Ischia

By the early 1920s, Will Lammert was associated with progressive artistic groups such as The Young Rhineland (Das Junge Rheinland) based in Düsseldorf. Like the Romantic German painters of the early nineteenth century and many of his contemporaries, Lammert traveled to Italy for study and inspiration. The subject of this drawing is a classicizing genre scene of a woman carrying a water bottle on her head. Lammert notes that the setting is a small village on the volcanic island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples called Ischia. Ischia is home to natural hot springs favored by German tourists. Because of Lammert’s political associations—he joined the German Communist Party the same year he made this artwork—and the modernist idiom in which he worked, the Nazis destroyed most of the sculptures and drawings left in his German studio. In this, his career parallels other vanguard artists active in Germany in the 1910s and 20s, who originally enjoyed critical artistic success, sales to museums, and public commissions, but whose work was later banned from public display and either sold abroad or willfully destroyed through Nazi cultural policy.