Komposition (1938)
This conversation is connected to Komposition (1938).
Otto Freundlich painted Komposition in 1938, the year the Jeanne Bucher Gallery in Paris held an exhibition for his sixtieth birthday. Over twenty fellow artists signed an appeal to the French government to purchase his work for the national museum — he was destitute. The painting is tempera on cardboard, built from the same interlocking geometric forms as his Komposition in Blau, but here the palette is entirely yellows, golds, peach, and cream, moving from warm ochre at the center toward pale lemon at the edges. Freundlich had been living in Paris since the mid-1920s. His work had already been seized and branded 'degenerate' by the Nazis in Germany. Five years after this painting was made, he was arrested in the Pyrenees and killed at Majdanek.