Iron Bridge

In September 1910 the New Artists' Association of Munich, a group Alexander Kanoldt had helped to found the year before, hung its second exhibition at the Thannhauser gallery, and this time it brought in guests from Paris, among them Picasso, Braque and Derain. For Kanoldt it seems to have been his first real look at their work. He took most to Derain's Cubist way of building forms, and pictures like this bridge from 1911 show him trying it out on landscape and architecture. On the stretcher at the back, Kanoldt wrote the title in ink together with the word München, and in pencil his address in Schwabing, Franz-Joseph-Strasse 36, fourth floor. The Lenbachhaus bought the painting in 1993.