Notes

“Where modern art screams, the paintings of Jentsch whisper”¹ wrote Olga Levison in her biography of the German artist, Adoplph Jentsch, who fell so in love with the arid landscape of South-West Africa that he dedicated the rest of his life to capturing it’s raw essence in watercolour and oil paint. 

Trained in Dresden during the heady days of modernist avant-gardism, Jentsch moved to South-West Africa in 1938 where he was so “deeply imbued with the mystique of South-West Africa that he evoked the silent poetry of this great, empty land”.²

Famed for the spiritual approach that he brought to his naturalistic renderings of traditionally bleak and typically monochromatic scenes of desiccated rivers and parched fields of wild savannah, Jentsch combined an objective observation of nature together with his uniquely subjective response to strip away all but the very essential, thereby getting to the heart of the landscape.

In the present lot, Schafrevier (sic), Jentsch depicts a dry river bed that is typical of the winter months in SWA. As Levison observes “there is a classical quality to the very simplicity and under-statement of his paintings, a subtlety in their economy of line”.³ Likewise, Nico Roos notes that “the primary significance of his perception of nature is that it leads him to a clear realisation that because of the influence of light, there are in the landscape few defined boundaries and that outlines are constantly dissolved”.

1. Olga Levinson. (1973) Adolph Jentsch, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Page 73.
2. ibid
3. ibid
4. Nico Roos. (1978) Art in South-West Africa, Pretoria: J.P van der Walt. Page 211.
5. Olga Levinson. (1973) Adolph Jentsch, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Page 72.

Provenance

Inherited from D von Funcke.

The Late Peter and Regina Strack Collection.

Exhibited

Arts Association of Namibia, Windhoek, Adolph Jentsch Commemorative Exhibition, 20 April 1982, catalogue number 28.