Object #76

Arnold Schönberg
Thinking
1910
Oil on board
Catalogue raisonné 60

Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades

"Arnold Schönberg, the thinker, finally attempts to recreate for painting that state of psychic primitiveness, that prehistorical type of past life, without which its existence now could not seem to be truly legitimized, and he alone was able to patiently create these forms totally insignificant to the connoisseur, since he appears, protected by his music, already immunized against an advanced and understood art. [...] What is represented in Schönberg’s enigmatic paintings are neither feelings of the senses swarming hungrily in the darkened globe of the mind nor facts in physical light. They are more colorful recordings of moral man – in the sense of Kant – than one is accustomed to." 
(Albert Paris Gütersloh: Schönberg the Painter, in: Arnold Schönberg. Mit Beiträgen von Alban Berg et al. Munich 1912)