“Expressionism is that
which disrupts preordained harmony, inscribes itself on canvas and in shape
with savagery and dissymmetry, tears its prey and howls. Its ingredients are
ultra-colours, ultra-lines and ultra-shapes. It is the opposite of the rounded
and caressed; it is pointed, jagged, scratched and bitten. Inner life bursts
forth in all its harsh, ugly, pitiless reality. The controlled appearance of
man and humanity gives way to trembling, temper and spasms. Its themes are
revolt, violence, remorseless self-analysis, madness, explosion of religious
belief – to devout people it must appear sacrilegious – primitive and sexual
savagery, the terrifying aspect of the primitives and the prostitute’s
shameless gestures, metropolitan restlessness, grimaces and death.” Pierre
Courthion, Expressionism, Heron History of Art, 1968, P.8.
“The primary, abrupt,
direct, originality on command was his desire. Gerstl’s painting was
self-fulfilling in the powerful act of painting itself.”
Otto Breicha.
Everything
about Richard Gerstl was incomplete, his life, oeuvre, correspondence and
relationships. Hardly any of Gerstl’s paintings were signed, he left only one
letter behind and few people who knew him personally left any accounts about
him. This has meant that establishing a chronology of Gerstl’s paintings and
his development as an artist has been speculative as has been accounts of his character
and probable mental illness not to mention divining the truth behind Gerstl’s affair
with Mathilde the wife of the composer Arnold Schönberg. If you have heard
Richard Gerstl’s name before, it has probably been in relation to his much more
famous contemporary Gustav Klimt twenty-one years his senior, or those that
came after him, Oskar Kokoschka three years his junior and Egon Schiele seven
years his junior. He never exhibited in his lifetime and shunned his artistic
contemporaries, though Dr Raymond Coffer has suggested that Gerstl may have met
Kokoschka. If you are a music lover, you might have heard of him in connection
with Arnold Schönberg who later castigated him as an evil punk who cuckolded
him. A young virtuoso, a true rebel despite his privileged background and
Expressionist prophet - Gerstl was sadly decades ahead of his time. Over the
last fifty years, Gerstl has become a cult figure for painters in Europe and
wherever his individual paintings have appeared in group exhibitions they have
aroused curiosity and admiration. Moreover, since Neo-Expressionism in the
1980s, Gerstl’s work has taken on fresh relevance for painters like Georg
Baselitz and become viewed as prophetic.
Of Gerstl’s surviving oeuvre of
seventy paintings, nearly a third of them, seventeen paintings were
self-portraits - the rest of his work included portraits, landscapes and images
of his mother and lover Mathilda Schönberg.
Since
my youth, I have pieced together facts about his life from books on Klimt,
Schiele and Kokoschka. Meanwhile, I tore out any illustrations of his canvases
that I found - and stored them in my notebooks. Still it was hard at first to
find decent accounts of Gerstl’s life and art (at least for an English
speaker). In 2002, I had paid a young French girl studying in Trinity College
Dublin (who was a bit of a prodigy) to translate those parts, which dealt with
Gerstl in my copy of La Verite Nue
(the catalogue for an exhibition of Austrian Expressionist paintings and
drawings at the Malliol Museum in Paris in the late winter of 2002). It cost me
€40 – but it was the best €40 I have ever spent! Then in 2011, I bought online Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka a
catalogue from the Galerie St. Etienne in New York written by Jane Kallir, which gave me further insights into him.
Then in early 2012, I came across Dr Raymond Coffer’s Doctoral Thesis from
2011, ‘Richard Gerstl and Arnold Schönberg:
A Reassessment of Their Relationship (1906-1908)’ on his website dedicated
to Gerstl and his affair with Mathilde Schönberg. The important advances in
Coffer’s researcher included a new chronology of Gerstl’s paintings and new
details of his affair with Mathilde Schönberg – which overturned much of the
chronology of Klaus Albrecht Schroder and previous versions
of Gerstl’s life. Then in 2017, we were blessed with a small book
on Gerstl by Diethard Leopold that used Coffer’s new research and the Neue
Galerie in New York staged the largest retrospective of Gerstl in the English
speaking world that was accompanied by a detailed book that used Coffer’s new
research. Thanks to Coffer’s research, I have had to re-write my essay on
Gerstl more times than on virtually any other artist. But, I still think the
definitive story has not yet been told or perhaps ever will be told give the
paucity of facts.
Viennese
art of the late 1890s to the late 1910s was one of the most fascinating
episodes in Modern art. Their concerns with self-hood, insanity, sex, and the
body still resonate today with young artists everywhere – and will as long as
human beings live on this earth. Characters change, settings change, plots
thicken, but the human condition is constant. The truth is, when a youth, I
felt an irrational kinship with Gerstl - if I believed in reincarnation - I
might have thought I was him! Like me he probably suffered from a borderline personality
disorder and perhaps a narcissistic personality disorder. Like me he was a
social loser, like me he was an angry young man, like me he would bend to no
one, like me he prized feeling over correct technique, like me he was too
sensitive for his own good. However, unlike me, he never lived into middle age
- to find some kind of happiness and compromise with the world.
Richard
Gerstl was born on 14th September 1883 in
Vienna, Austria (two years after Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain.) He was the
third son of Emil and Maria Gerstl. His father was a Hungarian Jew and his
mother a Catholic and he was brought up as a Catholic. His father had made a
fortune in the Stock market - and was a prominent landowner. It is thought that
Richard had an unnatural love for his domineering mother and an Oedipal
complex. Victor Hammer, Gerstl’s only true friend remembered Gerstl’s family
life thus: “His father was a Jew. His mother was an especially kind and friendly
woman, and the sons were very devoted to her. Richard resembled his mother, who
was not as well built as the father. The family lived on the Wahringer Strasse.
It was a modest apartment, not poor but not “upper middle-class”, very
decent... I think the mother was more inclined to support her youngest son’s
artistic ambitions.” (Victor Hammer, Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New
York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 27.)
Gerstl attended
elementary school, in the Bartensteingasse and then in 1895, he entered the
Piaristengymnasium a renowned public school. However, Gerstl became a troublemaker
in secondary school - all he wanted to do was study at the Vienna Academy of
Fine Arts. Disciplinary problems caused him to leave the
Piaristengymnasium after two years and he finished his secondary education at a
private institute. Emil was disappointed and angered by
youngest son’s choice to become a painter – perhaps he foresaw the tormented
life his son would have as an artist - however he continued to support him.
In
the summer of 1898, Gerstl enrolled in the drawing school of Ladislaus
Rohsdorfer to prepare for the entrance exams at the Academy of Fine Arts - the
most exclusive art school in the Hapsburg Empire. At the age of fifteen, Gerstl
passed the notoriously difficult entrants exam at the Vienna Academy of Fine
Arts and admitted in the autumn of 1898. No matter what his peers said against
him later, they could never take that away Gerstl’s successful entry to the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts - his only tangible achievement as an artist. Adolf
Hitler would later infamously fail to gain entrance to the same Academy twice
in 1907-1908 – leaving us all to wonder what might have happened if Hitler had
succeeded as an artist and channelled his rage into the more peaceful and
cathartic activities of painting and drawing.
