The portrayal of animals as subjects, something Campendonk shared with Marc, was one of the reasons that aroused Cerruti’s interest in the painting. 

It was in 1910 that the young Heinrich Campendonk met the cousins Helmuth and August Macke, who had themselves recently met Franz Marc at his studio in Munich. They became friends and Campendonk, who then shared a studio with Helmuth Macke, came to the attention of Marc and of Wassily Kandinsky, who were intent at the time on gathering together a group of artists with similar views. In 1911, during preparations for the publication of Der Blaue Reiter (the sole issue of which appeared in May 1912), the painter moved to Sindelsdorf in Bavaria, where he initially stayed with Marc. He took part in the first show of the Blaue Reiter group at the Thannhauser gallery in Munich in December 1911 and became one of its most convinced members during the years of intense activity that followed. One of the artists represented by the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin as from 1912, he took part in the Rheinische Expressionisten exhibition of 1913 in Bonn. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 saw the continuation of work as well as periodic service at the front and the dispersal and in some cases death of his artist companions. Like Marc, to whom he was particularly close, Campendonk portrayed the natural world as a place of enchantment while eschewing any trace of spiritualism or chromatic symbolism. The influence of Cubism, Robert Delaunay and the Futurists is combined in his works with an interest in the applied arts - he attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Krefeld from 1905 to 1909 - and folk art, especially the traditional Bavarian votive paintings on glass. While expressionistic colours are juxtaposed in limpid contrasts of hot and cold, his blatantly two-dimensional figures are constructed out of geometric forms and boldly outlined. This is exemplified by the horses in Hohes Bild mit Pferden (Vertical Painting with Horses), where the emblematic animals of rural life and man’s links with nature are shown in profile, overlapping one another, against a background of urban and industrial architecture that is also outlined in other works and appears to be modelled on the mining town of Penzberg near Sindelsdorf. The diagonal running through the painting dynamically accentuates its verticality and the buildings are typically simplified. Purely geometric or plant motifs, like stylised leaves, frame the scene. 

The portrayal of animals as subjects, something Campendonk shared with Marc, was one of the reasons that aroused Cerruti’s interest in the painting. His library includes a copy of the catalogue of Sotheby’s auction at which he purchased the work in 1997, together with a message from the Galerie Thomas in Munich, which occasionally brought works of potential interest to his attention. It also contains the catalogues of the exhibitions Il cavaliere azzurro held in Turin at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in 1971, a crucial point of reference for any understanding of some of Cerruti’s choices as a collector, and Espressionismo e arte tedesca del XX secolo (Turin, Palazzo Madama, 1954), which included a work in oils and four watercolours by Campendonk. The name of the artist and the title appear on a label of the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin glued to the back of the canvas. The entry in the general catalogue¹ attests to the presence on the back of other labels (of the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin and the Société Auxiliaire des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels), which are, however, no longer present and must have been glued onto the subsequently replaced stretcher. The same catalogue lists Hohes Bild mit Pferden as belonging to a private collection (with no indication of previous changes in ownership) and identifies it as the work shown in the exhibitions in Antwerp, Düsseldorf/Bonn and Brussels under the title Horses. In the catalogues of these three events,² the work is indicated as the property of Oscar Mairlot, a Belgian patron of the arts who built up a precious collection in the 1920s and 1930s. The measurements in the Bonn and Brussels catalogues coincide with those known but the date given is 1915. 

Valeria D’Urso

¹ Firmenich 1989, no. 442 ö.

² Antwerp 1955 (p. 38, no. 131); Düsseldorf-Bonn 1972-73 (p. 27, no. 29); Brussels 1973 (no. 25).