Richard Gerstl’s Genius

| 18 Jul 2017 | 03:32

Richard Gerstl, "Semi-Nude Self-Portrait," (1902-04). Oil on canvas. Leopold Museum, Vienna

Richard Gerstl, "Self-Portrait Laughing" (1907). Oil on canvas. Belvedere, Vienna

Richard Gerstl, "Mathilde Schönberg" (summer 1907). Tempera on canvas. Belvedere, Vienna

Richard Gerstl, "Portrait of the Reserve Lieutenant Alois Gerstl," (autumn 1906). Oil on canvas. Leopold Museum, Vienna

BY VAL CASTRONOVO

Austrian Expressionist Richard Gerstl’s life was tragically cut short in the fall of 1908, when he committed suicide in the aftermath of a love affair gone sour with composer Arnold Schönberg’s wife, Mathilde. He was only 25. Before stabbing and hanging himself, Gerstl (1883-1908) destroyed many of his art works, the majority created in a brilliant, but brief, burst of creativity from 1902 to 1908.

In an effort to keep the scandal under wraps, his family put the roughly 70 surviving paintings and drawings in storage. They were only made public 23 years later, in 1931, after Gerstl’s brother Alois showed them to gallerist Otto Kallir, who agreed to display a selection at his Neue Galerie in Vienna.

Gerstl’s art had never been exhibited or sold during his lifetime. He famously refused an opportunity to participate in a show alongside well-known compatriot Gustav Klimt, whom he dismissed as a trendy “society operator,” Neue Galerie communications director Rebecca Lewis said on a private tour.

The reaction to the first exhibit of Gerstl’s works at Kallir’s gallery in Vienna was overwhelmingly positive. Gerstl was pronounced “an Austrian Van Gogh,” but his reputation nonetheless grew slowly compared to that of Viennese modernists like Klimt (1862-1918), Egon Schiele (1890-1918) and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980).

He remains little known today outside Austria, but the organizers of the current show at the Neue Galerie in New York are looking to change that with the first museum retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre in the U.S. More than 55 works — some 45 by Gerstl with a smattering by his contemporaries, including Arnold Schönberg — line the galleries on the third floor.

“He was extremely original in his style. He actually didn’t embrace a style at all,” Lewis said. “He’d move from a more Pointillist style to Symbolism to a more Expressionist style, and there’s no real clear development over time. He really rejected any ideas about style or beauty that raged during this period,” she said in an obvious allusion to Klimt’s fabulously decorative portraits of society ladies.

Gerstl looked instead to Ferdinand Hodler, Edvard Munch, Édouard Vuillard and, of course, Van Gogh for inspiration. He met Schönberg in 1906 and became part of his inner circle, summering with his family and friends in Gmunden, south of Salzburg, in 1907 and 1908 and painting the landscape and their portraits.

Schönberg was looking to supplement his income as a composer and had approached Gerstl to give him and Mathilde art lessons. Gerstl, for his part, preferred the society of musicians to fine artists. Soon he was accompanying Mathilde to concerts, and the two became intimate over time. In August 1908, Schönberg discovered the affair when he walked in on the couple in flagrante at Gerstl’s summer farmhouse.

The lovers fled to a suburb outside Vienna, but Mathilde quickly regretted the liaison and returned to her husband and two children, leaving Gerstl in the dust (she resumed the affair, briefly, and Gerstl allegedly painted her nude). When Schönberg shunned Gerstl and did not invite him to a major concert featuring his students on November 4, 1908, the rejection stung. He was found dead in his studio that same day.

The painter’s personal history informs the work, especially the later portraits. Gerstl had two favorite subjects: himself and Mathilde, in that order. The self-portraits on view are notable for their psychological intensity and variety. We see Gerstl suited up, naked, grinning and somber — as a painter, a dandy and a very unstable young man.

The opening gallery is a showcase for his first homage to himself, “Semi-Nude Self-Portrait” (1902-04), an expressive Christ-like depiction of the artist with a sheet tied around his waist that looks like a loincloth. A radiant blue halo surrounds his head and suggests saintliness.

But the work, which highlights his slender torso and long skinny arms, was painted after the army rejected his bid to serve as a volunteer because of “physical weakness,” Gerstl scholar Raymond Coffer writes in the catalog. Coffer argues that the canvas is “a youthful, self-confident riposte to his army medical examiners … a secular image of his personal redemption” from disappointment.

Glance down the hall and compare that modest selfie with Gerstl’s final one, “Nude Self-Portrait” (1908). Created less than two months before he took his own life and in the midst of his breakup with Mathilde, this radical full-frontal nude is one of the artist’s most gestural works — and his most explicit. Per Coffer, his head and his manhood are painted in darker tones than the rest of his anatomy to accentuate their power. The figure appears emaciated and defiant.

Gerstl’s wild gestural brushwork anticipated the Abstract Expressionist painters of the mid-20th century. A blurry group portrait of the Schönberg family on summer holiday in 1908 is a forerunner of Willem de Kooning’s abstractions. “Mathilde Schönberg in the Garden” (1908), meanwhile, has a free and easy “air of spontaneity,” Coffer writes. Mathilde’s facial features lack clear definition, but Gerstl in his genius “somehow retains recognition of the subject.”