ERICH SCHMID (Vienna 1908 - 1984 Paris), Colors and Pallet, 1983

ERICH SCHMID*
(Vienna 1908 - 1984 Paris)
Colors and Pallet, 1983
oil/wood, 46 x 55 cm
signed E. Schmid and dated 83
depicted in Erich Schmid, Vienna 2002, p. 103
Provenance: Fine Arts Widder Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 2.500 - 5.000
START € 2.000

Austrian painter and graphic artist of the 20th century. representatives of exile art. Came from a Jewish family. Studied psychology and psychoanalysis with Wilhelm Reich. Studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna and the Reimann Kunstschule in Berlin. Close contact with Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin and Hans Böhler in the 1930s, exhibited in the Vienna Secession. Lifelong friendship with the writer Jean Améry. Fled to Belgium in 1938 and to Paris in 1940, imprisoned with Améry in a French internment camp. His parents and brother were murdered in Auschwitz. Fled the camp and joined the Résistance, the Foreign Legion in Italy in 1945. Back in Paris from 1946, friends with the painter Eva Friedmann. From 1954 support from the Mendel family. In 1958 he met his future partner Gail Singer, who was a member of the artist group CoBrA. Exhibited with the painters of the Lyon circle. Developed his own style with influences from interwar Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism. Belongs to Abstract Expressionism, color dots and strokes comparable to Jackson Pollock's Action Paintings. Created primarily still lifes and cityscapes bordering on the non-representational.

Erich Schmid's pictures are direct testimonies and the legacy of a particularly consistent and at the same time tragic artist's existence. After fleeing the Nazis, Erich Schmid manages to gain a foothold in Paris, but the living conditions are extremely adverse. In his works, the artist captures the mood of those years. They do not serve as an escape from reality or a moral exaggeration of the post-war period of deprivation, but are the unadulterated testimonies of his life and at the same time expressions of his own psyche. He first studied psychology in Vienna before going to the Vienna School of Applied Arts from 1930 to 1934. In his pictures he always seeks the harmony of inner and outer reality. By combining a post-impressionist pictorial language with expressionist pictorial statements, he went against the taste of the times. The abstract painting that dominated the post-war art scene in Paris did not suit him. Erich Schmid remains true to his own style and his own artistic goals even under difficult conditions. Solitary and intellectual, both as a person and as an artist, he would rather refrain from critical acclaim than conform. Jean Amery, Erich Schmid's childhood friend, with whom he shares the fate of being persecuted by the Nazis, the experience of flight and internment in France, writes about his pictures: "I can't imagine my life without these pictures any more than (...) without the feelings that I experience." (...) "I would indeed be unhappy if I were forced to live my life without Erich Schmid's paintings.

In his still lifes, Erich Schmid uses simple motifs to capture the objects that can be found in his studio. It is not random objects that the artist chooses based on purely aesthetic criteria, but rather his own few belongings. Erich Schmid combines these private set pieces in an image of impressive simplicity that emphasizes the beauty inherent in everyday objects.

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