The museum notes this as a work by Xaver Fuhr (1898-1973) that was part of the New Objectivity movement of artwork in Weimar Germany. The HYA is the Hanseatic Yacht School and it was painted in 1928. This is all noteworthy in its own right, but I find this period of German culture to be fascinating because of what was unfolding nationally, so I had a focus that was in a different direction.
Fuhr was inspired by artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, but he developed his own style and his artworks were not traditional Prussian heavy landscapes or paintings of heroic peasants. So, the Nazis hated him and labelled his work as degenerative art as they didn’t like things that might be culturally appealing. Between 1936 and 1945 he focused on watercolour painting that would be tolerated by the regime, although his studio in Mannheim was destroyed by an air raid in 1943 which I’m sure he considered as far from ideal.
Many of Fuhr’s works were stripped from museum and gallery walls, but his reputation was restored after the end of the Second World War. He became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and retired in Regensburg. And that’s what intrigued me, the artist behind this scared the Nazis because of that individual approach. It made me like the painting even more.