Leopold Museum dedicates comprehensive exhibition to first Austrian Expressionist Richard Gerstl

01.10.2019

Gerstl’s works enter into a dialogue with exhibits of Classical Modernism, international art after 1945 and Austrian contemporary art

Richard Gerstl created an autonomous expressive oeuvre, even before Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, which was full of stylistic innovations and radically contradicted the conventions of the time. 25 years after the last monographic presentation of the artist’s work in Austria, the exhibition’s curators Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Diethard Leopold explore artistic-cultural contexts and through juxtapositions for the first time showcase Gerstl’s keen interest in the international modern painting of his time. The exhibition further highlights how his enthusiasm for music, literature and psychology shaped his oeuvre, and how his works influenced subsequent generations of artists. The contemporary works on display were selected not only with a view to Gerstl’s gestural painting tending towards abstraction but also to the uncompromisingness of the artistic stance of this painter of Viennese Modernism who, though esteemed by connoisseurs, is still not widely known. The exhibition was conceived in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zug, which is home to the second largest Gerstl collection.

Veil of uncertainty over Gerstl’s life and oeuvre

Owing to a lack of facts, Gerstl’s life and oeuvre is interspersed with stories and legends. Time and again, the artist, who was born in Vienna in 1883 and had a complex personality, came into conflict with authorities, found it difficult to fit in with his fellow painters and fell out with teachers and exhibition organizers.

“The experienced rejection and feeling of being misunderstood in the visual arts led to Gerstl trying to find a home in another artistic discipline: the musical circle surrounding Arnold Schönberg. In Schönberg, especially, he encountered a kindred spirit – joint musical and painterly interests reinforced the consistent esthetic stance in both artists and expedited their will to experiment. Here was Schönberg, who was about to induce the farewell to tonality and to thus accept the loss of order associated with the loss of harmony; there was Gerstl, who initiated the re-evaluation of handed down values in the area of painting and who was the first artist in Austria to venture into Expressionism.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger

“The two artists’ individual and almost simultaneous step over the threshold of the conventional, which occurred in July 1908, may seem astonishing. But we must not forget that this plunge into the unfamiliar was preceded on both sides by years of contemplation and modification of their respective artistic media, and was thus long prepared and developed. The opinion that comes closest to the truth of the creative process is that both artists motivated each other towards freedom and that they found in each other what is so important, if not to say essential, to creative work: recognition and understanding.”
Diethard Leopold

At the height of his painterly prowess, Gerstl’s life came to an abrupt end. The reason was an unhappy love affair with Mathilde, the wife of Arnold Schönberg. When the lovers were caught, the Schönbergs initially separated, but Mathilde soon returned to her husband. The rejection by his lover, the exclusion from the Schönberg circle, as well as a lack of exhibition opportunities for his works drove the mentally unstable artist to suicide on 4th November 1908.

Re-discovery after more than two decades

Gerstl’s oeuvre met with little understanding during his lifetime, was put into storage after his death and wasn’t re-discovered until much later: More than two decades after Gerstl’s suicide, his brother Alois showed Gerstl’s works to the art historian and gallery owner Otto Nirenstein (Kallir), who committed to making it known to the public. Around 1960, the art historian Otto Breicha took up his in-depth research into Gerstl’s oeuvre. Breicha is considered one of the first Gerstl experts and worked as advisor to the Galerie Würthle in Vienna. Otto Kallir, who had emigrated to New York following the outbreak of World War II, sold 18 works by Gerstl to this gallery in the 1950s, as it would have been too risky to ship the works to the US. The gallery was owned by the Zug-based married couple Fritz and Editha Kamm, with Fritz Wotruba acting as artistic director. All of them played essential roles in imparting Gerstl’s oeuvre. The Kamm and Leopold families were in animated contact from the early 1970s to the 1990s. In the end, it was the collector Rudolf Leopold who compiled the world’s most eminent Gerstl collection, both in terms of quality and size, and made it accessible to the public through the foundation of the Leopold Museum. Supplemented by new permanent loans, the museum currently houses 19 works by the artist.

Short creative period full of ruptures and changes

Richard Gerstl’s oeuvre is full of contradictions: The descriptive-realist tendencies of his Pointillist phase were probably influenced by the 1903 Impressionism exhibition at the Secession. The following year, it was likely also at the Secession that he discovered the works of Munch and Hodler, as suggested by the Symbolist elements that entered into his painting. The 1906 presentation of van Gogh’s works at the Galerie Miethke may have inspired the impulsive-dynamizing painting of patches and strokes characterizing his works striving towards abstraction from 1907.