However,
Gerstl’s entry into the Academy was only the start of his problems. His
professor in the Academy was the notoriously strict and conservative, history
and allegorical painter Christian Griepenkerl - who was then nearly sixty.
Christian Griepenkerl (1839-1916) had worked as an assistant to Carl Rahl on
his mural of the Prometheus legend and then in 1874 he was made a professor at
the Academy. You know I have read at least a hundred books on the art of Vienna
of the 1900s, Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka and it just occurred to me that
while Christian Griepenkerl was mentioned many times as a demon teacher –
nobody ever actually seems to have looked at his work closely. Well I did - if
only online – and what a shock! His paintings are conventional in technical
terms - based on the earlier tonal ‘painterly-painting’
of the likes of Titian, Tintoretto, Rubens and José Ribera. Griepenkerl’s
themes are also conventional allegorical works based on the Bible and the
Classics - making them look like they might have been painted in the 1640s not
the 1890s. They are full of drama and wild animals. His drawings are competent
and skilful – but also empty and academic. However, Griepenkerl’s chauvinistic,
macho and self-important tone is most important.
The
dictatorial Griepenkerl was not the kind of wimpy academic of today who would
like to teach his pupils how to draw - but just lets out a sigh and lets them
get on with their scribbling - not Christian Griepenkerl! He was going to
uphold the ancestral skills of Western painting and drawing - and fight the
youth tooth-and-nail to his dying day! I have no doubt he cowed many youthful
pupils into submission – but Richard Gerstl was not going to be one of them. He
instinctively recognized the bankruptcy of the academic tradition personified
by the pompous work of closed-minded artists like Griepenkerl.
I
have argued for the recognition of late academically trained portrait painters
like Sargent, Sorolla, Boldini, Mancini, Orpen, Lavery and John on many occasions.
Yet my passion for defending lost causes is stultified when I see work like
Griepenkerl’s. I find it easy to appreciate the simplicity, the panache and the
highly skilled bravura brushstrokes of the portrait painters I have mentioned.
However, I fail repeatedly to love the pompous, macho, escapist and hypocritical
‘machines’ of late Salon Art. Artists like Alexandre Cabanal and William
Bouguereau in France and Griepenkerl and Hans Makart in Vienna were capable
draughtsmen, competent and sometimes skilful painters – but there was a void in
their personalities and in their art. Their work had none of the humanity,
fresh passion, originality and innovation that the canvases of their heroes
like Raphael, Titian and Rubens had possessed over two hundred years before. I
do not think that technique was the major flaw in late academic art like
Griepenkerl’s. It was the preposterous nature of it when used to uphold
Aristocratic values and the Western canon in the face of Realism,
Impressionism, Symbolism, industrialization, democracy, the press, nationalism,
socialism, anarchism, feminism and the cannibalization of the individual in the
capitalist system and the modern battlefield. Griepenkerl’s huge oil paintings
and frescos were simply empty propaganda for an Empire - which was by the 1900s
one of the weakest and most decadent in Europe.
Vienna
in the early 1900s was a city in a state of decadent collapse - divided by all
kinds of political and artistic factions and splinter groups. Intellectuals discussed
politics, sex, religion, economics and art heatedly in the cafes – but to no
conclusive effect. Despite the
respectable facade of the city – it was morally rotten to the core and cheap
pornographic postcards and prostitution – including child prostitution was
rampant. It is no coincidence that in a neurotic and two-faced city like
Vienna, psychoanalysis emerged and was concerned with overcoming the dangers of
repression and psychological ignorance. The First World War and Spanish flu
epidemic of 1918 - would finish off the Hapsburg Empire – but the party until
then would go on. So Griepenkerl and his patrons tried to pretend that the
world had not changed and that old elitist calls to; honour, duty and
subservience to the Aristocracy - could still mean something to a growing
commercially, sexually and socially exploited underclass and a nervous and
neurotic middle class.
Like
Romanticism, Expressionism was a movement of furious youth - sick of their
moribund and deceitful society. Gerstl was a true rebel in a fiercely
conservative and restrictive state. He was also born just a little bit too
early - to a world not ready to hear his truth - or brothers who could take
some of the flack. These days an art student can rub themselves in excrement
and give the Nazi salute – and still be given a passing grade - and thought of
as quite the joker. Today's art students are kicking against a door - that has
already been rammed open by a tank. However, Gerstl and his generation really
were in open rebellion against an establishment - that had its backs to the
wall - and were fighting like cornered rats to save their ideological system.
From
the start - the young upstart - who gave off an insolent aura, irked
Griepenkerl. In photographs – the highly-strung Gerstl looked creepy - like the
kind of young man who might strangle you in a back-alley. Narcissistic,
taciturn, volatile and sex obsessed, he looked haunted and sick of his own
skin. My suspicion is that he was a highly sensitive young man who did not know
how to express his feelings in public – so he turned to art. He was as you
might say - a young man who could have a fight in an empty room. He quarrelled
with everyone and did not seem to give a dam about the opinion of anyone else
in Vienna. Gerstl was quick tempered and an isolationist - his short life spiked with violent quarrels: “He had no patience with those he
considered his intellectual inferiors. An amateur painter who gave
well-intentioned advice was shown to the door; another visitor’s praise caused
Gerstl to slash the painting in question, so despicable did he find his
admirer’s taste. Once while he was copying a picture at the Kunsthistorisches
Museum, the director happened by and made a comment. “Don’t disturb me,” Gerstl
snarled. “What do you know anyway.” (Jane Kallir, Richard Gerstl –
Oskar Kokoschka, New York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 9.)
Hammer
was one of Gerstl’s only friends – yet they always addressed themselves by
their last names. How odd! “I met Richard Gerstl at the academy, where we were classmates. He was a
year younger than I. We soon became friends, and I believe I can say I was his
only friend. Our friendship continued after we had both left the Academy, until
his death in 1908...” (Victor Hammer, Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New
York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 27.) Hammer
would go on to become a very technically accomplished classical painter. “Gerstl was not impressed by the
Austrian artists, but he was enthusiastic about the Spanish painter Zuloaga.
Munch – whose influence on Gerstl was later imputed – was never mentioned by
him. On the other hand, he often spoke of Van Gogh, who was just then beginning
to be known in Vienna.” (Victor Hammer,
Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New
York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 28.)
During the summers of 1900 and
1901, Gerstl studied with the more adventurous painter Simon Hollosy in
Nagybanya (which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Simon
Hollosy work was not very original – a mix of then trendy French Romantic,
Realist and Impressionist canvases – but he must have been a huge relief from
the over-bearing Griepenkerl. Gerstl had ambitions now to make modern
masterpieces (like his hero’s van Gogh and Munch had recently created – their
names growing every day in the minds of art students with increasing news,
scandal and legends about their art and lives.)
