Portrait of Wally

Egon Schiele - Portrait of Wally - 1912 - Oil on panel - 32,7 × 39,8 cm (approx. 13 x 16.8 in) Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria (click photo for larger image)Valerie "Wally" Neuzil met  Egon Schiele (1890-1918) in Vienna, in 1911, when she was 17 and he was 21 years old. Wally was a model for a number of Schiele's most striking paintings. They were introduced by Gustav Klimt. Wally had been Klimt’s mistress before she got together with Schiele. Wally and Schiele were a couple from 1911 to 1915. The relationship ended when he decided to marry Edith Harms, for her money, in 1915.  Schiele’s most famous work, “A Portrait of Wally” had been owned by Lea Bondi Jaray, who was fleeing the German annexation of Austria and the Aryanization program. Bondi had given up the painting, under duress, to art dealer Friedrich Welz, in 1939. Welz had seen the painting in Bondi's apartment, where it was part of her private collection, and demanded that she turn it over to him. As they were to be fleeing the country any day, Lea’s husband persuaded her to turn the painting over to Welz. Welz also forced Dr. Heinrich Rieger to sell his collection of Schiele paintings, before Rieger was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died. After years of battling over the painting’s ownership, the Leopold Museum and the Bondi estate agreed upon a settlement of $19 million, in July 2012. Many of these cases still remain open today.

“Woman in Gold”

Gustave Klimt - Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I - 1907 - Oil and gold on canvas - 138 x 138 cm - (approx. 54.3 x 54.3 in) - Neue Galerie, New York (click photo for larger image)Gustave Klimt - Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II - 1912 - Oil on canvas - 190 cm × 120 cm (75 in × 47 in) Private collectionGustave Klimt (1862-1918) took three years to complete “Woman in Gold”, which features elaborate and complex ornamentation. Klimt was a member of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists that broke away from the traditional way of painting. The picture was painted in Vienna and commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. A wealthy industrialist who had made his fortune in the sugar industry, he sponsored the arts and favored and supported Gustav Klimt. Adele Bloch-Bauer became the only model who was painted twice by Klimt. He completed a second picture of her, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, in 1912. Adele's portraits had hung in the family home prior to their seizure by the Nazis during WWII. The Austrian museum where they resided after the war was reluctant to return them to their rightful owners, hence a protracted court battle in the United States and in Austria  ensued. Five Gustav Klimt paintings were finally returned to Maria Altmann, the niece of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, in January 2006. In November 2006, Christie's auction house sold "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II" at auction for almost $88 million, the fourth-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. ‘The Woman in Gold’ remains at the Neue Gallery in New York.

Artistic Drama

Matisse – The Green Stripe - 1905; Oil and tempera on canvas, - 40.5 x 32.5 cm (15 7/8 x 12 7/8 in) - Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (click photo for larger image)Amélie Parayre married Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in 1898. It was his aura of desperation and danger that had first attracted Amélie to him. She posed for, or presided over, every one of the great revolutionary canvases he produced in the first years of the 20th century. She left him after 31 years of marriage. More on that a bit later. In his green stripe portrait of his wife, he has used color alone to describe the image. Her oval face is bisected with a slash of green and her coiffure, purpled and top-knotted, juts against a frame of three jostling colors. Her right side repeats the vividness of the intrusive green; on her left, the mauve and orange echo the colors of her dress. This is Matisse's version of the dress, his creative essay in harmony.  Matisse painted this unusual portrait of his wife in 1905. The green stripe down the center of Amélie Matisse's face acts as an artificial shadow line and divides the face in the conventional portraiture style, with a light and a dark side, Matisse divides the face chromatically, with a cool and warm side. The natural light is translated directly into colors and the highly visible brush strokes add to the sense of artistic drama. 

Henri Matisse - Large Reclining Nude, 1935 - oil on canvas - 66 x 92 cm (approx. 26 x 36) The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, BMA (click photo for larger image)“Large Reclining Nude” was a work in progress for over six months, during which time Matisse discussed its composition with a favorite patron, Etta Cone; she acquired the work the following year. The model was Lydia Delectorskaya. Madame Matisse felt threatened by her husband’s close relationship with Lydia. Lydia Delectorskaya (click photo for larger image)A golden-haired beauty from Siberia, Lydia was orphaned at a young age, and managed on her own wits to flee Russia in its post-Revolution years. She ended up in Nice, France, with no money, job or connections. Lydia found employment in the Matisse household as both a studio assistant and domestic worker. She was hired by Amelie. Eventually, Amelie gave Matisse an “it’s her or me” ultimatum—and Matisse chose his wife. But Lydia tried to shoot herself in the chest when she was asked to leave—and the emotional toll on the Matisse marriage was just too deep. Matisse and Amelie divorced—and Lydia remained with Matisse for the rest of his life.

Picasso: Muses and Mistresses

Pablo Picasso, Fernande with a Black Mantilla (Fernande à la mantille noir), 1905–06. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 7/8 in - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Thannhauser Collection, Bequest of Hilde Thannhauser. (click photo for larger image)Pablo Picasso - Weeping Woman - 1937 Oil on canvas - 608 x 500 mm (approx. 24 x 20 in) - Tate Modern - London (click photo for larger image)Fernande Olivier was a French artist and model known primarily for having been the model and lover of painter Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). She is also known for her written accounts of her relationship with him. Picasso painted over 60 portraits of Fernande. Picasso’s portrait “Fernande with a Black Mantilla” is a transitional work. Still somewhat expressionistic and romantic, with its subdued tonality and lively brushstrokes, the picture depicts his mistress wearing a mantilla, which perhaps symbolizes the artist’s Spanish origins. The iconic stylization of her face and its abbreviated features, however, foretell Picasso’s increasing interest in the abstract qualities and solidity of Iberian sculpture, which would profoundly influence his subsequent works. Though naturalistically delineated, the painting presages his imminent experiments with abstraction. 

Dora Maar (1907-1997) was another of Picasso’s many mistresses. She was 29 when they met. He was 54. Dora was a French photographer, poet and painter, also best known for being a lover and muse of Picasso.  Picasso referred to Dora Maar as a “woman of tears” and used her as a metaphor for the “tears” brought on by the Spanish Civil War. Dora Maar (1907-1997), Picasso's “Weeping Woman”, had seen him through the creation of his masterpiece, “Guernica”, his vivid condemnation of war commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 Universal Exposition in Paris. The work was designed as a protest of the bombing of civilians in Spain. Dora photographed “Guernica” throughout its genesis until it was complete. “Weeping Woman” is a continuation of Guernica--although a more general depiction of suffering.

Wadisaw Œlewiñski: Spatial Flatness and Symbolic Innuendos

Wadisaw Œlewiñski - Rough Sea at Belle-Ile - 1904 - Oil on canvas, 58 x 82 cm - Muzeum Narodowe, Cracow (click photo for larger image)Polish painter Wadisaw Œlewiñski (1856-1918) was born into the gentry and administered his estate in Poland before traveling to Paris in 1888. Once there he studied at the Académie Colarossi where he met Paul Gauguin. The impression this encounter made on him—and Gauguin's encouragement—prompted Œlewiñski to dedicate himself to art. He submitted to Gauguin's artistic and personal influence, spending time with him in Paris and, from 1889, in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu in Brittany. For Wadisaw Œlewiñski, the decisive was set by the spatial flatness and symbolic innuendos of Gauguin and the Nabis. His art was also not without Impressionist roots.