Object #64

Arnold Schönberg
Portrait
1910
Oil on board
Catalogue raisonné 70

Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades

“And now someone comes, and this person is a musician, someone who already knows that the work of art expresses nothing but boundless distances, someone, possessor of a cultivated terminology, prepared to set it provisionally to a palette void of linguistically fixed technical functions, and someone who leads painting, grown flabby as the result of a dissolute life of the senses, before an ice-cold eye of logic first and then, when the disuse of the figurative has reached the frosty pole of its own reason, back to the limits of the prehistorical, to the place cut by invisible diagonals, from where it may be possible for it to obtain the obligatory connection to the legend after all. Without costume, and totally unromantic, forms suddenly arise which do not exist anymore, which, if they appeared in a painter’s head, would be disregarded as incomprehensible atavisms, their one, and only function is this: to have unlimited mistrust in man, who, when he acts and perceives, conceives himself as a machine, attacked, but overcome by the soul, illogically pretends to be manually active so to speak, and, at a catchword of the mightier, begins to doubt.”
(Albert Paris Gütersloh: Schönberg the Painter, in: Arnold Schönberg. Mit Beiträgen von Alban Berg et al. Munich 1912)