Gerstl’s
earlier work was rather conventional - inspired by the likes of Diego Velázquez
and Max Lieberman – but lacking the former master’s exactness, wisdom and
maturity and the later German’s slick Salon polish. However, his work after
studying with Hollosy would be a response to the Impressionist and Pointillist
dissolving of the world - into a shimmering haze of coloured brushwork. After
Gerstl had assimilated these influences - he went on to produce prophetic early
Expressionist canvases.
Gerstl’s
first great self-portrait was Semi-Nude
Self-Portrait, 1902-4 – painted in the same year that Picasso had begun
working on his Blue Period paintings.
Neither of them was unique. Blue was very much the colour of turn of the
century especially amongst Symbolist's and early Expressionists like Ferdinand
Holder and Georges Rouault. However, even amongst this company Gerstl’s blue
stands apart as his own. It is a turquoise like blue – radiating spirituality.
He has depicted himself full frontally- his chest bare - but his lower
half-covered with a white shrift. His arms are down at his sides and he stares
in complete vulnerability towards the viewer. Coffer has suggested that Gerstl,
revealing a hatred of his own Jewishness, Gerstl posed himself as a Christ like
figure – vulnerable to the world. Not a man who wants to hurt – but who is
hurting. The painting is over five-feet high - making it almost life-size. Clearly
influenced in technical terms by the open brushwork and airy space of Velázquez
the canvas also echoes the Symbolist mood of the time. Coffer’s has also
suggested that this self-portrait was painted in response to his rejection for
military service and was just one of many rejections that angered and alienated
Gerstl.
Haunted
by Gerstl’s gaze in Semi-Nude
Self-Portrait, 1902-4, Diethard Leopold whose father owned the painting, observed
that the painting’s power rested upon questions about the meaning of Gerstl’s
stare: “That is the reason that this
painting has been interpreted in so many ways: as the expression of a crisis;
as the rejection of any further communication; as a challenge to enter into a
process of looking at each other in which personal limits are violated or
transcended.” (Diethard Leopold, Richard Gerstl, Munich: Hirmer, 2017, P. 18.) Writing of Gerstl’s Self-Portrait Semi-nude
against Blue Background of 1901 Klaus Albrecht Schroder wrote, “This self-portrait by Gerstl not only
refers to Dürer’s drawing but adapts two of the iconographical traditions
associated with Christ. Both the isolation that symbolizes the sense of
exposure and of being at the mercy of an unknown power, and the passivity of
the frontal stance with arms hanging loose, related to devotional paintings of
the Man of Sorrows, and to Ecce Homo images divorced from their narrative
context. This imagery of suffering is synthesized with the iconography of the
Resurrection: the pellucid appearance of the body, surrounded by an aura that
stands out against the deep blue night of the ground, transports Gerstl far
beyond the earthly sphere.” (Klaus Albrecht Schroder, Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion Munich: Prestel, 1999, P. 54.)
The
spare stripped down nature of Gerstl’s paintings were a direct response the
overly elaborate and ornamental canvases of Klimt whose work he despised. It
was the simplicity and immediacy of Gerstl’s canvases that make them so modern.
Gustav Klimt and later Egon Schiele were infinitely greater artists – but their
extreme form of stylization can make their work look a bit dated.
From 1901-1904 – Gerstl lived an
increasingly solitary existence. In a frightening full length self-portrait in
a suit of 1904 (which he later cut-up and vandalised with paint) was perhaps
his first laughing self-portrait - yet in this one his face was more menacing
than pitiful. Coffer suggested that Gerstl was spurred on to paint more
aggressive expressive works by his previous rejections.
“Despite his erratic educational experiences,
Gerstl was by all accounts extremely intelligent and well-read. He taught
himself both Spanish and Italian, achieving a degree of proficiency that
enabled him to read complex scientific and philosophical texts. Though
parallels between Freud and the Austrian Expressionists are often cited, Gerstl
is the only major painter who is known to have read The Interpretation of
Dreams shortly after publication.” (Jane Kallir, Richard
Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 10.) He avidly
studied philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis and music. He was a great fan
of the decline of Empire style writings of the anti-Semitic, racist,
misogynistic, and elitist historian Otto Weininger, the scandalous
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as well as the angst-ridden dramas of Henrik Ibsen
and the romantic symphonies of Gustave Mahler - a typical cultural diet in
Vienna for the trendy, intellectuals of the time.
Gerstl
had always loved music, and would go to a concert every night. He even toyed
with the idea of giving up painting and becoming a music critic. Gerstl
disliked other painters and preferred the company of musicians - perhaps
because they did not have the expertise to judge his work and make criticisms
and were more open-minded to new ideas than the conservative painters of Vienna
who were concerned only with technique.
Briefly,
Gerstl and Victor Hammer attended a progressive private art school on Vienna’s
Kohlmarkt run by two painters from the Secession group including Hohenbeger.
While there, they met Jules Pascin who at the time was still using his real
name Pincas. Meanwhile Gerstl followed van Gogh in art periodicals and probably
saw the sweeping Impressionist exhibition in the Secession that year. In 1904,
he may have taken the chance to see a few of Munch’s works in the Vienna
Secession – even if he did not mention Munch’s work to his friend Victor
Hammer. The spectral quality of many of Gerstl’s portraits, their abstracted backgrounds
and wraith like application of paint may have been in response to the radically
simplified forms and silhouettes of Munch. However, because Gerstl was still an
awkward art student his work had an even more neurotic and uncontrolled look. Later in 1906, he must have seen the paintings by van Gogh in the Miethke
Gallery.
Another
lesser influence might have been Lovis Corinth who at the time was painting and
exhibiting dramatic psychological and allegorical self-portraits. There are indeed many similarities in terms of technique and approach
between these two painters: “Both had a
predilection for dealing intensely with the colour paste and both followed this
– albeit at different speeds. The personal crisis in which Gerstl found himself
in 1908 accelerated this development and led to him throwing himself into an
intensity that was unparalleled at the time. The young painter was almost
overpowered by the paint. In terms of violence, Gerstl left Corinth far behind
him even when one takes the late, almost informal, works of the older painter
into consideration.” (Erhard Stobe, Lovis
Corinth: A Feast of Painting, Ed. Agnes Husslein-Arco and Stephan Koja,
Munich: Prestel, 2009, P. 130.) However, in Corinth’s
self-portraits, there was always an element of play-acting, posing and
posturing - that was utterly lacking in Gerstl’s work. In fact, the painful
sincerity of his canvases strikes one immediately.
At
the end of the summer of 1904, Gerstl had to be treated for a “nervous stomach”
complaint which reminds us of the equally explosive painter Chaim Soutine’s own
battle with a nervous stomach - which in his case was exacerbated by
alcoholism.
