GOETHE

Krems, Austria: by the artist, 1919. unframed drawing. Unframed. Good +. Gertrud Hozatko-Mediz. Charcoal and color chalks on paper, laid on mount, (unframed: (14.7" x 9.1" / 37.3 x 23.2 cm); dated in the lower left margin "27 [January] 1919 Krems"; SIGNED by the artist in the lower right as "Trude Mediz." Gertrude (Trude) Hozatko-Mediz (1893-1935), daughter of famous Karl Mediz (1868-1945) the Austrian landscape artist, portrait painter, and Symbolist, and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan (1861-1908), also a landscape artist with Symbolist elements--was born in Krems, Austria. She, too, became a well-known Austrian female artist. Trude grew up with her grandparents in Krems, Lower Austria, and was deply attached to her mother. After moving to Dresden, fifteen-year-old Gertrude or "Trude" became deeply grieved at her mother's premature death in 1908. She never completely recovered from this loss, which found expression in her art. Works of Gertrude Hozatko-Mediz often bear a strong spiritual, mystical, and sometimes macabre content. As a painter and illustrator, Gertrude expressed her best works through engravings and drawings--many of which had strong symbolic content which drew upon her father's technique and other great German engravers such as Max Klinger and Joseph Uhl. Like her mother, Trude also lived in Dresden where she, too, died before her time. A remarkable portrait of Goethe, the great German poet, statesman, and master of natural science in his mature dignity. Verso: remains of a charcoal sketch of lumber or a fence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832) was a German writer of the romantic Sturm and Drang period in his youth and a leading figure of the Aufklarung or Enlightenment during his maturity. He was also a distinguished statesman who did much to elevate Weimar. Goethe's works include epic and lyric poetry: most notably the closet drama Faust [1808ff.], and the basis for the poetic movement known as Innerlichkeit ("introversion"). A prolific writer and thinker, Goethe also wrote prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; scientific treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; as well as novels (for example, The Sorrows of Young Werther [1774], and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). In addition, he left numerous literary and scientific fragments and was associated with all of the important scientific figures of Germany and elsewhere; more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him exist. In Good or Better overall condition, a few spots of foxing, and a bit of chalk rubbings on the lower left.