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Spring Auction

MARIA HILLER-FOELL (Odessa 1880 - 1943 Stuttgart)
Summer bouquet
oil/canvas, 54,5 x 48,5 cm
monogrammed M.H.F.
verso inscribed M. Hiller-Foell stuttgart /w, Wannerstr. 33, No. 761 Sommerstrauß

ESTIMATE °€ 400 - 800
STARTING PRICE °€ 400

The German painter Marusja Foell came from a German family in Odessa. When she was a child, the family first moved to Munich and then to Stuttgart. Foell studied from 1905 for one year at the Royal Württemberg Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart with Gustav Igler. In 1906, she took part in the first annual excursion to Pfullingen by Adolf Hölzel, who was appointed to the Academy in Stuttgart in the same year. After the excursion, she switched to his women's class from 1910 to 1913 and became a master student. In the circle of his numerous students, she regularly attracted attention at exhibitions with her courageous figure compositions. In 1913, she joined the Württemberg Female Painters' Association. Foell finished her studies in 1914 and, alongside Luise Deicher, was the first artist to be awarded the silver medal by the Academy. After graduating, Foell worked as a freelance artist and was a member of the Württemberg Association of Women Painters. In 1923 one of her works was the first work by an artist to be purchased by the city of Karlsruhe. In the same year she married the painter and architect Theodor Hiller. In terms of style and choice of motif, her paintings not only reflect the intensive school of colour and form of the modern Hölzel doctrine, but even more so the then current art development of Expressionism and New Objectivity. Hölzel's theory of colours aroused Hiller-Foells' interest in glass as a material. From 1920 to 1932, she received large public commissions for stained glass windows and murals in churches. At the same time she was a founding member of the "Juryfreie Künstlervereinigung Stuttgart". From 1933 on, she received no more public commissions and things became quiet around her. Her art was classified as "degenerate" by the Nazis, and in 1937 the works "Russian Bride" in the City Museum of Ulm and "Frau Spinne" from the Municipal Picture Gallery in Worms were confiscated.

PLEASE NOTE:
The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights. In the case of normal taxation (marked °), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax of 13%, for photographs 20%, is added to the sum of the highest bid and the buyer's premium.
The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.

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