PAUL KLEINSCHMIDT (GERMAN 1883-1949) Landscape, 1939 oil on canvas 65 x 54 cm (25 5/8 x 21 1/4 in.) signed and dated lower left and upper right PROVENANCE Erich Cohn Collection Thence by descent in the family to the present owner LOT NOTES The present lot comes from the estate of Erich Cohn, a prolific patron and collector of German expressionism. Born in 1890 in Filehne (present-day Poland), Mr. Cohn emigrated to the United States before the outbreak of the Second World War, where in 1937 he became president of the noodle and matzoh manufactory A. Goodman & Sons. Art from the Erich Cohn Collection, especially by Kleinschmidt, Grosz, Gottlieb and Kollwitz, is held at the MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums and the Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1927, Cohn met with Paul Kleinschmidt at the suggestion of art critic Julius Meier-Grafe and soon became the artist's most important patron. He was instrumental in introducing Kleinschmidt to American audiences by facilitating the artist's first U.S. retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago (Paintings by Paul Kleinschmidt lent by Erich Cohn, December 14, 1933 - January 21, 1934; the exhibition also traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Of the twenty-four pieces shown, at least five were lent by Cohn and another by George Grosz, a mutual friend whom Cohn also patronaged. Although the annual stipend provided by Cohn allowed Kleinschmidt to work unencumbered for some time, he soon found himself under attack by the Nazi regime. Proclaimed a "Degenerate" artist featured in the infamous Entartete "Kunst" Ausstellungsführer exhibit of 1937 -- and banned from painting, Kleinschmidt fled to the Netherlands in 1936. (His intent to emigrate to his patron in New York was never realized). Kleinschmidt would stay in Holland for two years before moving to France. There he again came under state scrutiny, then interned and forcibly repatriated to Germany in 1943, where he died six years later (German Expressionist Prints: The Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection, 170). This painting, dating to 1939, was made during Kleinschmidt's stay in France, and together with lot 683 is testament to the artist's lifelong affinity for the expressive possibilities of a landscape. Here, Kleinschmidt compresses the space, each area of the painting -- like the road buckling as it is brought up against the flowers -- made a tectonic plate. This lively patchwork, generously modelled with pastose brushstrokes, is reminiscent of those of his contemporary Chaim Soutine. Kleinschmidt continues, too, as remarked in the 1933 Art Institute of Chicago bulletin, something of the intensity of Van Gogh, expressed, however, with a very personal palette ("The Winter Exhibitions", Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 27, no. 7 (1933): 120). With ultramarine-based greens, ochres and muted salmons, he juxtaposes cool and warm tones for a subtly dynamic effect, a chromatic technique favored by the likes of J.M.W Turner. Far from an Iconoclast, Kleinschmidt remains, however, a standalone master of the landscape genre.