Adolf Fleischmann

Acquired by the family of the present owner in the 1980s

Cologne, Art Cologne, 1993

The sheet has not been laid down but is attached intermittently along the edges to the backboard, into which a small aperture has been cut allowing the inscription on the reverse to be seen. Apart from a few very minor tiny spots of paint flaking in some of the thicker yellow pigments in the lower left quadrant, this work is in good original condition. Presented framed and glazed, the edges of the sheet visible.
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Adolf Fleischmann studied under Adolf Hoelzel at the Stuttgart Academy before leading a somewhat nomadic life. After completion of military service, during which he sustained an injury on the Eastern front, he lived first in Switzerland and then Germany. Labelled a ‘degenerate’ painter by the Nazis in 1933, he migrated to Mallorca before settling in France, where he was repeatedly interned at the Camp des Milles. Returning to a liberated Paris in 1944, he sustained a nervous breakdown upon seeing his destroyed studio and works. He spent the remainder of his life in New York, affiliating himself with the American Abstract Artists group.

Fleischmann’s art is an idealistic counter-image to his turbulent life. In works such as Abstract Composition, the purified geometry is devoid of any concrete definition or threat and, like the works of De Stijl artists, opposes the existential chaos of the world with an image of utopian order and harmony. 

The present work is permeated by continental modern art, fusing the crystalline character of Cubism with the reduced formal vocabulary of Constructivism. With a slightly looser and thus more individual technique, Abstract Composition employs neoplastic lines and Suprematist areas of colour to create a number of internal forms. These micro-elements remain locked in tension with the dominant vertical oval, a cellular form which is reminiscent of the artist’s brief career in scientific illustration.