Genre scene

Alois Kolb's impressionistic composition shows a young woman leaning over a sheet of water and touching its surface with her hand. Above the figure, there are delicate, densely leafed tree branches obscuring the distant opposite shore of the lake. Kolb has tried to capture the contrasts of light and shadow. There is symbolic content in the pose of the young woman thoughtfully playing with water. Pouring water through her fingers, she is melancholically contemplating the rapid passage of time. The graphic was made in 1920 using the technique of etching supplemented with roulette, printed on hand-made velin paper and signed in pencil. It comes from the IX Jahresgabe der Freunde Graphischer Kunst 1921 (9th issue of the annual portfolio of the Society of Friends of Graphic Art for 1921).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 Munich Academy under Karl Raupp and Ludwig von Löfftz. He was self-taught in the field of printmaking. At first, he worked in Ebersberg near Munich. At the end of 1904, he went to Murnau, where the Expressionists created a subalpine art colony. He worked as a graphic artist, painter, illustrator and teacher. He made graphic cycles, ex libris, vignettes, illustrated the magazine Jugend and works of fiction, among others books by Henrik Ibsen, Heinrich von Kleist, Clemens Brentano, Friedrich Hebbel. He prepared two graphic cycles for Homer's poems Iliad and Odyssey and designed applied graphics. He learned 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