The Berlin Secession/degenerate art: Karl Hofer
Girl with Pumpkins (Mädchen mit Kürbissen), Circa 1929/1930
Oil on canvas
115.2 x 105.4 cm
Auctioned at Lempertz in 2026 for €190,500

Karl Hofer painted this scene at the end of the Weimar Republic, working steadily until Hitler came to power and ended the avant-garde movement in Germany. The canvas shows how he placed models in plain spaces to look closely at shapes and volume. The history notes from the auction house track how this work moved safely to American collections before World War II started.

Shapes and the Final Version

The layout relies on simple geometry. A young woman wearing a headscarf stands right in the center behind a wooden table. Hofer stacked six pumpkins on the flat top to form a clear triangle. The model holds one more long green squash under her left arm. This setup keeps the focus entirely on the physical look of the fruit and the model.

Archival records from art historian Daniela Maier show that this painting was actually the final version of five similar attempts. Hofer often worked on the same subject multiple times. Each time he stripped away extra details to make the core image look clearer. The background stays dark brown and empty. Without a real room or house around her, the woman seems distant, leaving us to focus completely on how she stands with the still life.

Nazi Defamation and the Flechtheim Exile

Hofer finished this canvas between 1929 and 1930. This means he painted it right before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party took total control of the German government in 1933. The new rulers targeted modern artists immediately. In 1933, a public poster defamed Hofer alongside Oskar Schlemmer, a prominent Bauhaus master and painter known for his abstract figure designs, labeling them leaders of a destructive, liberal-Marxist alliance. The regime fired Hofer from his teaching job at the Berlin Art Academy in 1934 and put eight of his paintings in the Munich Entartete Kunst propaganda show in 1937.

The sales records show how this political shock wave hit the local art market. The painting belonged first to the Berlin gallery of Alfred Flechtheim. Because he was a prominent Jewish dealer who sold modern art, his business became an immediate target for Nazi persecution and forced Aryanization. Flechtheim had to close his doors. The College Art Association in New York helped move the painting out of Germany to the United States in 1933. The Worcester Art Museum bought it that same year, keeping it safe while the Nazi regime started to seize over 300 of Hofer’s works from German public museums.

The Personal Tragedy and Total Destruction of Work

The official bans altered the actual look and production of Hofer’s later work. In 1938, the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts expelled Hofer and placed a total ban on his right to sell, exhibit, or buy materials publicly. Joseph Goebbels later extended this to a strict painting ban. To survive financially and legally under these racial laws, Hofer divorced his Jewish ex-wife Mathilde to secure an Aryan status upgrade. This administrative separation left Mathilde completely unprotected against the state, leading directly to her deportation and murder in Auschwitz.

Working in total isolation, Hofer could no longer paint his earlier, calm themes. His style shifted from the quiet realism of the Weimar years to dark, tense imagery. His colors grew gloomy, and his figures became skeletal. His famous 1943 painting Die Schwarzen Zimmer shows this change, featuring a naked figure beating a drum in a dark concrete space.

In March 1943, an Allied bomb struck Hofer’s Berlin studio, burning his entire inventory of newer paintings to ash. The Nazi regime had already confiscated or destroyed hundreds of his earlier canvases in public collections, meaning the vast majority of his life work was systematically wiped out. The loss forced him to spend his final years frantically repainting his destroyed artwork from memory. Hofer lived through the aftermath of the war and worked to rebuild the Berlin art scene until he died on April 3, 1955.