(Oberndorf 1891–1958 Kitzbühel) ‘Winteridylle’, signed A. Walde, label to the reverse: Alfons Walde Kitzbühel/Tirol with handwritten addition, ‘Winteridylle’, oil on cardboard, 40 x 50 cm, framed, (K)

Provenance:
Family ownership, Germany - direct from the artist

The landscape painting competition of 1924 was a starting point for Walde, leading him to find a simplified, more broadly conceived view of nature. The full force of the expressive post-war pictures and the entire weight of the natural forms he perceived is integrated into his compositions. The distant chain of hills in the area of Kitzbühel and the barrier presented by the Wilden Kaisers rising up in the background are in themselves a statement about landscape painting. Almost primeval and amorphous in terms of their bulk, the planes and volumes, tend always towards a modelled plasticity and yet appear to be carefully considered with great sensitivity. The elements of this landscape, the houses, the cottages, the roofs and areas of shadow are consciously inserted into the composition, and are not just placed there for reasons of effect. There are always new nuances, new juxtapositions of light values in the soft, sometimes impasto, dry painterly style, which vibrate above all natural forms. Landscape also means for him the contrast with the sky. He seldom continues the mountains up to the upper edge of the visual frame, and the blue of the sky is always a defining aspect of the image in its intensity. The compositional escalation from lightly accented foreground to the deeply worked middle ground and the stage-set nature of the mass of mountains in the background is employed by Walde in all of his landscape paintings. He seldom designs compositions delimited to the sides when painting these motifs, and a panorama effect dominates. Die Almen im Schnee, die Trattalmen and many of the small pictures of alpine cabins, bowed down under the weight of the snow, exist in reality, and can still be found alongside the flattened slopes as peaceful occurrences in nature.
Gert Ammann, Alfons Walde, Tyrolia-Verlag, 2001