Lot 334: Richard Gerstl (1883-1908)

Richard Gerstl (1883-1908)
Herrenbildnis
oil on canvas
78¾ x 41 3/8 in. (200 x 105.1 cm.)
Painted circa 1906-1907

Vienna, Kunstforum, Das Auge des Sammlers: Monet bis Picasso, March - June 1998, no. 32.

Commissioned from the artist by the sitter and thence by descent to the present owner.

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One of relatively few remaining works by Richard Gerstl in existence, this full-length portrait of a Czechoslovakian button manufacturer is a rare commissioned work made by the tragic Austrian avant-garde painter around the years 1906 or 1907.

Gerstl who, along with Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Max Oppenheimer was one of the leading Expressionist painters of his generation in Vienna during these dramatic years in its history is only known today because of his influence on these artists and through the few paintings of his to survive. A student like Schiele at the Vienna Academy under Christian Griepenkerl, Gerstl was one of the great innovators of the Austrian avant-garde developing rapidly from a neo-Impressionist technique to a more transcendental style of portraiture that used a heightened and deliberately expressive colour to anticipate some of the developments made later by Kokoschka and Schiele.

Although little is known about Gerstl, he was known to be a passionate music-lover who championed Gustav Mahler and painted many of the leading figures of musical life in Vienna among them the avant-garde composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Zemlinsky. Indeed, it was the ramifications of his affair with Mathilde Schoenberg that appears to have prompted his suicide in 1908 and the setting fire to his studio that destroyed most of his documentation, letters and paintings.

For many years he remained a forgotten and unknown figure from this time and it was not until 1931 that his surviving pictures came to light at an exhibition organised by Otto Kallir. Painted in the neo-Impressionist style of Gerstl's first years of maturity, this painting, which has remained in the family of the sitter since it was first painted is therefore a rare and important example of this intriguing artist's work.