Original Watercolour 'Harbour with Cranes & Dockers' Egon Adler (1892-1963) Initialled & Dated EA 34

Born in Karlsbad, Bohemia, in 1892, Egon Adler studied in Berlin, Munich and Weimar. He was a regular visitor of the popular Café Arco in Prague, one of the meeting places of avant-garde writers and artists at the time, including those working for important publications associated with German Expressionism. Egon Adler had strong ties with the German avant-garde as well and first exhibited at Der Sturm Gallery in 1912, along with Jan Gauguin and Arthur Segal, and at the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin in 1913. His pointed shapes and thick contour lines were inspired by the works of fellow artists and friends August Macke and Oskar Kokoschka, with whom he had come into contact in Vienna. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Adler moved back to Prague, Czechoslovakia, becoming Advertising Director for 20th Century Fox. In 1938 he fled to Switzerland and emigrated from there to the United States where he died in 1963. His family have recently set up a website displaying his later day paintings post 1963. This work is a rear early example of his German expressionism and is full of power and colour. Provenance; This painting was acquired from Antonin Bartl, another Czech painter who knew Adler pre the Second World War.