About the work

September is one of the few portrait format, glazed gouaches of Siegward Sprotte, who was born in 1913 in Potsdam. How could the atmosphere of a misty September day at the sea be captured more appropriately? Sprotte was not interested in the representational, in the clearly identifiable landscape, the detailed imitation on paper. Instead, the well-travelled artist was successful in capturing that which was characteristic of a landscape, a particular situation in his works through a few colour aspects and confidently placed brushstrokes. “Abstraction at the sight of, not apart from nature” was his motto. The places Sprotte shows in his works can’t be precisely localised. This gives them a universally valid character. The viewer always sees a consciously selected excerpt of nature in the intensely colourful, brilliant watercolours and gouaches. In this, Sprotte is successful in revealing the characteristic of nature. The artist shows its changeability, the spontaneity of the change, just as much as the interplay of the individual elements. In the process, his works oscillate between abstraction and pure colour painting. Sprotte explained his viewpoint on the occasion of an exhibition in the Kunstverein Marburg in 1963: “Abstraction as a passage, not as the final goal. Because the abstract can train the gaze, liberate it from the compulsion that only that can be recognised which is a one-to-one reproduction of nature or an object.”