Object #20

Arnold Schönberg
Red Gaze
1910
Oil on cardboard
Catalogue raisonné 65

Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades

“I do not think that one needs to interpret Schönberg’s paintings as among the psychological hypotheses of the “Audition colorée,” that one hypothesis, conveyed most widely by the young Frenchmen (Rimbaud, René Ghil, Suarez de Mendoza), of a direct release of color imagery through sounds. Rather, he wanted for once to attempt to communicate, through painting as well, the way he sees people and states of mind in a fulgurant clarity, through quickly tossed-off impressions. Without a doubt, this way is very powerful and very original, but equally frightening. Schönberg once said of one of his quartet movements that there was a feeling in it like when a vein bursts in the  brain. In more than one of these paintings, one feels a dreadful tension, which perhaps is also intended to express such a physical condition. It is a frightful imagination that invents such things. Deep down to the foundation, into the elemental and enigmatic of existence, sudden, hastily veiled lights seem to fall. No longer paintings, but wild confessions of a tormented, afflicted human soul.
(Elsa Bienenfeld: Eine Bilderausstellung von Arnold Schönberg, in: Neues Wiener Journal, 9. Oktober 1910, page 13, page 14)