Dietz Edzard (1893-1963) German/French, "Ballerinas" Oil on Canvas. Depicts a principal dancer at the front with the rest of the company in matching leotard and tutus behind her, with forest-style set pieces in the background and their faces starkly shadowed from the stage lights below. Signed bottom left. Faded writing and tags on the back of the stretcher. One tag from the Alexander Kahan Fine Arts Ltd. gallery on the Upper East Side of New York City with information about the piece is affixed to the top middle of the back of the frame. 

Overall Size: 34 x 40 in. 

Sight Size: 23 x 28 in. 

Dietz Edzard was born into a prominent trading family in Bremen, Germany on March 30th, 1893, but abandoned a career in the wool trade to pursue art, briefly studying in Karlsruhe and training under Max Beckmann in Berlin. His early life took an unconventional turn when he joined a traveling circus as a rope dancer, an experience that later inspired his frequent paintings of performers and acrobats, and the trauma of serving in the infantry during World War I profoundly impacted his mental health and early artistic style, which utilized dark, angular German Expressionist imagery to convey his distress. After a restorative period painting the Bavarian countryside Edzard moved permanently to Paris in 1928, where his work shifted toward more successful, atmospheric subjects after his marriage to fellow artist Suzanne Eisendieck (1906-1998), and established himself as a sought-after portrait painter and chronicler of Parisian life, capturing society beauties and theater scenes with newfound psychological depth. His career flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, with his work being exhibited in major galleries across Europe and New York, but he came to focus on still lifes during the horrors of World War II, producing some of his most memorable canvases in the following decades before his death on January 8th, 1963. 

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