Herbstliche Bachlandschaft im Abendlicht (Thüringen). 1904/05.
Pastel On cardboard laminated with wove paper.
Signed lower right. 35,4 x 50,5 cm (13,9 x 19,8 in), the full sheet.
The pastel was made during a summer's stay in Thuringia in 1904/05.

Accompanied by a photo expertise issued by Dr. Sibille Groß, Berlin, dated 29 December, 2011. The pastel will be included into the forthcoming catalog raisonné.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Tel Aviv (bis ca. 1940).
Ludwig Arie and Frida Magnus, Tel Aviv (since ca. 1940).
Private collection (acquired from previous owner).

In 1871, Ury Lesser, a "forgotten" artist from Berlin's exciting Secession period, moved from the small village Birnbaum, then in the Poznan Province, to Berlin. From the first moment on Ury felt a very special sympathy for this city, which was going to influence his art to such a degree that he was honored as "the artistic glorifier of the capital" by the Berlin mayor on his 60th birthday. Before Ury however finally made his long time home in Berlin, he studied painting in Düsseldorf and Brussels, gathered precious artistic experiences in Paris with Lefebvre et al. and explored Flanders and Munich, where he was enrolled for a short time at the "Akademie für Bildende Künste". In the next year he finally settled in Berlin.

Pastels by Lesser Ury are renderings of both an intensive occupation with changing atmospheric values of light in open nature as well as their artistic implementation. Ury loves the changes of the times of the day, particularly, however, the end of the day towards the evening when shadows elongate and the light becomes diffuse, revealing its true beauty. With his pastels Ury also captivated the softest color values in his light atmospheres, adding an atmospheric density of expression to even the most unspectacular motif. An outsider in a quickly developing art scene at the beginning of the 20\up5 th century, Lesser Ury continued the best traditions of landscape painting that found its fulfillment in depicting nature as anything but a spectacular event. This work is a remarkable example thereof.

Whereas his Berlin contemporaries Liebermann, Slevogt and Corinth were united by joint artistic intentions, Ury was a loner that followed his own ways in the world of art. His increasing extent of fame was a thorn in the flesh of Max Liebermann, then president of the academy and influential spokesman of the artistic scene, who tried to obstruct Ury's artistic career with all possible means, probably because of professional jealousy. Only when Lovis Corinth succeeded Lieberman, Ury could exhibit his works in the Secession regularly and successfully. In this decade, Ury travelled to London, Paris and different German cities for several times and brought along with him an abundance of new pictures from each journey. The condition of the artist's health worsened continually because of a heart attack shortly after a Paris trip in 1928. Ury died in his Berlin studio three weeks before his 70th birthday, when the Nationalgalerie and Sezession wanted to honor his life's work. [KD].