Late Autumn

Leo Putz signed this canvas at the upper right, Leo Putz 08. In 1908 he was in his late thirties and one of the founders of Die Scholle, a group of Munich painters most of whom had studied with the painter Paul Höcker at the academy. In handling paint they owed much to the painter Wilhelm Trübner, and in their pictures, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, space and colour were arranged to stress the flat surface of the canvas. Shortly after 1900 Putz had moved away from Jugendstil towards painting in the open air. The museum's catalogue lists a garden in late autumn, a meadow and trees, a table and chairs, and a woman asleep, and it does not name her. A year earlier Putz had painted Frieda Blell, the woman he married in 1913, in a garden, and that picture belongs to the Lenbachhaus too.