Three representations of the human figure, three genres and three styles trace the path of avant garde painting to the “Spiritual in Art”. Galerie Thomas is presenting a portrait, a nude and a constructive-abstract figure composition, each highlighting the artistic conception of the human being and its varied development.   The portrait of a blonde woman by Kees van Dongen is still entirely bound to psychologising portrait art and a style of painting that combines realistic and impressionist elements.   Kees van Dongen became famous almost overnight at the beginning of the 20th century when he exhibited together with the painters later known as the so-called “Fauves”. He was viewed as the wildest of the painters of this group of French Expressionists, which also included Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck.   His irritatingly, intensely colourful and erotic likenesses of women in particular drew attention. However, Van Dongen was such a gifted painter that he always experimented with new stylistic methods and continued to develop. The “wild one”, the unsettling outsider thus became one of the most popular portrait artists of the late Belle Epoque and the Golden Twenties. The entrancing beauty of his portrayals is also evident in Van Dongen’s portrait of a lady from 1912.   Following the decidedly fauvist period, Van Dongen combined his painting methods to create a kind of metropolitan Orientalism, which also bears witness to his interest in contemporary fashion. However, this stylistic pluralism changed nothing about the specific sensuality and the vibrating expressiveness that Van Dongen was able to breathe into his portrayals.   The lady portrayed thus radiates an emphatic presence, although frozen in her pose of grace and poise. These are characteristics that would be expressed frequently in Van Dongen’s portraits of the Parisian bourgeoisie over subsequent decades.   The “Akt liegend” (Reclining Nude) of the Expressionist and co-founder of the Blaue Reiter, August Macke, was also created in 1912. He presents the woman portrayed, Macke’s wife Elisabeth, in an intimate, private situation, in which the sheet, raised slightly by the reclining figure, who is lying half on her side and facing the viewer, covers little more than her legs. Macke reproduced the scene in a simple, almost delicate colour scheme dominated by shades of pink, blue and white. Only the dark hair and the necklace of the nude figure provide contrasting accents. Nonetheless, the painting possesses power and presence thanks to the composition and the volume. In addition to this, Macke distorts the private nature of the portrayal into the general by mostly dispensing with individualising facial features and a more elaborated description of the location or other details.   The motif itself is clearly situated within the French tradition of classical odalisques, like those of Ingres, Manet or Matisse. The colour schemes and tonality chosen by Macke are also clearly reminiscent of their paintings. As Macke himself repeatedly testified, French painting had a special influence on his art. He was especially enthusiastic about the painting of Matisse and had already commented on him as follows in 1910: “Purely instinctively, I find him to be the most congenial of the whole band of them. An eminently fiery painter animated by divine fervour.”   In contrast, the simplicity and clarity of volume and proportion that distinguish this painting owe much to the sculptures of Aristide Maillol, about whom Macke wrote to Elisabeth: “Especially Maillol is extremely characteristic of the grandeur of art.”   The third painting, a work by Oskar Schlemmer, accomplishes the leap into the interwar period and emphasises the important development in the conception of figurative representation of the avant garde of the 1920s in an exemplary fashion. The theme running through Schlemmer’s oeuvre like a guiding thread is the human being in space. However, Schlemmer’s ambition is to overcome naturalism. The human form in pictorial works is for him abstraction. The heads or figures are not likenesses in the sense of a recognisable representation, but instead a transmission of the individual into a pictorial fabric of elementary language of form. The figures, initially reduced to geometrical forms, are incorporated into a play of light and shadow, into which they in some cases seem to disappear, while emerging elsewhere. The form, usually represented in profile, becomes his preferred method of artistic expression of his idea of the human being as a ‘cosmic entity’ in the 1920s, and the guiding principle of his entire work.   The body, represented in three-quarter profile, has been disassembled into its individual parts. The oval forms of the thighs, the torso and the head are stacked on top of one another. The strict, architectural arrangement, as well as the sculptural modelling with light-dark values, lend the figure the statics of a column. Referring to Greek antiquity, Schlemmer avoids any individualisation of the person. With his abstraction, he strives for the expression of an archaic idea of the human being and thus for the ‘spiritual’ per se.   The artist emphasises the dynamic nature of the figure primarily through the arm bent at shoulder height, which places the horizontal form in a relationship with the vertical and with the space.    With his seemingly coolly calculated paintings, Schlemmer is aiming beyond the rational representation of reality toward the symbolic ‘visualisation of the unconscious.’ The person, upright and gazing forward in a tensed posture, becomes for him the symbol of a transcendence into the metaphysical dimension. Schlemmer refers to this type in other works as ‘Kommenden’ (figure coming), ‘Gehenden’ (figure going) or ‘Vorübergehenden’ (figure passing[KF1] ).   The three paintings thus speak to the development of modern painting in the history of thought from the primacy of nature through the search for the ideal to a concentration on the symbol.   There is a path that leads from Van Dongen’s sensual representation through Macke’s ideal vision to Schlemmer’s formulation of the symbolic version of a mindset.