Gerstl was notorious
for his combative personality and short-fuse, it is said that angered by a
patron’s comments on one of his paintings - Gerstl slashed the picture in front
of them. Gerstl’s self-portrait from 1904 (Fragment
of a Full-Length Self-Portrait Laughing, 1904) reveals the depths of
Gerstl’s agonised narcissism and self-disgust and the kind suicidal aggression
that would eventually end his life. Gerstl in a fit of auto-aggression slashed
the canvas and defaced his laughing self-portrait with blue paint. The painting
as it now exists - as defaced fragment - is frankly psychotic looking and
terrifying. I know what that kind of self-loathing feels like and where it
leads… However, for the next few years, Gerstl channeled his anguish into oil
paint – applied with incredible immediacy with paint brush, pallet knife,
straight from the tube or even his own hands. He made paint transmit his
nervous feelings in a way unprecedented in art up to that point. More
importantly, this frenetic expression came out of him naturally without the
theatricality of other Expressionists like Kokoschka or Schiele.
In
October 1904, he returned to study in the Vienna Academy again under
Griepenkerl. Yet again, they clashed and Griepenkerl reportedly said to Gerstl:
“The way you paint I can piss in the
snow!” On another occasion Griepenkerl told Gerstl, “The devil shat you into my class”, a putdown he would also use on
Schiele.
Then
by luck (Gerstl did not have much) Professor Heinrich Lefler another tutor at
the academy was visiting the studio of Victor Hammer and saw Gerstl’s bizarre
and haunting portrait of The Sisters
Karoline and Pauline Fey, 1905. According to Hans Bisanz it “is regarded as the earliest example of
Expressionism in Austria. The influence of Velázquez is plain to see, but there
are also indications that he had studied the art of Ferdinand Holder and his
“Parallelism”, the sequencing of similar motifs.” (Hans Bisanz, Vienna 1900 and The Heroes of Modernism, London, Thames &
Hudson, 2005, P. 123.) Lefler suggested that Gerstl re-enter the academy under
his tutorship. Gerstl agreed to go back to the academy on the condition that he
had his own studio – which Lefler arranged. Professor Heinrich Lefler
specialized in illustrations prints - which mixed Rococo fantasy with Symbolist
metaphors. Lefler’s prints still have a period charm – though in art historical
terms they are trivial. At first, the
two men got along well. Lefler decided to show the startling new work of his
student at an exhibition of Hagenbund artists in a local inn. However, Lefler
chickened out at the last moment fearing Gerstl’s work would cause a scandal –
he was probably right - at least in this.
In
the spring of 1906, Gerstl painted his first uncertain landscapes in a northern
neighbourhood of Vienna - that show the influence of Munch. Then in the spring
of 1906, Gerstl met and befriended Arnold Schönberg (he changed the spelling
from Schönberg to Schoenberg when he immigrated to America) and his wife
Mathilde Zeminsky. The couple had two young children. Gerstl also befriended
the other members of Schönberg’s circle including Alexander Zemlinsky and
eventually Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Schönberg was still a struggling
composer, battling with alcoholism and a deteriorating marriage and had yet to
make the breakthrough of his twelve-tone dissonant music – some have in fact
suggested that his friendship with Gerstl who was trying to “emancipate the brushstroke” was to
influence Schönberg’s later music. Schönberg was to become one of the most
influential and divisive figures in contemporary music by destroying the over
three-hundred-year old total system of Classical music. The Nazi’s later
labelled his work degenerate and he had to flee to the United States where he
taught the likes of John Cage.
At
the time, Schönberg made ends meet by tutoring rich young people with a passion
for music. I think he also got off on acting the master to young impressionable
people. Gerstl who was a fan of the composer’s music and perhaps looking again
for a father figure - asked if he could paint the composer - who first checked
with Lefler to see if he thought his pupil was good enough to paint him! That
briefly sums up Schönberg for me – an arrogant conceited prick! Arnold who was
making little money from his music hoped that if he improved as a painter he
might be able to make money from his art – so he asked Gerstl to teach him.
Later
Schönberg became moderately famous as a painter for his The Red Gaze of 1910 - a crude Expressionist self-portrait painted
two years after Gerstl’s suicide. It was a powerful though unsophisticated piece
– pure ham-theatre. Schönberg’s paintings were persistently naivety, crude and
dumb. Little in them was significantly original. Nevertheless, Schönberg the
musician had a comparatively large cult audience that wondered just how awful,
painful and unpleasant music could get - before it was just banging on a piano
by an epileptic. The fact that Schönberg composed such a racket with such
elitist, arrogant and contemptuous theoretical baggage only made it worse.
“Like Schönberg and the rest of Loos’s
circle, Gerstl felt himself to be locked in mortal combat with a hostile world,
although in his case the hostility came more from within than without. Unlike
Schönberg, who was subject to vicious attacks whenever a new piece was
performed, Gerstl managed totally to avoid pubic confrontation.” (Jane Kallir, Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New York: Galerie St. Etienne,
1992, P. 9.) Gerstl’s huge semi-pointillist portrait of the
authoritarian Schönberg in the spring of 1906 - is compelling and I think it is
a real insight into the composer. Schönberg sits suited, on a chaise lounge
with his legs spread (an Alpha-Male pose) and a cigarette in his limp left hand
staring out at us – and Gerstl - with a look that I can only describe as
contemptuous. Gerstl may have used photographs of the composer as aids in this
painting and in others around this period. Though he did not slavishly copy
photographs, I personally find this his least convincing period. Still in this
canvas, we see a real painter at work. It still holds the usual influences -
but it is also a searching painting - in which a young artist is looking for
new phrases in painting – never conjured before.
During
1906, Gerstl painted a number of portraits of his family, members of the
Schönberg circle and female sitters who have not been identified. Along with
Gerstl’s early academic portraits of 1902, I think these works that bordered on
kitsch were his weakest works. It is notable in all these and all Gerstl’s
other portraits that none of his sitter’s smile – but rather regard the painter
with suspicion. Frequently they chose not to take the finished work - thinking
it not very good.
Some
of canvases of the winter of 1906-7 show him standing or sitting pensively in
his suit holding his pallet and brushes and alone in his cold studio. Knowing
of his later more extreme self-depictions, the conservative depictions of
himself in 1906-7 look especially repressed. Throughout 1905-6, Gerstl grappled
with the influence of Pointillism as he tried to free his brushstrokes of line
and the constraints of form - most of these efforts were unsatisfactory,
transitional works. However, a series of four pointillist ink self-portraits from
1906-7 had a haunting and heart-breaking character – revealing Gerstl’s fragile
sense of self. We see the artist shimmer
in his brief existence through a flux of dots – but we are sadly aware that he
will end his own life a year later and disappear altogether from this earth.
