A Tree

On the back of this canvas Otto Freundlich wrote its title, his name, Paris 1927, and a dedication to Til Brugman. She was a Dutch poet, translator and linguist close to De Stijl, the Dutch movement of Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld, and she worked on a translation of Mondrian's essays. Since 1926 she had been living with the Berlin Dada artist Hannah Höch, first in The Hague and later in Berlin, for about ten years in all. Freundlich, a German painter then working in Paris, gave the picture a plain title, A Tree. It hangs in the Lenbachhaus as a long-term loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation.