Cheffins
Lot 12
Gert Heinrich Wollheim (German, 1894-1974) An Allegory with Vice as a Clown playing Cards with Ignorance, who is holding an Ace, and Old Age, Vanity looking in a Mirror, and holding an Apple, an Admirer Kissing her Foot, and a Parrot , signed lower right "Wollheim" on the chalk board, oil on board, 80 x 102cm. Wollheim was born in Dresden and studied at the College of Fine Arts in Weimar from 1911 to 1913. Wollheim went to Dusseldorf at the end of 1919 and became one of the founding members of the "Young Rhineland" group, which also included Max Ernst, Otto Dix and Ulrich Leman. In 1925 he moved to Berlin, and his work began a new phase of expressionism. Immediately after Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933 his works were declared degenerate art and many were destroyed. Wollheim fled to France and became active in the Resistance. In 1937 he was one of the joint founders of the artist federation "L«union de l'artistes libres" in Paris, and he became the companion of the dancer Tatjana Barbakoff. Meanwhile, in Munich, three of his pictures were displayed in the defamatory Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. In 2000 the August Macke Haus in Bonn presented an important retrospective exhibition of his work