All
my life I had thought that Gerstl’s Self-Portrait
Laughing, and the four drawings that seem to have accompanied it - had been
made in 1908 - at the end of Gerstl’s affair with Mathilda Schönberg. However, reading
Dr. Raymond Coffer’s Thesis from 2011, I had to rethink all I thought I knew
about Gerstl. Dr Coffer, convincingly questioned the accepted date and
suggested that stylistically it was closer to Gerstl’s work in the
summer/autumn of 1907, and that Gerstl’s appearance was closer to that seen in
a painting of Gerstl by William Clark Rice, also dated 1907. Looking through
the various self-portraits and photographs of Gerstl, it occurred to me that he
may have periodically shaved his head and changed his beard frequently. Yet I
think Coffer made a persuasive argument against this theory. Though I thought
his strongest arguments were stylistic and forensic. Coffer has suggested that
this self-portrait was painted after joining the Schönberg in 1907, though it
may have been before the start of Gerstl’s affair with Mathilda - though they
might have already developed feelings for each other. Coffer also suggested
that it may have expressed jubilation at befriending the Schönberg circle. Also
at the time, according to Coffer, records show that he was attending a doctor
for psychological problems.
Self-Portrait Laughing is a small (no
bigger than A3) rapidly painted proto-Expressionist painting - by the little
known Austrian painter Richard Gerstl. When I first saw it at the age of
fifteen as a tiny black and white illustration in book on Egon Schiele I was
mesmerized by it almost more than Schiele’s work. To this day, if I could own
just one self-portrait in the world – this would be it. There are few portraits
as terrifying, and immediate - the fact that it is so devilishly skilful,
authentic and of the moment - only serves to multiply its unsettling power.
The
painting depicts a thin, gaunt looking young man - with close-cropped hair and
a thin goatee – he is cracking a smile but he looks like he is on the verge of
tears. His hairstyle like a convicts, has led some to speculate that when
depressed Gerstl would shave his head. Though the subject should be one of joy
– we know instantly that this is not a chuckle of delight. The light seems to
be from a candle or lamp placed below him – which we cannot see - because the
painting ends just below his shoulders. The low lighting (which since its use
in German Expressionist cinema – has become a favourite trick of Hollywood when
the villain arrives on the scene) makes his face look grotesque and evil - as
he laughs alone in the darkness of his studio. His neck is unnaturally long -
and his head thrown back. He has painted his face in swift but skilful strokes
of largely tonal skin hues ranging from mauve, to olive, to ruddy pink and a
sour light green dabbed neurotically on his beard and sideburns. His right eye
is lit up so as to look ochre while his left flickers with the blue of his
iris. Only the eyes, the tip of his nose, his big teeth, and the collar of his
shirt has accents of dirty white. The cavity behind his teeth is dark purple.
It is as though his expression has been just caught before dissolving away
forever. Behind his face is a shimmering screen of dark browns and blacks –
suggesting more the inner state of his mind - than the space of the room he
inhabits. Though Gerstl’s technique was based on late academic tonal painting
and the open sketchy brushwork of Impressionism - its macabre mood made it an
early example of Expressionism.
Although
Self-Portrait Laughing - which I have
already extensively described - was probably painted in a few frenzied hours.
Gerstl had worked on the pose and composition in chalk drawings beforehand
(dated from 15th to the 29th of September) in the same way that all good art
students were taught. In these early studies, his face is impassive, his mouth
is closed – but his eyes are full of sorrow. In both the
preparatory drawings and finished oil painting, Gerstl emphasis the thinness of
his face and slenderness of his neck: “...
Richard spoke of his interest in the shape of people’s skulls. He mentioned a
book by Moebius about the width of women’s heads, which maintained that narrow
measurements were a sign of inferiority. I asked him if he had read the by
Moebius. “Yes,” he said, “and it gave me a width of 71cm.”” (Victor Hammer,
Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New
York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 28.)
Gerstl’s
grimacing self-portrait was reminiscent of the mad Viennese Neo-Classical
sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmitt’s sculpted self-portrait heads. However,
whether Gerstl knew of his work is open to question. After Messerschmitt’s,
death he was forgotten and a lot of his heads ended up in a freak show circus,
yet in 1907, Messerschmitt’s heads self-portrait heads had been exhibited in
Vienna to much acclaim amongst artists - however we do not know if Gerstl saw
the show. Still the similarities between Messerschmitt’s self-portrait heads
and Gerstl’s self-portrait laughing is striking.
Erhard Stobe has
suggested a link between this ‘violent’ painting and the late work of Lovis Corinth,
whom Gerstl may have been familiar with: “...
the fact that the Viennese painter was attracted to certain aspects of
Corinth’s painting has received too little attention. The bridge between
Corinth and Gerstl is somewhat fragile but maybe it is strong enough... In his
Berlin period, Corinth was a famous painter, his pictures were illustrated in
esteemed art journals and it is possible that the original works were displayed
in Vienna: there are apparently records that the Self-Portrait as a Howling
Bacchant was shown in Vienna in 1906. Gerstl’s Laughing Self-Portrait from
1908... follows this example in its radicalism, if not in its atmosphere.”
(Erhard Stobe, Lovis Corinth: A Feast of
Painting, Ed. Agnes Husslein-Arco and Stephan Koja, Munich: Prestel, 2009,
P. 129.)
I
am sceptical of posthumous psychiatric diagnosis. For example, I find the
posthumous diagnosing of van Gogh exasperating. Frankly, put two psychiatrists
in a room with one living patient and they will probably come up with three diagnoses.
Also mental illness is a continuum and a patient can have periods of extreme
distress and others of comparative normality. Personally I do not believe in
the biological root of mental illness even though it is the dominant one today
for reasons too long to go into (one of which being - it is cheaper to give a
pill than fund lengthy therapy), I believe it is brought on by environmental
factors more often, so I wonder what in Gerstl’s childhood might have affected
him. If I were to play the game, I would suggest that while there is no doubt
he was depressive, this to me does not explain his explosive relationships or
manic and frankly violent painting. Since full blown manic-depression would
have been obvious to everyone, I think that he had a personality disorder,
perhaps a borderline personality disorder which would explain his fractious
relations with other people it is also a disorder mostly found in women and can
involve gender confusion which would explain his effeminate depiction in
Self-Portrait against Blue Background. I also think that he might have a
narcissistic personality disorder which would explain his acute
self-involvement and detachment from others. But that’s just my dumb guess.
Writing
about Gerstl’s self-portraits Natalie Haddad observed that: “Gerstl’s self-portraits are equally compelling because he conflates
narcissistic self-scrutiny with a sense of humility and his own insignificance.
Where fellow Austrian Expressionists Kokoschka and Schiele, and German
counterpart, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, represented themselves through
sexuality, machismo or gendered self-performance, Gerstl portrayed himself as
slipping away.” (Natalie Haddad, Vienna’s
Prodigal Son, Hyperallergic website, 16th August, 2017.)
Some may view narcissistic Expressionism as an oxymoron.
However, self-involvement and self-importance can be found in many of the
Expressionists such as van Gogh, Munch, Ensor, Moderson Becker, Schiele and
Kirchner. My own work was just a mirror of this trend!
