About the work

“In the mountains: forms emerging in top view, shifting, distant mountains, richer, more manifold, stronger – as also the colours: distant mountains, – colours richer, more varied, more intensive. And then the possibilities: Hinterstein, Oberjoch and Unterjoch, Luitpoldhaus, Schrecksee, Himmeleck, Walsertal, Ostrach. Strong, strange in form, of the greatest significance, intense, appealing, plain, uniform in colour; on an absorbent ground, painted freely and intimately.”(1)

This sun–drenched view of the Hinterstein mountain range, with the Iseler peak to the left, was painted by Otto Modersohn beneath the early afternoon sun from just above the Gailenberg, near Hindelang. On the right is the barn of the local farmer Blanz, his closest neighbour. It is the fourth summer spent by Otto Modersohn in the house on the Gailenberg he bought in 1930. The paintings completed in this year are testament to the growing familiarity felt by this painter of the moors and the Lower German plains towards the majestic high Alps of the Allgäu. Increasingly he was succumbing to the allure of the mountain world, the staggered, rugged landscapes and the changing hues of the high–altitude perspectives, which, in comparison to his autumnal and wintery paintings of Fischerhude, boast a quite different colour palette; with their contrasting shades of green to violet and the aerial views of the almost skyless mountain terrain.

1   Otto Modersohn, diary entry from November 6, 1934