Wild about Oskar

Beautiful portraits of women in wonderful costumes always seem to attract readers to our blog, and we expect the paintings in this post will be no exception. There are some eye-catching, even startling pictures coming up. But we bet the artist will be completely unfamiliar to you. We'd never heard of him until quite recently. 

Take this Woman in White.... not a Whistler, of course, but by Oskar Zwintscher. It's the precision of the execution that strikes you, so many textures and patterns competing for your attention, in the dress, the hair, the stockings, the chair, the tiles, the vase and flowers.... and that rather amazing floor covering (keep that in mind, we'll be returning to it later). And her dreamy gaze into the distance, avoiding eye contact with the viewer. An attention-grabbing image.

From white to black, and another striking portrait. The 20th century has just begun, and there's certainly something very modern indeed, quite challenging in the way the sculptor Clara Westhoff, wife of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, is looking at us. The wide-open eyes and that curl of hair against her cheek, the hands apparently impatiently crossed stand out amid the darkness of the dress, chair and wallpaper, painted in something of an Old Master style. 

Impressed? Intrigued? Our interest piqued by photos of pictures such as these, we headed to Wiesbaden on a recent trip to Germany to check out Escapism and Modernity: Oskar Zwintscher and the Art around 1900.

You may be asking why you haven't heard of Oskar Zwintscher before. German history, it seems, plays a part. He was born in Leipzig in 1870 and spent much of his life, until his death in 1916, studying and working in Dresden and Meissen, also in Saxony. After World War II, Saxony was in East Germany, and it's probably fair to say that the type of paintings Zwintscher made -- the beautiful portraits, dreamy landscapes, dabblings in Symbolism -- didn't really fit in with the Socialist Realism that was the standard art movement in the German Democratic Republic. Most of Zwintscher's paintings were in East Germany, and so he seems to have slipped into oblivion, until an exhibition at the Albertinum in Dresden last year, now on at Museum Wiesbaden on a smaller scale. 

We noted how Zwintscher's portrait of Clara Westhoff had the style of an Old Master work, and it's clear that Zwintscher saw himself as a descendant of a tradition of German Renaissance portrait painting going back to Dürer, Cranach and Holbein. Look at this double portrait of his parents, who might perhaps be prominent burghers from three or four centuries earlier.  

Another double portrait is even more surprising. Zwintscher's wife Adele features prominently in this show -- 14 paintings of her by her husband survive, in a remarkable variety of situations and poses -- and this one of her looking in a hand-held mirror really exploits her large piercing eyes. 

Another Portrait of the Artist's Wife presents Adele dramatically in black, with a veil and black gloves, opening a white-painted panelled wooden door. Again, the swirling pattern on her blouse catches the eye.  

It's quite hard to pigeonhole Zwintscher; there are elements of Art Nouveau, the Aesthetic movement, looking ahead to the New Objectivity that came after World War I. Here is the man as he saw himself in 1900, eyes as penetrating as Adele's. And another patterned backdrop.... Oskar doesn't seem to have been one for a drab background. 

Below, however, is a striking picture that looks as if it might have come from several decades later: Portrait of a Lady with a Cigarette. It's not just that the sitter is smoking so casually, she's also rather androgynous-looking, isn't she?

Zwintscher's landscapes are excitingly startling too. And you have to stand in front of Summer's Day to appreciate just how astounding the vertical format is; it's an exaggeratedly tall painting, much taller than you'd credit from the illustration below. 

We're on a high viewpoint over the River Elbe near Meissen known as the Boselspitze, and it's around midday. A boy lies in what shade is provided by the rock, while the red roofs of the houses in the village below are tightly crammed together. Trees reach high into the luminous bright blue sky with idiosyncratic cloud formations. 

Less vertiginous but no less stunning is this landscape of the same wine-growing area, giving the feeling that the White Cliffs of Dover have somehow been inserted into the Saxon landscape.

Now there were aspects of Oskar's work we didn't go wild over. His experiments in Symbolism left us cold, and there's a particularly troubling unfinished picture from World War I that may have been begun as a public commission, showing a mother suckling her infant while an enormous naked blond-haired warrior wielding two huge swords stands behind her....

We weren't that taken by a series of nudes on the beach either, but Adele also pops up in one, entitled Gold and Mother-of-Pearl, reclining like a Titian Venus, with an arresting mother-of-pearl jewel box shimmering beside her. And lying on a brown-patterned throw, just like the one we saw at the start. 

And to end this post, we could not resist one more portrait of Adele, here actually wearing a coat of the same pattern as the throw and the floor covering seen earlier.... it turns out to be made of hamster fur. 

Again the contrasts of textures as well as the tonal variations are amazing. Just look at that soft swirl of ostrich feathers that falls from the sharply contoured hat. The placing of Adele's hands draws the eye into the picture and up to her dramatic face with those haunting eyes, in slight shadow from the brim of the hat. The repetitive busy pattern of the background wallpaper quickly returns the focus to the figure and that plush spotted fur coat that seems so thick.

A lengthy German-language Wikipedia article that includes this picture tells us you'd have needed 80 to 100 hamster skins for a coat. But luckily, as far as we know, no hamsters came to harm in the creation of this eye-opening exhibition. If you're in or around Frankfurt over the next couple of months, it's well worth a visit. 

Practicalities

Escapism and Modernity: Oskar Zwintscher and the Art around 1900 is on at Museum Wiesbaden until July 23. The museum is shut on Mondays (except public holidays) but otherwise opens at 1100. It closes at 1700 Wednesdays and Fridays, 1800 Saturdays, Sundays and public-holiday Mondays and 1900 Tuesdays and Thursdays. Full-price tickets are 12 euros and can be reserved online here (note this page is almost entirely in German!). We spent about an hour in the exhibition. 

The museum is on Friedrich-Ebert-Allee, about 10 minutes walk from Wiesbaden Hauptbahnhof, the city's main rail station. Local trains run from Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof every 10 minutes or so, taking around 45 minutes, while services from Frankfurt Airport run every 15 minutes, taking around 40 minutes.  

And not far away in Frankfurt....

The Städel Museum is one of Germany's finest art galleries, with a huge and varied collection. They've got van Eyck, Botticelli, Cranach, Vermeer, Impressionists, Expressionists and more. And one of the iconic pictures in German art, depicting the greatest icon in German culture: Johann Wilhelm Tischbein's portrait of Goethe in the Roman Campagna. 

Images

Oskar Zwintscher (1870-1916), Girl with White Asters, 1903, Städtische Galerie Dresden 

Oskar Zwintscher, Portrait of Clara Rilke-Westhoff, 1902, Sammlung Böhm, Berlin
Oskar Zwintscher, Portrait of My Parents, 1901, Städtische Galerie Dresden
Oskar Zwintscher, Portrait of the Artist's Wife, 1901. © Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich
Oskar Zwintscher, Self-Portrait, 1900. © Kunsthalle Bremen -- Der Kunstverein in Bremen. Photo: Marcus Meyer
Oskar Zwintscher, Portrait of a Lady with a Cigarette, 1904. © Albertinum, Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Elke Estel/Hans-Peter Klut
Oskar Zwintscher, Summer's Day, 1896. © Städtische Galerie Dresden -- Kunstsammlung, Museen der Stadt Dresden. Photo; Franz Zadniček
Oskar Zwintscher, Rambling, 1903, Albertinum, Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Oskar Zwintscher, Adele Zwintscher in a Hamster Fur Coat, 1914. © The Jack Daulton Collection. Photo: Don Tuttle