The Recovered Vision of Richard Gerstl

The Austrian early Expressionist painter Richard Gerstl is not well known today — or if he is, it’s often for the lurid details of his suicide at the age of twenty-five — but his life and his art provide a unique link between two of the composers on the Aspen Music Festival and School’s July 26 program Recovered Voices, conducted and hosted by James Conlon. Just as “Recovered Voices” seeks to highlight the music of composers who either died at the hands of or fled from the Nazi regime, the art world has recently begun to pay more attention to Gerstl, an artist whose short, tragic career in fin de siècle Vienna was perhaps a harbinger of the upheaval to come in the following decades.

 

 Born in 1883 to a wealthy Viennese family, Gerstl was a rebel from a young age which kept him out of the city’s conventional artistic circles. Expelled from art school, both scornful of and scorned by Vienna Succession artists like Gustav Klimt, and coming slightly ahead of more famous Austrian Expressionists like Oskar Kokoschka, Gerstl continued painting on his own without further formal training. In his “Self-Portrait, Laughing” he appears almost manic; in his “Semi-Nude Self-Portrait” he stares straight ahead, his thin body wrapped in a white garment that, in conjunction with a halo effect around his head against the plain blue background, gives the painter the air of a quasi-religious figure. The close-cut hairstyle in both portraits is much more common now than at the turn of the twentieth century, and at that time would have implied instability.

 

 

Gerstl also painted his friends and neighbors, who included the composers Alexander Zemlinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg hired Gerstl as a painting tutor for himself and his wife, Mathilde (née Zemlinsky; she was Alexander’s sister). Schoenberg perhaps hoped to supplement the family’s income beyond what musical composition could bring in. (A self-portrait by Schoenberg, and Gerstl’s portrait of Alexander Zemlinsky, are featured in the program notes for the Recovered Voices recital.) Gerstl became close to the Schoenbergs, painting Arnold, Mathilde and their two children in “The Schoenberg Family” in 1908. He became especially close to Mathilde, and painted several portraits of her.

 

In the summer of 1908, Gerstl and Mathilde began an affair of several months, leading to a brief elopement after their discovery by Schoenberg himself. (The composer’s revolutionary Second String Quartet, written around this time and dedicated to Mathilde, became notable as one of Schoenberg’s first atonal works.) By October, however, Mathilde had left Gerstl and returned to Schoenberg; they would remain married until her death in 1923. Gerstl committed suicide in November.

 

 

Having burned a number of papers and paintings in his studio before taking his life, and with his family eager to overlook the details of his short life and untimely death, Gerstl’s work languished in obscurity for decades. It was exhibited no more than once during his lifetime (some sources reference a week-long show at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1907, others say he was never displayed; he is also known to have refused to have his work shown alongside Klimt’s) and only rediscovered in 1931, when Gerstl’s brother brought a couple of his small works to a Vienna art dealer. Finally, in 2017, Gerstl received his first solo show in the United States at the Neue Galerie in New York City. Alongside the recovered voices of composers like Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, Richard Gerstl’s work is a recovered vision of a Vienna his contemporaries could not see.