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拍品专文
Anna Gabbioneta is one of the great series of portraits Christian Schad made in Vienna and Berlin in the mid-1920s - a series that has come to define the essence of the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency in German art. Painted in Vienna in 1927, the picture depicts Anna Gabbioneta, a young pianist and pupil of the Austrian pianist and composer Joseph Pembaur. Pembaur, who had been famously painted by Gustav Klimt in 1890, had himself sat for Schad in 1922 when the German artist had painted him in the nervy Expressionist style that he then practiced. By contrast, Anna Gabbioneta displays all the clarity and precision of the new, objective and matter-of-fact style of portraiture that Schad developed after moving to Vienna from Italy in 1925.
Confronting the viewer directly, face on, in front of a sharply observed and daylight townscape of houses and a church spire, Anna Gabbioneta is a work that in its simplicity and starkness of realism directly confronts the mechanized precision and objectivity of photography and the camera portrait. Here, however, the richness of the colour and the softness of the inner contemplation that Schad attains, heightens this image beyond that of a simple snapshot. In particular, the sharply delineated stillness and balance of the sitter's spherical earrings set starkly against the sky, establishing the extraordinarily intense mood of the picture, echoing the pupils of Anna's eyes as they mournfully gaze straight out of the picture at the viewer. The combination of these four spheres against the still and empty backdrop of the town lend this demonstrably clear and precise work a surprising aura of mystery.
'It is the eyes that come alive in a portrait while everything else still remains unformed. I have noticed that there are different types
of eyes: the ones with which you always remain on the surface - that do not let anything pass - then there are the ones which make you think that you can penetrate all the way to the bottom but which eventually make you hit an invisible wall somewhere in the background. The most beautiful eyes - not in the sense of their external beauty or colour or form of the eye - are the fully open eyes. But you do not come across them very often.' (Christian Schad, quoted in 'Antworten an einen Kunsthändler', in G. A. Richter, Christian Schad, Texte, Materialien, Dokumente, Rottach-Egern, 2004, p. 194).
Confronting the viewer directly, face on, in front of a sharply observed and daylight townscape of houses and a church spire, Anna Gabbioneta is a work that in its simplicity and starkness of realism directly confronts the mechanized precision and objectivity of photography and the camera portrait. Here, however, the richness of the colour and the softness of the inner contemplation that Schad attains, heightens this image beyond that of a simple snapshot. In particular, the sharply delineated stillness and balance of the sitter's spherical earrings set starkly against the sky, establishing the extraordinarily intense mood of the picture, echoing the pupils of Anna's eyes as they mournfully gaze straight out of the picture at the viewer. The combination of these four spheres against the still and empty backdrop of the town lend this demonstrably clear and precise work a surprising aura of mystery.
'It is the eyes that come alive in a portrait while everything else still remains unformed. I have noticed that there are different types
of eyes: the ones with which you always remain on the surface - that do not let anything pass - then there are the ones which make you think that you can penetrate all the way to the bottom but which eventually make you hit an invisible wall somewhere in the background. The most beautiful eyes - not in the sense of their external beauty or colour or form of the eye - are the fully open eyes. But you do not come across them very often.' (Christian Schad, quoted in 'Antworten an einen Kunsthändler', in G. A. Richter, Christian Schad, Texte, Materialien, Dokumente, Rottach-Egern, 2004, p. 194).