Adolf Erbslöh sits in a blue armchair, his right arm is slightly bent. He is wearing a green-shimmering jacket with a white shirt and a burgundy bow tie. He looks at the viewer through his round glasses, the corners of his mouth are slightly pulled down. Even in contemporary photographs, for example in a photo by Li Osborne from 1930, Adolf Erbslöh is easily recognizable by his round glasses, round head shape and slightly pulled down corners of his mouth. A photograph from 1937 showing Adolf Erbslöh with Alexej von Jawlensky and the archaeologist and musicologist Walter Riezler also offers the sight of a sometimes melancholic person. When Adolf Erbslöh speaks of his art, as in his article: “About my work”, this seems to be confirmed: “What seems to speak clearly in my pictures is a certain melancholy as a legacy of my Bergisches homeland.” But Adolf Erbslöh also had “a mischievous streak” at times, for example when he asked little Isabella Nadolny: “When you cry in bed, do you cry to the front or to the back?” Or he surprised her with the question: “Do the days of the week also have colors?” – and immediately added: “For me, Wednesday is yellow!” Who who reads that doesn’t pause to allow empathy and color imagination to continue to work within themselves? Adolf Erbslöh’s spontaneous remark: “Here comes that totally confused couple again!” seems just as fresh. As original and sophisticated, with cigars and large horn-rimmed glasses, as a brilliant storyteller, music lover and good host, as reserved towards others regarding his own art and committed to that of friends; and Isabella Nadolny describes him as a basically melancholic man in her book: “Allerlei Leute” from 1967. His commitment to the art of friends was also evident in his efforts to prepare an anniversary exhibition for 1934 of the “Neue Künstlervereinigung München”, which had been founded 25 years previously. Gabriele Münter, invited by Adolf Erbslöh, also sent a happy acceptance and was astonished to learn that Kandinsky not only took part, but had even welcomed the project as an excellent idea. But then Erbslöh rejected him: “The great national movement means that an international art exhibition does not seem appropriate at the moment.”