ALBERT REUSS (Vienna 1889 - 1975 Mousehole, Cornwall), The blue Shoes, 1948

ALBERT REUSS*
(Vienna 1889 - 1975 Mousehole, Cornwall)
The blue Shoes, 1948
oil/canvas, 63 x 47,5 cm
verso titled and dated "the blue shoes" 1948
Provenance: Fine Arts Widder, European private collection

ESTIMATE °€ 4.000 - 8.000
START € 4.000

Austrian painter and sculptor of the 20th century. Representative of exile art, belongs to the so-called lost or forgotten generation. Came from a Jewish family and initially worked as an actor. As a painter self-taught, exhibited from the 1920s in the Vienna Secession, the Hagenbund and the Würthle Gallery. From 1932 member of the Hagenbund. From the mid-1930s also sculptor, 1935 stay at Bedfordshire estate in England. 1938 emigration via London to Mousehole in Cornwall. His wife ran the gallery ARRA Gallery with artists such as Jack Pender or Alexander Mackenzie of the artist colony St. Ives. Lifelong friendship with gallery owner Jacques O'Hana. Early influences of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, then influences of expressive Carinthian painting. After emigration, development of style in the direction of New Objectivity and Surrealism. Landscapes with figures and individual objects in increasingly cool and restrained colors and monochrome surfaces. Colorfulness, mysteriousness and the static, frontal posture of the female torso comparable to works by Paul Delvaux. Composition and mood, calm, melancholy and contemplation comparable similar in the works of Josef Floch.

Albert Reuss, son of a Jewish butcher (named Reiss) in Budapest, went to Vienna against his father's wishes at the age of 18 to become an artist. He studied the works of the great masters in the Viennese museums, but remained self-taught. His style in those years was expressive, with an impasto application of paint and a lively color palette. In 1930 a patron made it possible for him to spend a year on the French Riviera. The landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings created there were exhibited in 1931 in the Würthle Gallery in Vienna, where Reuss had already shown a collective exhibition in 1926, at that time under the patronage of the Society for the Promotion of Modern Art. In 1932 the artist became a member of the Hagenbund, but emigrated to England in 1938 because of increasing pressure from the Nazi regime. There he exhibited in provincial galleries with little success and, due to the indifference of the gallery owners and the public, retreated to the countryside in Cornwall, where he continued to work intensively on his paintings. His pictures became increasingly heavy in content and revealed his mental state at this time. He himself called the fruits of his labor "images of loneliness". In 1975 these works were shown at the BAWAG Foundation in Vienna.

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