Allegorical scene

Alois Kolb depicted five naked young women with slender, athletic figures standing in various poses picking fruit from a spreading, low-growing apple tree. The artist took up the theme of naked human figures with idealised shapes, staying freely in an idyllic landscape existing outside of time, which had already become popular a few decades earlier among artists seeking creative stimuli in the art of antiquity and the Golden Age. Hans von Marées initiated it in the 1870s, and in the following decades, it was taken up by representatives of Symbolism and Expressionism, including Ludwig von Hofmann, Max Beckmann, Otto Mueller and Max Slevogt. The scene of picking fruit under an Edenic or Arcadian tree belonged to the canon of themes undertaken by Symbolists. The graphic was made in 1913 with the etching technique in a green tone and printed on handmade velin paper. It was signed on the plate and handwritten in pencil.Alois Kolb was born in 1875 in Vienna and died in 1942 in Leipzig. He was the son of a decorative painter, so he had contact with art from childhood. He was educated in Munich, at the Royal School of Arts and Crafts and later at the academy under Karl Raupp and Ludwig von Löfftz. He was self-taught in the field of printmaking. Initially, he worked in Ebersberg. At the end of 1904, he went to Murnau, where the Expressionists created a sub-Alpine art colony. He worked as a graphic artist, painter, illustrator and teacher. He created graphic cycles, ex librises, vignettes, illustrated the magazine Jugend and works of fiction, including books by Henrik Ibsen, Heinrich von Kleist, Clemens Brentano and Friedrich Hebbel. He prepared two graphic cycles for Homer's poems Iliad and Odyssey. He also designed utility graphics. He taught nude and figure drawing at the School of Arts and Crafts in Magdeburg. From 1907 until his death, he headed the graphics class at the Royal Academy of Graphic Arts and Crafts in Leipzig.

Ewa Gwiazdowska