As
their friendship deepened, Schönberg trusted Gerstl enough to accompany his
introverted and plain wife to concerts. The composer was very busy at the time
and perhaps welcomed the free time to spend on his work. Mathilde and Gerstl
were soon having an affair. When it started, who made the first move, who
consummated it, who persisted in it - we may never know. It is my suspicion
that Gerstl (like many young Viennese men of the day) might have lost his
virginity to the loose women of Vienna’s red light district – but emotionally
he was naïve when he fell for Mathilde. Gerstl’s paintings of Mathilde are by
conventional standards, quite ugly and hastily made. It is as though he was so
frightened of her or his feelings for her – that he could hardly paint her. In
his paintings, she looks more maternal than sexy and in no way a Siren of men. Though,
those who knew Mathilde said she had a high sex drive. Was she flattered by the
attentions of a young man who lived by his own rules? Or did she just feel a
maternal need to give him love?
Meanwhile
Gerstl painted a series of paintings of the Schönberg family and their friends
like Alban Berg as they all holidayed in Gmunden in 1907 and 1908. He also
taught Schönberg – the rudiments of oil painting. Later Schönberg claimed that
he had opened up Gerstl’s eyes and encouraged him to paint ‘modern-paintings,’
though some like Dr Raymond Coffer have disputed this. Still, the intellectual
dialogue this group of musicians perhaps encouraged Gerstl to give his
paintings a movement and flow and freed them up to became more aggressive,
discordant and challenging. “What may be termed Gerstl’s “emancipation of brushstroke” developed
progressively in the landscapes done during the artist’s last summers in
Gmunden... The mock pointillism of some of the earlier works of this period
gradually gave way to a much looser, almost uncontrolled application of paint.
As forms are pulled apart, the pallet becomes noticeably brighter, so that the
subjects ultimately appear to dissolve in light. It is not physical appearance,
but rather the spiritual essence of the subject that is being presented. Many
of these works verge on abstraction... and it is tempting to speculate that
Gerstl might have evolved further in this direction had he lived.” (Jane Kallir, Richard Gerstl –
Oskar Kokoschka, New York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 11.) On the flipside, Coffer and has also convincingly proved that Gerstl influenced
Schönberg’s painting and even his music.
In
1908, Gerstl summered with the Schönberg family, friends and pupils in
Traunsee. Despite their small size, unfinished look and hastily painted nature
– I am irrationally fond of Gerstl’s oil paintings of the summer 1908 around
Traun Lake and the mountain Schlafende Griechin (named so because - the sloping
peak beside the water - resembled a sleeping Greek woman.) Gerstl’s nervous
pointillist dots gave way to bolder gestural brushstrokes that approach
Abstract Expressionism. Spontaneously painted in rhythmic brushstrokes, they
have an immediacy, honesty and simplicity - that is charming and deceptive.
They are utterly unpretentious – and that is good enough for me. “Gerstl intensified the
Impressionist visual experience by adding an emotional charge to the painting
of light. This developed, as his work proceeded, into a free, gestural handling
that was increasingly remote from the object to be depicted. Within a few years
he had made a dramatic thrust forward to the very brink of autonomous
painting.” (Patrick Werkner, Egon Schiele and His Contemporaries: Austrian
Painting and Drawing from 1900 to 1930 from the Leopold Collection, Vienna,
Munich: Prestel, 1989, P. 39.) However, compared with his
self-portraits, Gerstl’s other portraits of friends and small bravura
landscapes lack something. There is a disconcerting incompleteness to them. It
is as though Gerstl could not fully imagine the life of others or the world
around him.
Most
shocking of all is the incomplete, slap-dash look to most of Gerstl’s even
signed and thus supposedly finished canvases. The Schönberg Family of 1908 - is still a bizarre painting. I have
always liked it without reason. This painting pre-dated the most violent
extremes of COBRA art of the 1940-50s with its infantile scrawls and lurid
colours. I have always presumed that it was unfinished. However, it is in fact
- signed by Gerstl in his looping joined-up handwriting in the bottom
right-hand corner. Painted with meter long paint brushes that allowed Gerstl to
adopt a more gestural approach from a distance to the canvas, and in parts with
his hands so he could mould the paint, the colours were wild greens and yellows
- scraped and dabbed blues and smeared hot reds and pinks – it could have been
a bad drunken de Kooning of the 1960s. “Everything
is centred around colour, contours only exist where colours come together and
sometimes overlap each other. In a rapidly carried out piece of work, a stormy
temperament captures the group of four people in a powerful colour experience
of green, yellow, white, blue-black and violet tones. The representation of
objects is reduced to a minimum which enables an almost unrestrained display of
colour.” (Hans Plank, Klimt, Schiele,
Kokoschka: Three Expressionists and Their Successors, Germany: Zachary
Kwintner Books Ltd., 1991, P. 9.) The stress of these neurotic people is
palpable. Perhaps there was some truth in what Schönberg said, “When this person invaded my house, he was a
student of Lefler, for whom he supposedly painted too radically. But it was not
quite so radical, for at that time his ideal… was Libermann… When he saw some
quite miscarried attempts of mine, he took their miserable appearance to be
intentional.” Well if Schönberg’s influence is clear on Gerstl the same is
true in reverse.
Reading
Schönberg’s accounts of Gerstl tied my stomach in knots. The sheer hatred and
contempt is palpable as it is with most of those who later spoke of him. True
his comments are from a cuckolded man. True it was probably easier for him to
make Richard not his wife the scapegoat. However, had he never heard the
saying: “don’t speak ill of the dead.” This was Vienna in the 1900s for God’s
sake - everyone was at it In fact, Schönberg was to later have an affair with
Alban Berg’s wife perhaps in revenge for Mathilde’s betrayal.
In
1908, Gerstl finished with Lefler after his Professor collaboration on the
Festzug, a parade commemorating the Emperor Franz Josef’s fiftieth jubilee.
Lefler had also again declined to show his work in the annual student show. “As a painter, Gerstl was totally
incorruptible. He painted only what he considered right, never for money. I
have no idea if he ever earned anything from his art. His parents must have
supported him, otherwise he could never have been so uncompromising in his
works.” (Victor Hammer, Richard Gerstl – Oskar Kokoschka, New
York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 29.)
Gerstl
never exhibited in his lifetime. As I have mentioned before - it was not that
he did not get offers – he did. However, he turned them all down or frightened
off those who had thought to risk showing his work. Offered a place in 1908, in
a major exhibition of Austrian art at the prestigious Miethke Gallery - which included works by Vienna’s greatest artist
at the time Gustav Klimt - what did Gerstl do? He refused to have his work hung
in the same show as Klimt! Can you name me a twenty-five-year-old artist today
who would refuse to have their work shown in the same room as Anselm Kiefer,
Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst? Talk about cutting off your nose
to spite your face! Even if he hated everything Klimt stood for (which he did)
why not take the opportunity to make a case for his own art?
