Self-Portrait, Laughing; Richard Gerstl; summer-autumn 1907Belvedere, ViennaTalk about overkill! On Nov. 4, 1908, Richard Gerstl stripped, stuck his head in a noose and stabbed himself in the chest while he hanged himself. He was 25 and bereft, having just been left by his lover — the wife of composer Arnold Schoenberg, who not long before had found them in bed together.
There the story might have ended had Gerstl not been such a brilliant artist. Decades after his death, when his paintings were hauled out of storage, where his scandalized family put them, he was hailed as the Austrian Van Gogh.
Some 40 of his thickly painted portraits and landscapes make up “Richard Gerstl” at the Neue Galerie, the first American museum to give this tormented Expressionist his due. The works, arranged more or less chronologically, include the Old Master-ly portrait he painted at 15 and the nude self-portrait, with his genitals painted an alarming brown, that he made shortly before his suicide, 10 years later.
Here and there are works by his contemporaries, including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. But they seem to show just how far ahead of them he was, at least as far as Expressionism’s concerned.
“Nobody ever smiles in his portraits,” notes curator Jill Lloyd. Even in “Self-Portrait, Laughing,” Gerstl — punk-haired, his eyes a mix of blue and brown — seems more manic than amused.
Yet his talent was so evident that Schoenberg, that famously atonal composer, had Gerstl give him art lessons. Little did he dream the young artist would sweep his pregnant wife off her feet.
Mathilde Schoenberg was six years older than Gerstl, and hardly a cougar. The portraits he made of her show a stolid woman in buttoned-up blouses — except, of course, when she posed nude. After Schoenberg discovered them, she left him and their children to run away with her lover. But the composer’s friends intervened and she returned to him. Not long after, Gerstl set up his noose.
“Believe me,” Mathilde wrote the artist’s brother, “of the two of us, Richard has chosen the easier way. To have to live, in such circumstances, is very hard.”
Nevertheless, she survived him by 15 years. And Gerstl’s art? Though he never sold a single painting in his lifetime, that survives them both.
“Richard Gerstl” runs through Sept. 25 at the Neue Galerie, Fifth Avenue at 86th Street; NeueGalerie.org
