Detail

Albert Paris Gütersloh painted his wife Vera seated at a table, her head carefully poised on one hand, with the additional support of her other arm. This pose and her gaze suggest an attentive listener. The composition is reminiscent of the New Objectivity movement between the wars, when artists turned away from abstraction to a clear form of realism in order to address social and political issues. The colors in this painting are unusual, with its stark contrasts between yellow, a reddish brown, and pink that seem to be flickering on the sitter’s clothes, hands, and face, while the bright background provides a serene contrast. Gütersloh was also a writer, and his expressionist texts were as colorful as his painting. He used violent images and long series of evocative narrative fragments as a way of liberating language from the obligation of content. His novel “Sun and Moon” begins with the sentence: “The most beautiful order in the world is an arbitrary pile of things.” Critics saw this novel as fascinating or boring, inspiring or simply too difficult. Looking at this portrait of Vera, we can only speculate as to who she might be so carefully listening to. In 1927, when he painted Vera, Gütersloh was forty years old, in the middle of his artistic career, which had begun before the outbreak of World War I. He was a student of Maurice Denis in Paris, and in Vienna a member of the circle including Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Josef Hoffmann. He was in touch with the intellectual elite of his time: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heimito von Doderer, Robert Musil, and Hermann Bahr. After World War II he continued to play an important role in Austria, becoming the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts, a founder member of ART CLUB and for a while its president. At the Academy, his students included the painter Ernst Fuchs, and Gütersloh is seen as the spiritual father of the Vienna school of fantastic realism.