Campendonk’s very early works, with which the young artist was represented in the first exhibition of the "Blaue Reiter" in 1911/12, are already characterized by a very unique style that would continue to develop and become consolidate after the artist group dissolved at the beginning of the First World War. Faced with the increasing horrors of war, Campendonk chose to retreat with his family to Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg in 1916, where they moved into two floors of a farmhouse surrounded by meadows and fruit trees. Campendonk's close friends August Macke and Franz Marc fell on the French front in 1914 and 1916. Campendonk contrasted the fear and great sadness of this time with the rural idyll, a dreamlike, contemplative isolation - also in his paintings. Not only did his early deceased artist friends Macke and Marc exert strong influence on him, Campendonk also found artistic inspiration in Chagall’s pictures, which he probably saw on trips to Berlin, as later letters suggest. Accordingly, Heinrich Campendonk attained an artistic climax during this time in Seeshaupt. "Had it not been for the seclusion of Seeshaupt, through which independent and concentrated work only became possible, the actual artistic development of Campendonk's work, which led to his most liberated and most beautiful works, probably wouldn’t have been possible. Here Campendonk began to pursue a path that would take him beyond the quality of his works from the days of the “Blauer Reiter" (quoted from: Gisela Geiger Rausch und Reduktion, Penzberg 2007, p. 50).
Campendonk's painting style around this time is determined by a kind of Cubism characterized by the division of the image area into dissolved cubic forms with a predominantly red color effect. The contents of the painting, usually an arrangement of deconstructed elements, stand in a loose compositional context, they don’t allow for any narrative. The two birds move about as if in a dream world of color surfaces that here and there merge into fantastic flowers and leaves. A stringent narrative is avoided. Campendonk strings things together more than he connects them. He embeds them in a mesh of seemingly constructive forms, which in their painterly conception contradict their actual formal intent. In the limbo between abstraction and figuration, one cannot interpret this composition, which is coherent in itself, in one way or the other. It should be grasped in its entirety and seen as such. [EH]