LEOPOLD GOTTLIEB (POLISH 1883-1934) Nudes at a Bath, oil on canvas 117 x 90 cm (46 x 35 1/2 in.) signed lower left PROVENANCE Erich Cohn Collection Thence by descent in the family to the present owner LOT NOTES The present lot comes from the estate of Erich Cohn, a prolific patron and collector of German expressionism. Born in 1890 in Filehne (present-day Poland), Mr. Cohn emigrated to the United States before the outbreak of the Second World War, where in 1937 he became president of the noodle and matzoh manufactory A. Goodman & Sons. Art from the Erich Cohn Collection, especially by Kleinschmidt, Grosz, and Kollwitz, is held at the MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The collection also included several artworks by Polish-Jewish modernist Leopold Gottlieb, whose works are represented in lots 684-686. Compositionally, Nudes at a Bath is reminiscent of the 1933 painting Biale kobiety (White Women) in the The National Museum in Warsaw, with the same kind of pyramidal structure formed by the three women's bodies. Another example of this subject is found in a 1930 gouache and oil work found in the collection of the Jewish Museum (Group of Seated Figures). Here, the table is shown at an angle and is populated with three more figures than the 1933 example, imbuing the work with greater dynamism. These scenes of labor and eating are a staple of Gottlieb's ouevre beginning in the 1920s, and can be viewed as a continuation of his interest in biblical motifs. Beginning with the late 1920s onward, he also condensed his color palette to whites, browns, greens and blues, as seen in the works represented in this auction.