Sitzendes Mädchen (Hanna Nicolassen). Um 1918.
Watercolor and pencil.
Signed in the lower left. Titled "Hockendes Mädchen" on the reverse, presumably by a hand other than that of the artist. 57.5 x 43.6 cm (22.6 x 17.1 in), size of sheet.
The sitter is a friend of the artist, Hanna Nicolassen. Born near Hamburg, Nicolassen later studied psychology, philosophy, physiology and history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, where she received her doctorate in 1923. In 1922, she married Gerhard Colm (1897-1968), a finance expert from a Jewish family. Hanna Colm, née Nicolassen, taught at the Alice Salomon School and the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House in Berlin until 1927, and then at the adult education center in Kiel until 1933. After Hitler's rise to power, her husband lost his position at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and the family emigrated to New York, later moving to Washington, D.C., where the woman portrayed here worked as a clinical psychologist at various children's hospitals; her husband worked in the finance department at the White House. Hanna Colm was also a lecturer at, among others, the American University, s well as a member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and worked for Harry Stack Sullivan at the Washington School of Psychiatry. From 1946, she had her own practice as a child analyst in Washington.
Today, she is considered an early pioneer of humanistic psychology. [CH]

Please note the condition report.

• Around 1918, she created a few pictures showing single boys and girls, which play an important role in Bruhns' oeuvre.
• In this work, the artist depicted her adult friend Hanna Nicolassen (1896-1965) as a young girl.
• The sitter can be found in other drawings and with a very similar expression, a lost painting (Bruhns G 68) shows her in almost the same pose.
• The emotional world, so characteristic of her figure paintings, is an expression of the special artistic personality of Anita Rée and her mental disposition.
• In the present work, the earnest and pensive young woman conveys a certain forlornness and reflects the widespread fear of the world that arose during the war years and which is also present in the artist's famous self-portraits.
• The painter is particularly interested in the figure and its expression, while the forms in the background remain abstracted and the delicate colors, dull and subdued.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Commeter / Commeter'sche Kunsthandlung, Hamburg (from 1925, with the typographic and handwritten label on the back of the frame).
Private collection, Schleswig-Holstein.
Private collection, Schleswig-Holstein (inherited from the above in 2009).

LITERATURE: Maike Bruhns, Anita Rée. Das Werk, Munich 2018, cat. no. A28 (illustrated).
Maike Bruhns, Anita Rée. Leben und Werk einer Hamburger Malerin 1885-1933, Hamburg 1986, p. 273, cat. no. A 11 b.

On brownish wove paper mounted on Japan paper. The wove paper broken along a horizontal crease, also with vertical breaks in the upper left and right centre of the sheet. A tear about 10 cm long in the upper right. The fragile paper has been professionally backed with Japan paper to secure and strengthen the areas described. Overall, the sheet is very discolored.
For information concerning the condition, please view the high resolution image / backside image.