Walter Spies (1895-1942), attributed to - Landschaft (vermutlich auf Bali)

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Attributed to Walter Spies (* September 15, 1895 in Moscow; † January 19, 1942 west of Nias in the Indian Ocean)
Nationality: German
Landscape (exact title unknown)
1932
Style: Magical Realism (or also Neo-Expressionism)
Oil on canvas
Frame-free format: approximately 70 cm x 88 cm
Framed format: approximately 91 cm × 115 cm
Walter Spies attributed or to his circle of the artist association Pita Maha.
Provenance: Auctioned at Singapore International Auction Pte Ltd., previously private collection of Dr. Joachim Maier.
According to the previous owner, he acquired the painting in 1971 directly from the Sukawati family as an original work by Spies.

The signature on the present work was probably not executed by Walter Spies himself. In the context of his oeuvre, this circumstance, however, has relatively little significance. A portion of his work remained entirely unsigned. Moreover, various well-known and documented paintings bear signatures that—as the expert John Stowell demonstrates in his monograph “WALTER SPIES: A LIFE IN ART”—do not originate from the hand of the artist.
Stowell publishes in his standard work a list of the known pictures by Walter Spies. He stresses explicitly that this directory does not claim to be complete and that there exist other, as yet undocumented works.
Furthermore, Stowell points to paintings that Spies merely sketched or began and were completed later by fellow artists of the Pita Maha association. This artists’ association was co-founded by Walter Spies in Bali in 1936.
My suspicion is that the painting belongs to this group of works that Spies had produced by friends among Balinese artists.
From John Stowell’s book:
"Moreover, he said, the story was going around that Spies was passing off works of his own as having been done by Balinese. Considering the difference in price, this was an even less likely story than the more common one that he had Balinese artists fill in the less demanding passages in his own work. But both stories suggest that there must have been some more ephemeral works by Spies closer in style to those being done by the painters round Ubud than the surviving large-scale oil-paintings." Page 157.
John Stowell: Walter Spies a life in art, afterhours books, 2011

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