A
sign of Gerstl’s growing mental instability was the letter written in crazed
handwriting which he sent on 22ed July 1908 – to the ministry of culture and
education - in which he told of his unfair treatment at the hands of Professor
Lefler. Gerstl complained that Lefler had refused to show his canvases at the
annual student exhibition – thus preventing him the opportunity of winning the
academy prizes. I do not blame Gerstl – but I could have told him it was a
waste of time. The art world is a tea-party run by ruthless father figures and
cunning society-ladies – so don’t expect to be invited back if you throw over
the tea tray too many times. “Madness – or the affectation of madness – is the refuge of many
rebellious young men, but if the conceit is pushed too far, its perpetrator,
like Gerstl, risks self-annihilation. Feigned madness, as demonstrated by
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is sometimes no less dangerous than the real thing.” (Jane Kallir, Richard Gerstl –
Oskar Kokoschka, New York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 12.)
Later
that summer, on August 26th 1908, while in Gmunden - Arnold Schönberg
discovered Gerstl and Mathilde in an
uncompromising position. He begged his wife to stay with him - but she left
with Gerstl. The shame-faced couple left for Vienna. When he and Mathilda fled,
Gerstl left behind around 20-25 paintings with a farmer’s family who later
threw them out. “And who can blame them
for that? The aesthetic of what Richard Gerstl had accomplished was too new for
it to be recognisable as art.” (Diethard Leopold, Richard Gerstl, Munich:
Hirmer, 2017, P. 49.) Distraught, Schönberg contemplated suicide but did
not go through with it. Schonberg reported his wife missing to the police and
they found the couple in a pension in a suburb of Vienna. Mathilda agreed to
return to Arnold which she did on August 30th seeking his forgiveness.
Richard,
returned to live at his family home where he painted his famous Nude Self-Portrait. “When Richard Gerstl painted his full-length Nude Self-Portrait, in
September 1908… just thirteen days had elapsed since his lover had returned to
her husband. He was two days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. Less than eight
weeks later, he was dead.” (Raymond Coffer, Richard Gerstl, Neue Galerie,
Munich: Hirmer, 2017, P. 49.) Gerstl’s Nude
Self-Portrait of 12/9/1908 painted in his family living room, is as
shocking as his Self-Portrait Laughing
- in its high keyed colour, scribbled and scrapped paint, sweeping
brushstrokes, relatively thick paint and large size – it anticipated not only
Expressionism of the 1910s but also Neo-Expressionism of the late 1970s and
early 1980s. “Gerstl, in his self-portraits, records his own nakedness and then
imparts an emotional content to it in the process of painting – a process in
which the surrounding space plays a decisive part... Gerstl links person and
space through a painterly technique derived from Impressionism.”(Patrick
Werkner, Egon Schiele and His Contemporaries: Austrian Painting and Drawing
from 1900 to 1930 from the Leopold Collection, Vienna, Munich: Prestel, 1989,
P. 35.)
It
is an image of a man searching for honesty and past caring what others think. “Possibly the artist had
suffered all along from a manic-depressive syndrome, as suggested not only by
his erratic temper, but also by the peculiar dual persona evident in surviving
photographs. In certain of these photos, the artist presents himself as a young
dandy – immaculately groomed and with luxuriant dark, wavy hair. However, in
periods of distress – as, for example, when he was expelled from Griepenkerl’s
class – Gerstl tended to neglect his dress and, even stranger, to shave his
head in the manner customary for convicts.” (Jane Kallir, Richard Gerstl –
Oskar Kokoschka, New York: Galerie St. Etienne, 1992, P. 12.)
Again,
Gerstl struggled to place himself in a defined space and express his inner
turmoil at the same time. His pale, tall, rake-thin, white body stands out
against the pale blue, light green and dark blue of the wall behind him - along
his right-hand side a bright blue line pulsates in a spectral way. He avoids
the total pornography of his penis and scrotum - by only roughly suggesting
them. In fact, his penis almost seems to be crawling back into his pelvis. His
exposure is not aggressive or sexual in any way – it seems paled by shame and
self-stigmatization. However, Dr Raymond Coffer believed that it symbolised
Gerstl’s sense of sexual pride after continuing his affair with Mathilde. While
I found Coffer’s interpretation of Gerstl’s final Nude Self-Portrait as a
statement of sexual pride interesting - I also felt that with its lacerating
brushstrokes and Gerstl’s skeletal figure held a premonition of his suicide. I
was also doubtful about Coffer’s assertion that Gerstl’s suicide was
unpremeditated. I thought it would be highly unusual for him to kill himself
spontaneously - as most suicides come after some considerable mental
deterioration. But if he were like me, he might have documented this
self-immolation wish more explicitly in other self-portraits – which apart from
Fragment of a Full-Length Self-Portrait
Laughing - he didn’t. So maybe his suicide
- which came at a highly traumatic moment in his life - was spontaneous.
The
modernity of Gerstl’s Nude Self-Portrait
is best seen in contrast with Gerstl’s other more conventional self-portraits
of himself in his studio - and fully clothed in his old-fashioned suit and tie
- from earlier in the year. The former is universal and timeless. The later,
still embedded in the masks and conventions of a society on the edge of ruin -
but determined to put up a good front.
Gerstl
found a new studio in Vienna and according to Coffer, Mathilda visited Gerstl
in his studio where he began but did not finish his last canvas Seated Female Nude - which Coffer believes was of Mathilda. The
mirror behind Mathilda in Seated Female
Nude was the same mirror that Gerstl later killed himself in front of. The
couple also resumed their sexual relationship. At the beginning of November
1908, Gerstl may have proposed to Mathilda - forcing her to choose between him
and her husband and family and she refused. Anton Webern who had befriended
Gerstl, appealed to Mathilda’s maternal duty and persuaded her to return to
Arnold for the sake of her children. She would never see Richard again. Gerstl
was left feeling abandoned and bereft. He had lost his lover, betrayed the few
friends he had, burnt all his bridges at the academy – and he was still
virtually unknown in Vienna.
On the night of 4th November, the night
before a recital by Schönberg’s pupils - that Gerstl was of course not invited
to - Gerstl stood in front of the mirror he had used for his self-portraits -
hung himself and stabbed himself in the heart with a butcher’s knife. Otto Breicha even suggested that Gerstl
castrated himself. It seems very extreme and unlikely to me. I confess, that I was
to paint a number of self-portraits holding a knife to my penis as a youth -
but I never actually castrated myself. Also I wondered if Otto Breicha recollections were coloured by the rumours Rudolf
Schwarzkogler a later Austrian Actionist had killed himself through auto
castration - gossip subsequently
disproved.
To
avoid scandal, Gerstl’s family did not reveal the details of their son’s death
and his affair with Mathilda was kept secret by all parties for fifty years
after his death. A physician issued a certificate of insanity which granted
Gerstl a Christian burial. After his death, Mathilde wrote in a letter to
Gerstl’s brother Alois: “Richard has
certainly chosen the less painful road. Living in such conditions is awfully
difficult.” Later, Werner Hoffman
the acclaimed Viennese historian and assistant curator of the Albertina Museum
in Vienna wrote, “He died because he had
lost faith in the healing, rescuing power of the creative act”.
