GALERIE DRYLEWICZ

Founded in 2005 by Samuel Drylewicz and located in a private villa in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, Galerie Drylewicz specializes in paintings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Focusing on the avant-gardes of this prolific period, and particularly the Symbolist movement, the gallery is always keen to defend its own particular taste and to present selected works by renowned artists, talented anonymous artists and forgotten artists whom it brings back into the limelight.

After initial training at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, where he learned the craft of porcelain painting from the Italian Ermenegildo Antonio Donadini, Karl Hänsel entered the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1889. There he studied under Leon Pohle, then from 1891 became a pupil of Ferdinand Pauwels, joining his circle of most promising students.

In 1894, with a solid academic background, he began to exhibit regularly in the major German salons in Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, where he was a regular exhibitor at the Glaspalast.

An active member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund (German Artists’ League) in Weimar, founded in 1903 to promote young artists and defend creative freedom, Karl Hänsel quickly established himself as a major figure on the Saxon art scene.

His work developed in a naturalistic vein, focusing on themes inspired by peasant life, rural landscapes and scenes of work, which he explored in both painting and engraving.

A complete artist, he also distinguished himself in lithography and etching, in which he excelled in depicting miners, workers, craftsmen and labourers. His style skilfully combines observation of everyday realities with a poetry attentive to the decorative qualities of line and colour. He thus follows the German tradition by combining powerful graphic naturalism with a certain synthesis in his treatment of compositions.

The small pastel presented here is one of Karl Hänsel’s most refined works, at the crossroads between the German naturalist tradition and a more spiritual and internalised symbolist vein that is unique to him.

In a resolutely tight frame, the artist captures the sculptural profile of a young, impassive male figure with a fixed gaze, closed lips, a headband around his forehead and a feather discreetly adorning his thick black hair. Only these somewhat exotic attributes allow us to identify Winnetou, the famous Native American hero, illustrious warrior and chief of the Mescalero Apaches, created by Karl May, a cult writer in the German-speaking world.

The meticulous, rigorously naturalistic treatment of the face contrasts with the synthetic nature of the background, which is reduced on the left side of the sheet to a vibrant matt blue, delicately rendered in pastel. On the right, the thick black hair, reminiscent of a dark night, creates a subtle visual tension with the yellow glow of the hero’s skin, suggesting the light of a wood fire.

This modern chiaroscuro, applied here not to a narrative scene but to a simple profile, gives the work the meditative power of an icon.

Thus, eschewing all picturesqueness or folklore, Karl Hänsel’s Winnetou is less a novel hero than a spiritual archetype, the silent embodiment of wisdom and a certain stoicism.