Evening atmosphere on the Darß

In 1889, Paul Müller-Kaempff came to Ahrenshoop for the first time during a hike with Oskar Frenzel across Fischland. Three years later he settled here as one of the first painters in the artists' colony. Born in Oldenburg, Müller-Kaempff had studied first at the Düsseldorf and later at the Karlsruhe Art Academy. In 1886 he became a master student of Hans Fredrik Gude at the Berlin Academy. Paul Müller-Kaempff was the dominant organisational force in the artists' colony of Ahrenshoop. He is regarded as its founder. Together with Friedrich Wachenhusen, he initiated and built the St. Lucas painting school in 1895. The Kunstkaten - the first exhibition house for local artists - which opened in 1909, was also built at his instigation according to plans he developed with his fellow painter Theobald Schorn. Müller-Kaempff's paintings sold very well in the first two decades of the artists' colony, especially in Berlin. The Great Berlin Art Exhibitions became the decisive platform for his Ahrenshooper Impressions. This Ahrenshoop imagery redeemed his generation's longing for a secluded rurality in which people still lived in harmony with the rhythms of the earth. Sand and sea, fishermen's cottages and trees shaped by the weather under a richly clouded high sky: this is how the village presented itself to the painter, and this is how he still depicted it when tourism had long since changed the face of the small fishing village. His landscape panoramas appear timeless and show no stylistic changes. Starting from pencil or colour studies in front of the motif, he usually painted them in the studio. This is especially true of works of representative format such as the picture of the evening west beach. All attention here is given to the atmospheric appearance of the landscape, which is dominated by sand, water, sky and the speaking forms of the vegetation. A row of storm-torn trees defies the wind that constantly changes, sometimes threatens, this area. The impression of the moment takes on permanence and becomes a symbol of the power and grandeur of nature.