Although
the press release to Gerstl’s first exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Vienna in
1931 stated that Gerstl had destroyed “all
documents, letters and almost everything else in his studio,” some like
Otto Breicha disputed this. However, it is likely that before his death, he did
burn all his letters. How many
of his artworks Gerstl destroyed is still open to debate. But most agree that
he destroyed most of his drawings. Given that few of his academic works survive
also suggest that he destroyed them too and given his critical approach to his
work from the start - he may have destroyed works he did not like as he went
along. Today only about 70 paintings (mostly oils on cardboard or canvas) and 7
drawings in chalk, ink or watercolour by Gerstl survive and most date from
1905-1908 - the period of Gerstl’s friendship with Schönberg. If Gerstl did destroy any sizable number of
his paintings – it was a sad loss. It always angers me when I hear of
artists destroying their work. As an art lover, I feel cheated of answers. No
more so than in Gerstl’s case. What kinds of paintings might he have destroyed?
As with many other aspects of Gerstl one can only speculate. Were there even
more extreme self-portraits than the ones that escaped his hand? Were there any
erotic works? Did he destroy any other nudes of Mathilde? Perhaps there were
paintings of him and Mathilde? As for the letters he destroyed – they more than
anything would have explained a lot. They would have revealed the extent of
Mathilde’s involvement for one thing. Given his youth, Gerstl’s existing small
oeuvre still contains a number of mediocre and less convincing works. There was
a kitsch quality to Gerstl’s academic old-masterish portraits of 1902 and to
many of his pointillist portraits of 1906.
One
surviving painting, Nude in Garden –
with its rapidly scrawled almost abstract forms over a darkly primed canvas –
reminds me of early Francis Bacon. Was this female nude Mathilde? Other’s like
Dr Raymond Coffer have suggested it was in fact another self-portrait of Gerstl
painting nude in front of a nightmarish garden party. Nude in Garden, I still find perplexing, I have looked and looked
again at it and I cannot say conclusively that it is either a female nude or a
self-portrait, though its ambiguity and unfinished quality is intriguing.
I
think Vienna breathed a sigh of relief when Gerstl died - and promptly set
about forgetting him. His family tried also to forget the shame of their son who
went mad and had taken his own life. What works survived - his brother Alois
saved. They were stored in a warehouse until 1931 when he art dealer Otto
Nierenstein saw the remaining works that Alois held and instantly recognized
their importance. Nierenstein put his gallery stamp on the works and catalogued
them for his gallery. Exhibited for the first time at the Neue Galerie in
Vienna in 1931, Gerstl’s paintings achieved wide acclaim and his work
subsequently travelled to Salzburg and four other German cities. However, the rise of Hitler, the Anschluss,
and the Second World War, again sent Gerstl’s work into obscurity. Only for it
to be rediscovered and exhibited again in 1956 at the Venice Biennale bringing
his work to international recognition for the first time. His work has since
then has been regularly exhibited in Austria and in group-shows of Austrian
Modernism internationally.
As I have mentioned, Schönberg was to become widely
acknowledged as one of the most innovative atonal composers of the Twentieth
century (for all that matters). Personally, I still cannot sit and listen to
his pretentious clatter. He also made a
minor name for himself as an amateur Expressionist painter. Although the
composer had painted with Gerstl and some of his early works survive, his first
dated painting was created six weeks after Gerstl’s death and of the 65 oils
attributed to Schönberg, two thirds of them were created in the following two
years.
You
know I am convinced that art does not make people go mad – it keeps people on
the verge of madness a safe outlet. Art did not destroy Gerstl - his
uncompromising personality and mental frailty doomed him. But Gerstl’s drive to
paint with extreme expressivity certaintly did his mental health no favours. You
see the secret to judging an Expressionist artist is their life. Most never
sought to shock, they never sought madness, they never wanted to be martyrs –
yet their personalities unconsciously drove them to it. Regardless of the risks
– they could not live by other men’s rules and other men’s conventions – they
had to find their own sense of reality and they paid the price. I am sure
countless people tried to council Richard and guide him away from his
self-destructive path – but he could not conform.
As
Roberta Smith observed: “Gerstl had and
unlimited faith in both the varied expressive powers of oil paint and his own
abilities to summon them… Gerstl was after the immediacy of paint on canvas and
of life itself, both its inner and outer purpose.” (Roberta Smith, Spending Through Life, With Sparks, The
New York Times, 19th July, 2017.)
In many ways, the closest painter to Gerstl was Chaim Soutine who was ten
years younger than Gerstl and was also Jewish but only seriously began painting
ten years after Gerstl’s death. If the world shimmered, liquefied and writhed
in Gerstl’s paintings – it looked wrecked by an earthquake in Soutine’s later
paintings. However, Clement Greenberg questioned the expressive intensity of
Soutine who he observed, “… aimed for a
maximum of expressive intensity and he asked, perhaps, too much of painting.” (Clement Greenberg, Chaim Soutine, 1951, Clement
Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Chicago: The University of
Chicago, 1995, P. 72.) and as Hilton Kramer reiterated, “The life of Chaim Soutine is a harrowing fable of aspirations
impossible to realise, emotions impossible to appease, appetites impossible to
satisfy.” (Hilton Kramer, Soutine and
the Problem of Expressionism, The Age
of the Avant-Garde, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, P. 229.)
Similarly, one feels that Gerstl asked too much of art and of himself. Extreme
expressivity is almost unbearable not only for the average viewer - but for the
artist as well. The expressivity of Gerstl’s paintings of 1907-8 were 100%
authentic and seemingly torn from his central nervous system. But that extreme
expressivity endangered both Gerstl’s sanity and must have eventually
contributed to his suicide. That is why so many Expressionists after an initial
outburst of volcanic creativity - later retired from risking their lives with
every brushstroke - and became mere pastichers of their earlier style. It is
also why so many pseudo-Expressionists refused to risk their sanity and lives
for true expression - and opted for just the style and theatrics of
Expressionism.
Was
Gerstl destined to become a great artist? It is hard to tell given the
briefness of his career and scant surviving oeuvre. Perhaps he was too wild,
inconsistent and undisciplined to become a great master. However, given time he
might have become one. As his decimated oeuvre stands today – there are simply
too few examples to judge him. Although the art critic Wolfgang Born later
called Gerstl the “Austrian Van Gogh”,
I think this hyperbole was true in only the coarsest sense. Van Gogh’s oeuvre
was anything but immature, it was consistent and over-whelming in its broad
humanity, which extended to everything from a tangle of weeds to a man tilling
a field. Gerstl’s simply did not have the ambition, work ethic, hard won drawing
skills, painterly originality or scope of van Gogh. However, we can see in
Gerstl’s paintings of 1907-8 how he anticipated so many expressive painters
from Chaim Soutine, Willem de Kooning, Leon Kossoff to Frank Auerbach amongst
many others – all of whom were notable for their extreme manipulation of oil
paint. There is so much lousy, cheap and easy ‘bad’ or ‘expressive’ painting
today made by both men and women, but they should look upon Gerstl with
humility and question whether they are more real than him - and if they would
ever be willing to feel as deeply as he did - when it came at such a price!