Mädchen am Fenster

By 1925 Georg Schrimpf had left Germany to live in Italy, drawn to its clear light and to the calm of early Italian painting. That same year an exhibition in Mannheim gathered the painters working in this new, sober manner under the name New Objectivity. This canvas is pure Schrimpf of those years: a girl stands full length at a window, turned away from us, looking out through the glass. It was a scene he painted over and over across the 1920s, a single still figure caught between a bare interior and the light beyond. Nothing is happening. The daylight falls evenly, the outlines hold firm, and the moment feels stopped rather than passing, the way it does in the quattrocento rooms he had been studying.