Monday, June 8, 2015

Ludwig Dill: Conservative Secessionist

Wilhelm Franz Karl Ludwig Dill (1848-1940), who called himself Ludwig Dill, was a founding member of the Munich Secession artists group. A brief Wikipedia entry on Dill is here.

In 1894 he became second president of the group after Bruno Piglhein's death. He was appointed professor at the Karlsruhe fine arts academy in 1899, so resigned and was replaced by Fritz von Uhde.

Although Dill was supportive of modernist tendencies in painting, his own works were fairly conservative. His mature style tended to simplification through use of broad brushwork as well as somewhat decorative composition. His favored subjects were trees and boating scenes from the Venice Lagoon, especially towards its southern end and the town of Chioggia.

Gallery

Fischer in Venedig - 1880
"Fishermen in Venice" show Dill's earlier traditional style.

Ein bewaldete Flusslandschaft - 1883
The title doesn't translate easily into English, but refers to a landscape featuring woods and water.  Modernist influence is clearly found here.

Trees

Der Morgen
"Morning" and the painting above it are characteristic of Dill's tree paintings, though Der Morgen seems more of a sketch than his usual tree art.

View of a town
No tile or date for this, but it shows that he didn't exclusively paint trees and boats. However, he tended to avoid painting people other than small, incidental figures in his boat paintings.

Segelboote in Kanal - ca. 1890
"Sailboats in a Canal" is in a style different from the paintings below that also are said to be from around 1890, so I wonder when it was made.

Ankunft des Fischerbootes - ca. 1890
"Arrival of the Fishboats" and the following painting are done in a decorative, broad-brush style that yields a modernist feeling without much distortion of the subject matter.

Fischer in Pellestrina - ca. 1890
Pellestrina is a barrier island to the Venice Lagoon.

Booten im Hafen - ca. 1900
"Boats in Harbor" apparently was painted later than the images above and incorporates a slight shift towards Expressionism and away from Dill's faintly Romantic earlier views.

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