Genre scene

Reinhold Nägel's graphic depicts a group of people gathered on a lawn in a hospital garden. The patients are soldiers wounded in the First World War. The artist has humorously portrayed the patients and their visiting relatives. Observed from afar, the figures, preoccupied with themselves, are arranged harmoniously. The figure in the middle divides the two social groups sitting on deckchairs and chairs. Compositionally and thematically, the scene is reminiscent of rococo representations of society in the park. However, it has been treated very sparingly, without unnecessary motifs. In that way, the artist conveys the austere aura of wartime. Nägele, like Daniel Chodowiecki, an eighteenth-century German artist specialising in depicting social scenes, skilfully reflected a whole range of human habits, weaknesses and vices in the figures, faces and manner of behaviour of the characters.The graphic was made in 1914 using the technique of etching with a dry point printed on handmade velin paper. It comes from a series of prints from the same year, telling the story of the soldiers' lazarettes in the first months of the First World War. Reinhold Nägele was born in 1884 in Murrhardt, Swabia, and died in 1972 in Stuttgart. He was the son of a painter-decorator who taught him his trade. He continued his education at the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart. He worked as a painter, draughtsman and graphic artist. Already his first exhibition at the turn of 1907/1908 at the Berlin gallery of Paul Cassirer, a patron of avant-garde artists, made him famous. In 1923, he co-founded the Stuttgart Secession, later known as the New Stuttgart Secession, an exhibition forum for young artists representing new trends not accepted by the academic community. In 1931, he co-founded the association Vereinigung Freunde Schwäbischer Graphik (Association of Lovers of Swabian Graphics). He created landscapes, vedutas, figural scenes, portraits and surrealistic compositions and ex libris.

Ewa Gwiazdowska