“His oeuvre spans around six years and is shaped by a quick succession of contrary developmental stages and stylistic changes characterized by anticipations and recourses. The appropriation of role models, which forced him time and again to review his use of color and forms, and his contradiction of stylistic influences appear to have determined his esthetic path. If we look at his oeuvre in the context of Vienna around 1900, in which the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk – embedded into hyper-estheticized and over-cultivated Jugendstil – was omnipresent, his progressive artistic stance as a pioneer of Expressionism becomes apparent. It is small wonder, then, that this impetuous and resistant man and painter, who was equipped with talent, intelligence and a seismographic intuition, could not succeed within the Viennese environment of the time.”
Hans-Peter Wipplinger

Juxtapositions at the Leopold Museum

Today, Gerstl has ceased to be an unknown in Vienna, but is rather considered part of the triumvirate of Austrian Expressionism alongside Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. The artist has gone down in art history as a central pillar of the avant-garde. He left behind preeminent paintings which stand up to international comparison and provide inspiration to contemporary artists including Martha Jungwirth, Georg Baselitz and Günter Brus. In the exhibition at the Leopold Museum, the approximately 50 paintings and drawings by Gerstl – his entire verified oeuvre comprises some 70 works – enter into a dialogue with works of Classical Modernism (among others by Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard and Lovis Corinth), of international art after 1945 (among others by Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Eugène Leroy) and of Austrian contemporary art (among others by Arnulf Rainer, Günter Brus, Herbert Brandl and Martha Jungwirth). These juxtapositions open up new perspectives and interpretations of Richard Gerstl’s art. The presentation comprises a total of 205 exhibits, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, sculptures, as well as a film. One exhibition room, featuring numerous archival documents, is dedicated to the reappraisal of the artist’s life and oeuvre.

Cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zug – integration of the Breicha Archive – outlook

The core content of the two presentations in Vienna and Zug is largely identical, but while the Leopold Museum accentuates the inspiration Gerstl drew from early Modernism, the Kunsthaus Zug emphasizes Gerstl’s reception by artists of Viennese Informal Art and Actionism. Thus, the two institutions – which house the most comprehensive collections of Gerstl’s works – are able to afford complementary insights. Both institutions have pledged to keep exploring and imparting Gerstl’s oeuvre in the future. The Leopold Museum has established its own archive for this purpose. This center is based on the extensive archival documents compiled by the Gerstl researcher Otto Breicha, which were placed at the Leopold Museum’s disposal thanks to the initiative of the Breicha family.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by Kamila Gora, Matthias Haldemann, Jane Kallir, Leonora Kugler, Diethard Leopold, Rainer Metzger, Dominik Papst and Hans-Peter Wipplinger. The spectrum of essays ranges from the essentials of an artist’s biography, a chronology of his works, provenance details and information on his painting process, to questions relating to his pictorial concept, to the cultural context and artistic reception, all the way to the closely connected collection histories of Rudolf Leopold and Fritz Kamm.

Exhibition opening ceremony

The opening ceremony, which was hosted by Director and exhibition curator Hans-Peter Wipplinger and curator Diethard Leopold in the presence of Managing Director Gabriele Langer, was attended by around 1,000 visitors, including Elisabeth Leopold, Josef Ostermayer, Jane Kallir, Agnes Husslein-Arco, Waltraud Leopold, Leonora Kugler (Kunsthaus Zug), Georg and Eveline Pölzl, Ewald Novotny, Peter Umundum, Sergio Barbanti, Philipp Breicha, Ernst and Brigitte Ploil, Richard Grubman and Sylvia Kovacek, Günther and Helga Fischer, Regina Ploner, Bernhard Heinz, Gerhard Rühm and Monika Lichtenfeld, Martha Jungwirth, Rudolf Goessl, Theo Altenberg, Therese Schulmeister, Walter Vopava, Markus Huemer, Alois Mosbacher, Eva Schlegel, Stella Rollig and Peter Hauenschild, Herwig Kempinger, Christian Bauer, Sandra Tretter and Peter Weinhäupl, Verena Traeger, Therese Muxeneder, Ebi Kohlbacher and Lui Wienerroither, Sylvia Steinek, Julius Hummel, Florian Kolhammer, Werner Gradisch, Michael Haas, Maxi Blaha, Sona MacDonald, Helene von Damm, Hans Raumauf, Ingrid Turkovic-Wendl, Gustav and Brigitte Huber, Uwe Schögl, Ursula Storch, Rainer Metzger and Daniela Gregori, Hubert Klocker, Patrick Werkner and Thomas Zaunschirm.

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