Heinrich Maria Davringhausen
La libertà dell’astrazione

edited by Mara Folini
preface by Dorothea Eimert
text by Mara Folini, Elena Pontiggia

Exhibition catalogue: Ascona, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, 10 March-9 June 2013

The works of the German artist Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (Aachen 1894 – Nice 1970) from numerous private collections have rarely been presented publicly and some have never been shown before. Now they have finally been brought together for the first time in a fascinating exhibition. Davringhausen was an important painter from the Post-expressionist generation, one of the pioneers of Magic Realism and the New Objectivity. A dandy in his coat and bowler hat, the nonconformist Davringhausen was a real ladies’ man – he charmed the poetess Else Lasker-Schüler, who dedicated her verses to him – and worked in Berlin in the 1920s alongside artists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, Carlo Mense and the Dadaist Herzfelde brothers. Like many other figures in the history of modern art, he too was tied to the Swiss city of Ascona. In 1914, at the age of twenty, he accompanied his painter friend Carlo Mense and stayed at Monte Verità, the hill overlooking the city that hosted the eponymous community of artists, a venue that circulated anti-bourgeois and anti-materialistic ideas.