Richard Gerstl

Origins and early life

Richard Gerstl was born in Vienna on 14 September 1883, the son of Emil Gerstl, a Jewish merchant and stock speculator from Hungary, and of Maria Pfeiffer, who was not Jewish; the Jewish descent is documented at the level of his father, and this fiche states plainly that nothing in the sources shows the family practising Judaism, and that Gerstl himself left no statement of belief.

Work and career

He entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at fifteen, quarrelled with its teaching, refused to exhibit with the Secession, and worked almost entirely alone in a studio in the Liechtensteinstrasse. What he painted there had no equivalent in Europe at that date: portraits in which the sitter dissolves into slabs and scratches of paint, whole figures rendered in strokes that seem laid on with the fingers, and a series of self-portraits, one of them naked against a blue ground, that anticipate by several years the expressionism of Kokoschka and Schiele.

He was, in the judgment of later historians, the first Austrian expressionist and had almost no audience in his lifetime. He became close to Arnold Schoenberg, taught him to paint, spent two summers with the composer's circle at Gmunden, and in 1908 began an affair with Schoenberg's wife Mathilde. She left with Gerstl and then, persuaded by Anton Webern and by the thought of her children, returned to her husband. The circle closed against him.

On the night of 4 November 1908, alone in his studio, Gerstl burned many of his papers and drawings, stabbed himself and hanged himself before the mirror he used for the self-portraits; he was twenty-five. His remaining work, some seventy paintings, was stored by his brother and forgotten, and was rediscovered by the dealer Otto Kallir in 1931. It hangs today in the Leopold Museum and the Belvedere.