Herbert Boeckl

Dr Otto Brill, London
Hans Brill, London
Private Collection, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Gerbert Frodl, Boeckl, 1976, Salzburg, no. 161, listed p. 187
Herbert Boeckl. Retrospektive, (exhibition catalogue), Belvedere, Vienna, 2009-2010, no. 156,  illustrated p. 356

The canvas is not lined and UV examination reveals some minor retouching along the lower left edge frame rebate and a further minor spot to the upper left corner. There is some stable shrinkage to some of the heavier impasto areas. A small area of craquelure lower right corner which is associated to a minor crease in canvas approximately 8cm in length. The work is in overall good condition and would benefit from a light clean.
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In Boeckl’s vivid Stillleben mit Muschel und Buch, colour exists not to complement structural organisation, but to command it, and it does so brilliantly. Boeckl’s thrusting use of scarlet and royal purple against a faded turquoise wall force the subject matter out towards the picture plane, the foreshortened book at odds with the flatness of the table that seems to sit impossibly behind it, almost flush with the wall. The background itself, barely connected to the foreground, becomes secondary to the overall composition. In his typically bold manner, Boeckl relies far more on his vibrant palette than traditional pictorial space to describe his scene.

By the time Boeckl completed this painting in 1929, he was already well established as one of Austria’s most preeminent artists. As a result of his contact with Egon Schiele, Boeckl had signed a lucrative contract with the art dealer Gustav Nebehay in 1918, and was consequently able to travel widely in the following decade. After studying in Berlin in 1921-22, Boeckl went to Paris in 1923 and by 1929, he had also spent time in amidst the dramatic scenery of both Sicily and Carinthia in southern Austria. His rough landscape paintings from this time, with their impulsive, sporadic brushstrokes, speak of Boeckl’s discovery of the work of Paul Cézanne in the avant-garde galleries of Berlin and Paris. Indeed, the vivacity of this still life also sings of the Expressionist’s fascination with Cézanne. Indeed, the parallels between Boeckl’s style and Cézanne’s are clear. Cézanne, similarly preoccupied with the power of the artist’s palette over composition, had given license to twentieth-century painters to exploit this new, liberated colour, and to use it to demonstrative effect. Here, Boeckl uses tools Cézanne had provided; but the result is an Expressionist creation that is uniquely Boeckl’s.