Description
Christof Drexel: *1886, Königstein/Taunus †1979, Munich
Execution: color chalk, oil pastel on paper
Date: c. 1940
Dimensions: 20,8 x 29,5 cm
Signed: bottom right
Provenance: original work from artist’s estate.
Hans Christof Drexel counts with his early works to the expressionists. Already during his studies of medicine and architecture in Munich he created graphic works for the Munich art and literature magazine “Jugend”. On the advice of Fritz von Uhde, painter and royal professor at the Munich Art Academy, he studied painting from 1906-1907 at the “Free Academy Julien” in Paris. Drexel moves to Hagen/Westphalia and starts a family. Here he meets the later patron Karl Ernst Osthaus, a collaboration with the Folkwang circle around Karl Ernst Osthaus, Henry van de Velde, Emil Nolde, J.L. Matthieu Lauwericks, Jan Thorn Prikker and others develops. Commissioned by Karl Ernst Osthaus, Christof Drexel visits Matisse in Paris a stay in the “Academie Matisse”, Paris follows in 1911. The important studio community with Paul Klee and Lionel Feininger develops. The Düsseldorf art dealer Alfred Flechtheim takes him under contract. Exhibition successes: After his first exhibition, which he already had in 1912 at the Folkwang Museum and the group exhibition together with Emil Nolde in 1917, numerous and significant exhibitions followed in the next decades, in which he also presented his art with commercial success. In 1926 the artist develops his concept of “choral drawing” a creative, didactic form, with foundations of a physio-psychic therapy. A long-standing relationship with C.G. Jung is established. In 1930 the seminal meeting with Edvard Munch takes place in Oslo. In the course of the next years there are several meetings with Munch and a joint exhibition in Oslo in 1932. In 1937 Christof Drexel was banned from exhibiting and counted among the “degenerates”. In 1944 his studio in Berlin was hit by an incendiary bomb, and most of his important early work was lost. In 1962 Drexel travels to Ecuador for several months. In 1963 the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation produces a television film with Drexel about choral drawing.In 1970 Drexel decides to stop painting landscapes, his focus is on the “Forms of Being Human”.In 1973 the film “Mask and Face” is made.
