Julia Beck

“L'Etang Saint-Cucufa, près Vaucresson”
This painting was one of the highlights at Zornmuseets groundbreaking exhibition “Julia Beck” in 2012, and it travelled on with the show to Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum the following year. The painting is truly one of Julia Beck’s masterpieces.
The reason it takes such an outstanding position in her oeuvre is its modernistic appeal: both when it comes to composition and execution. The application of paint in some parts of the motif with a palette knife makes a modern viewer to think contemporary artists, such like Gerhard Richter.
Beck’s remarkable career and art have during the last years been more and more sought after and has been given a lot of attention from museums, researchers and documentary filmmakers. One of the most important aspects that have been noted is how international her art was in comparison with her contemporary colleagues at the time.
In ”Grez-sur-Loing revisited. The international artist’s colony in a different light” (Academic thesis, presented at Gothenburg University 2013) Alexandra Herlitz writes the following about Julia Beck: ”her landscape painting is most characteristic of the Grez Style. […] As she was one of the Swedish artists to live in Grez most, even when there were not many Swedes there, she was certainly one of the Swedish artists who have drawn greatest inspiration from the artistic context of the international colony”.
That Beck’s style and painting balanced between Swedish domestic style and international modernism is clear, especially in her works from Grez in the 1880’s. In September of 1888 Beck settled in France for good and made a home for herself in Vaucresson.
A line of regular small pinholes in the most outer margins of the canvas can possibly derive from that that the artist have mounted it on to a panel – to be able to paint it en plein air. The painting has never been varnished which gives it a certain character. The original picture frame with exhibition label from Grand Palais accompanies this lot.