Gouache by Max Kaus,figures on beach 1938.

Frame: 32" x 26 1/4"
Gouache: 25 1/4" x 19"

Provenance
The Estate of Dr David Y Solomon, of NYC, heart surgeon and avid collector of rare French, Middle Eastern and African antiques as well as Fine Art, Antiquities and furniture. All removed from his NYC residence. Dr. Solomon was born in Kuwait and grew up in Iraq then fled religious persecution, escaping to Iran before emigrating to the United States in 1961 with the help of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. He practiced medicine for 67 years because of a true devotion to people. He took a personal interest in every single patient regardless of their stature. He never turned anyone away and they came from all around the world to see him, some even calling him "Papa."

Max Kraus
(Source: Wiki) Max Kaus (11 March 1891 - 5 August 1977) was a German "second generation" expressionist painter and graphic artist. He was also influential as a university level teacher and as deputy director at the Academy for visual arts in the city at that time known as West Berlin.

Max Kaus was born and, eighty-six years later, died in Berlin. Joseph Kaus, his father, is described as "a church painter". His early training was in decorative art: between 1908 and 1913 he attended the Study Institute of the Decorative Arts Museum ("Unterrichtsanstalt des Kunstgewerbemuseums" / UAKGM) in Berlin. He was powerfully influenced by the expressionism of the movement known as the Bridges Group ("Die Brücke"). His study was combined with work as a freelance decorative artist. That was followed by a shorter period, during 1913/14, as a student at the city's Arts Academy ("Akademie der Künste"). Impatient to build a career, he moved into his first studio in 1913. The award of a travel bursary early in 1914 enabled him to travel with his student-friend Mieczeslav Woitkiewicz to Paris, which aroused his interest in fine arts. Their stay was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War at the end of July, and he hastily returned to Berlin.

In 1916 he reported for military service, enrolling as a "medical orderly" and as an ambulance driver. He was one of a number of artists who served as medical orderlies, based in Ostend and undertaking their duties in western Flanders. A leading member of the group, in artistic terms, was Erich Heckel. Sources differ as to whether Heckel and Kaus already knew one another during the pre-war years, but it is clear that Heckel, with whom he remained in close contact after 1918, was an important influence, both in artistic and in human terms. Together in Ostend during the war, using what must have been in some respects improvised equipment, Heckel taught Kaus how to make lithograph prints. They constructed their printing press using timber recovered from panelling previously forming a part of a destroyed railway station building. They acquired two printing stones from a Belgian lithograph printer. Once Kaus as able to return to Berlin in 1918 he purchased his own lithography equipment, which provided a basis for an important part of his subsequent artistic output. Other important members of the Bridges Group with whom Kaus was associated during the war years included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Kaus had his first solo exhibition in 1919, at the Ferdinand Möller gallery. The next year he met up with Otto Mueller and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff at the modernist so-called "Freie Sezession", and became a member of the group, his work regularly featuring in subsequent "Freie Sezession" exhibitions. In 1923 he married the porcelain artist Gertrud Kant (1893-1944). In 1926 Kaus accepted a professorship, teaching landscape art at the Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule (loosely, "Arts and Crafts academy") in Berlin.[5] It was for his landscape works that he was (and remains) principally recognised. He drew inspiration from his travels within Germany and in the recently reconfigured state of Austria, as well as in northern Italy. Earlier he had worked extensively on portraiture. During the immediate post-war period Kaus produced a number of portraits of haggard, somehow bizarrely lost young men, which showed every sign of drawing inspiration from the works produced ten years earlier by Heckel and, above all Kirchner. Unfortunately this vision of German Expressionism in art was no longer so fashionable, however.

Early in 1933 the Hitler government took power and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. When it came to art the National Socialists knew what they liked. Max Kaus was one of a large number of modernist artists, including his longstanding mentor Heckel, who had enjoyed commercial and critical success in the 1920s, and who now found their work officially (and more widely) dismissed and despised as "degenerate". In 1937 his works were formally "removed from public view" in museums and galleries.

Meanwhile, in 1935 or 1937 he took a job teaching "figurative art" with the Unified National Academies for Free and Applied Art, a traditionally progressive institution in Berlin-Charlottenburg. However, he found himself under intensifying pressure to abandon teaching entirely as the dictatorship became more uncompromising in its approach to manifestations of non-standard thought patterns. Sources differ as to whether it was in 1938 or 1939 that he was obliged to give up his teaching position at the VS (which was itself closed down during 1939).

Max Kaus became a member of the German Artists' Association ("Deutscher Künstlerbund"/ DKB) and remained a member until 1936 when the association was forcibly suppressed by then government. The physical event marking the suppression was the DKB's final exhibition (till after 1945) which was held in Hamburg, and at which Kaus participated with his "Porträt Frau im Spiegel" ("Portrait of a woman in the mirror"). Between 1951 and 1971 he served as a member of the executive board of the now re-established DKB, serving also as deputy chair between 1956 and 1963.

Good condition overall