Provenance
Dr. Herbert Antoine, Berlin;
sale Bassenge, Berlin, May 24, 2003, no. 6426;
sale Bassange, Berlin, December 4, 2004, no. 6826;
Private collection, South Germany
Literature
Fritz Schwarzenberger, Werkverzeichnis Hans Orlowski , Berlin, 1972, no. 41.
The painter and print-maker Hans Otto Orlowski (fig. 1) was born in Insterburg near Köningsburg
in East Prussia. His father was a tailor and moved the family to Köningsberg, Potsdam, and then
Charlottenburg. Orlowski first studied at the Academy of Decorative Arts in Berlin from 1911 to
1915. But the First World War interrupted his studies and he served briefly as a soldier in Serbia
until he was wounded. He was then employed as a draftsman in the War Ministry, but also began
producing his first independent prints. In 1918 he returned to art school and became a member of
the Berlin Secession, a progressive group whose members included, among others, Lovis Corinth,
Käthe Kollwitz, and Emil Nolde. Orlowski graduated in 1919, and in 1921 he began teaching at
the Decorative Arts Academy in Charlottenberg, where he remained until 1945. In 1924 he visited
Paris, and his style evolved away from Expressionism to a more realistic, even classical, manner
applied primarily to nudes. The artist’s first one man exhibition was in Berlin in 1934 at the
prestigious Wolfgang Gurlitt Gallery, which was one of the first in Germany to show Matisse,
Kokoschka, and Corinth. During the Second World War Orlowski was involved with saving the
collection of the Berlin National Gallery. His own workshop and apartment were destroyed and
many of his paintings and prints lost. Beginning in 1945 he taught at the Berlin University of the
Arts and during his last years received a number of exhibitions throughout West Germany.
In the early 1920s Orlowski’s nude studies (figs. 2a-b) displayed the angular, intense Expressionist
style that was then current in Germany. But by the late 1920s and into the early 1930s his
paintings of nudes become more traditional and even classical (figs. 3a-c), but with great attention
devoted to the texture of the flesh, the effects of light and dark, and close-up view-points. Girl
with a Candle is one of Orlowski’s major surviving works from this period. The nearly full-length
nude stands before a window, and the candle that she shields with her left hand casts provocative
shadows across the rippling plains of her flesh. Lost in her own contemplative concerns, the figure
is both sensitive and sensual.
This artistic approach lasted only a short while, Orlowski in the late 1930s and into the 1940s
evolved a grander, broader neo-classical style for his nudes (figs. 4a-b) Due to the painter’s own
editing of his works and the destruction of the War, such early paintings like this by Orlowski are
quite rare.