Object #46

Arnold Schönberg
Tears
1910
Oil on canvas
Catalogue raisonné 77

Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades

“Nonetheless, many believe in Schönberg the musician. They can follow the paths he took, which are open to all to take; more about this must be discussed in this book. But at best, they shake their heads over Schönberg the painter. Here is a weeping countenance with a clear brow and veiled face. No child, no woman and no man weeps in this way; a living body does not encounter such sorrow. For it stands in the world and in its greatest affliction is diverted by a thousand things. But inside the artist, the sorrow must become vivid, as reality cannot present it so perfectly. Inner weeping is the clearest and most intensively heightened form of external weeping. In the yearning for deliverance, it is formed into an image. Colors willfully occupy places they leave no more, also not upon the objections of reason, which doubts correctness, possibility and reality. Everything happens through inconceivably strong instincts against whose force the creator is defenseless. He has only the feeling: something is happening with me. My hand is being led.”
(Karl Linke: Zur Einführung, in: Arnold Schönberg. Mit Beiträgen von Alban Berg et al. Munich 1912)