Anna Gabbioneta

In the summer of 1925, Christian Schad moved with his family to Vienna, renting an impressive studio apartment in the heart of the city center. The artist and his wife, Marcella, were quickly absorbed into the Austrian capital’s cosmopolitan circles—in a letter to a friend shortly after their arrival, Marcella reported that the couple were inundated by visitors and invitations to tea parties, dinners and balls, thanks to the success of Schad’s recent paintings at an exhibition at the Galerie am Graben. Immersed in this exciting milieu, the artist began a series of portraits of various characters from Viennese society, including the present work, which focuses on Anna Gabbioneta, a young Italian pianist and pupil of the Austrian composer Joseph Pembaur, who was then living in the city. The artist most likely met his subject through Pembaur, who had been painted by Gustav Klimt in 1890 and subsequently sat for Schad in 1922. Painted in 1927, Anna Gabbioneta displays all the clarity and precision of the objective style of portraiture that Schad perfected during this period of his career, his elegant subject sharply observed and bathed in a soft, even light, as she sits in front of a quiet townscape.
Schad had spent much of the period between 1922 and 1925 in Italy, where he came under the influence of the great painters of the Renaissance. “Italy opened my eyes to what I wanted to do and to what I could do…” Schad remarked. “Ancient art is often more contemporary than the art of our times... In Italy, I found the way to myself” (“Mein Lebensweg,” 1927; quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2003, p. 20). Through careful study of the art of Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Schad’s brushwork and forms reached a new level of precision. His outlines became sharper and more delineated, and he developed a unique technique based on the subtle glazing of the Old Masters, in which a gradual build-up of near transparent layers of paint brought a vibrant luminosity to his canvases. In this way, Schad established a cool, incisive, and seemingly brushless style of portraiture that came to full fruition during his years in Vienna, and which is now widely regarded as the epitome of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement.
According to the artist, he rarely worked from life, preferring to rely on his memories and personal impressions of an individual instead, in order to imbue his portraits with a sense of their internal character. In Anna Gabbioneta, Schad conveys a sense of the young woman’s intensity and focus, her gaze almost hypnotic as she stares directly out from the canvas at the viewer. Placed against a backdrop of simple, domestic buildings crowded together, Gabbioneta appears to hold herself perfectly still, her poise and fashionable attire at odds with her surroundings. Schad had begun adding urban views to the backgrounds of his portraits in the mid-1920s, often drawing on his recollections of visits to Paris for inspiration, aided by an extensive collection of photographs and hand-colored postcards of the city which he kept in his studio. As Jill Lloyd has observed, “whereas the ‘real’ people in Schad’s paintings were based on his memory and occasional preparatory drawings, the ‘imaginary’ backgrounds were taken from photographs. This gives another twist to the play between reality and illusion in Schad’s work” (“Christian Schad: Reality and Illusion” in ibid., p. 22). In Anna Gabbioneta, Schad’s imagined cityscape includes a vertiginous church spire that stretches above the other rooftops, an addition which may have been a subtle nod to the intriguing mix of ambition and piety that the artist discovered in the young woman. The painting remained in the artist’s personal collection until the mid-1960s, at which point it was acquired by the sitter’s family.