culture in which ‘art advances towards creation as an end in itself and towards domination over the forms of nature’.