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©
Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, VEGAP, Madrid
Oskar Kokoschka

Portrait of Max Schmidt

1914
Oil on canvas.
90 x 57.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
629
(
1982.29
)
Room 34
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room

Oskar Kokoschka began painting portraits in his youth as a self-taught artist. His portrait gallery is a matchless pictorial depiction of the Viennese intellectual set and haute bourgeoisie and one of the most original contributions to the history of modern portraiture. From the outset the young artist brought to this genre his own personal formula for representing human psychology, according to which physical likeness was subordinate to capturing the sitter’s feelings. As he himself confessed in his diary, “I tried to intuit from the face, from its play of expressions, and from gestures, the truth about a particular person, and to recreate in my own pictorial language the distillation of a living that would survive in my memory.”

The portrait of Max Schmidt — belonging to the Museum’s permanent collection — was the central fragment of the Triple Portrait of the Schmidt Brothers, which was cut into three parts in the 1950s. The portrait of Carl Leo belongs to the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and that of Hugo is reputedly lost. The Schmidt brothers owned the interior decoration firm Friedrich Otto Schmidt, which was founded in Vienna in 1854 and still exists. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this company, which crafted its furniture by hand to a high degree of technical perfection, boasted a few members of the imperial family and prominent figures from the Viennese aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie among its clientele. The Viennese architect Adolf Loos, Kokoschka’s chief mentor during his artistic beginnings, sometimes collaborated with the firm as an advisor and designer and, as Peter Vergo points out, it was he who secured the commission for the portrait in 1911.

The original painting was executed in two different phases and each of the three sitters was painted separately. The sketchy portraits of Carl Leo (right) and Hugo (left), dated 1911, were done on the same day — in the morning and the afternoon according to the inscriptions beneath the sitters: “Vormittag” (morning) and “Nachmittag” (afternoon) — but for some unknown reason were left unfinished. The portrait of Max, the only one that is finished, was painted three years later, on 20 March 1914, as stated in the inscription beneath the subject.

Kokoschka had already painted a few double portraits, prominent among which is that of Hans and Erika Tietze, but he had never before attempted one of three sitters. In the portrait of the Tietzes, he had solved the problem of communication between the couple by means of a dialogue of hands, but this device was much more complicated to employ with three subjects. As can be seen in the photograph of the painting in its original state, Kokoschka wished to emphasise the central figure by making him stand out forcefully between his two brothers, who gaze at him in a somewhat withdrawn posture. Unfortunately, owing to the mutilation of the painting, the dialogue of gestures that the artist introduced between the three figures and the variation in the stylistic languages used for each in order to differentiate their distinct personalities have been lost forever.

The portrait of Max clearly evidences an evolution in Kokoschka’s style owing to the influence of past masters. During his trip to Venice with Alma Mahler in 1913, the artist was impressed by Venetian painting, particularly that of Titian and Tintoretto. Their mark can be found in Kokoschka’s use of a freer technique and in the more theatrical illumination of the portraits he painted immediately afterwards. A certain resemblance to El Greco, who was then being rescued from oblivion by the German historian Julius Meier-Graefe, is also evident in the works produced around this time.

Max Schmidt (1861–1935), the firm’s owner, had notable business acumen and managed to convert Friedrich Otto Schmidt into one of the most important design firms in Vienna. He was an openminded man and also a significant collector and patron of the arts, which led him to keep the triple portrait in his collection until his death. In 1962, the year it was exhibited in the retrospective of the artist at the Tate Gallery, the portrait was in Hamburg, in the collection of Professor Edgar Horstmann, and remained in his possession in 1966, when it was shown in the Zurich and Karlsruhe exhibitions. In 1979 it was sold in Hamburg by Hauswedell & Nolte to the Galerie Beyeler of Basel, which in turn sold it to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1982. It belongs to the permanent collection of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza since 1993.

Paloma Alarcó

20th Century20th Century - European painting. ExpressionismPaintingOilcanvas
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Portrait of Max Schmidt. Retrato de Max Schmidt, 1914
Portrait of Max Schmidt
Oskar Kokoschka

©

Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, VEGAP, Madrid

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Portrait of Max Schmidt. Retrato de Max Schmidt, 1914
Portrait of Max Schmidt
Oskar Kokoschka

©

Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, VEGAP, Madrid

Terms of Use

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To request images or permits for commercial use in academic or research publications, that is, catalogues of other institutions, monographs and other specialized publications, you should contact the Museum's Photo Library by email at the e-mail @email.

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However, photographed works are protected by copyright. Therefore, regardless of the terms of use of the photographs set out below by the Foundation, it will be necessary to obtain a license from  VEGAP (Visual Entidad de Gestión de Artistas Plásticos www.vegap.es) or from the corresponding collective management organizations in the country where the work is going to be used or, where appropriate, from the holder of their rights in order to reproduce or exploit the work.

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