Lovis Corinth

Alice Schurz, Wiesbaden
Art Collection of the City of Königsberg
Sale: Koller Auktionen, Zurich, June 26, 2006, lot 3169
Acquired at the above sale

Paris, Salon, 1891

Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Die Gemälde von Lovis Corinth, Werkkatalog, Munich, 1958, no. 74 
Christoph Vitali, Barbara Butts and Peter Klaus Schuster, Lovis Corinth, exh. cat. Haus de Kunst, Munich, 1996, pp. 30, 106 (second version illustrated pl. 9, p. 106)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is unlined, and has been stretched over a piece of Masonite which has been attached to the original stretcher. The work is unevenly cleaned. Horizontal, unstable cracking has developed on the back of the figure, and broadly applied and amateurish retouches have been applied through this area as well as the background in the upper center. There are some broad retouches in the lower center, and broad and badly applied retouches in the towel held by the left hand. Under ultraviolet light, only the paint layer around the right hand reads very strongly. Although the condition of the picture may be quite good, the restoration is poorly handled and a modern lining would stabilize the surface and eliminate any instability and cracking.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In the Book of Daniel, Susanna, a married woman, is spied upon by two lustful elders while bathing. As she returns to her home, they accost her, threatening to claim that she was meeting a young man in the garden unless she succumbs to their advances. She refuses to be blackmailed and is consequently arrested and tried for promiscuity, until Daniel interrupts the proceedings in her defense and reveals the truth about the elders. Since the Renaissance, this narrative has provided inspiration for artists to draw upon and convey themes of innocence and culpability, as well as an occasion to paint a nude figure within the context of a history painting. The subject is portrayed by such masters as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Artemisia Gentileschi, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Hart Benton and, in the present work, Lovis Corinth, whose rendering was inspired by Jean-Jacques Henner’s earlier composition, Chaste Susannah (1864, Musée d’Orsay, fig. 1), which Corinth would have known from the collection of the Musée de Luxembourg.

Corinth benefitted from a broad artistic training while studying at the avant-garde Academy of Fine Arts in Munich before moving to Paris for tutelage at the Académie Julien under William Bouguereau in 1884. The opportunity to receive focused academic instruction, with a concentration on formal technique in figure painting and on literary themes, appealed to Corinth. He also hoped for the official recognition that came from inclusion in the Salon, a goal that he would not attain until 1890, three years after leaving Paris, when his Pietà was exhibited and received an honorable mention (Bernhart Schwenk, “One can treat the subject matter in a hundred different ways […]”, Lovis Corinth, 1996, p. 30). He exhibited the present work, Susanna im bade, at the Paris Salon the following year.

While Henner’s painting was highly criticized at the Salon for the inelegant pose of the model and the thinness of the veil offered by the historical subject, Corinth’s submission nearly thirty years later almost abandons the narrative alibi altogether, including elements such as the curtain and peering heads of the Elders anecdotally. The frank presentation of his model sympathizes with the realist nudes of Gustave Courbet. As Andrea Bärnreuther suggests: “It was Corinth’s objective to free the nude of the conventional formulas that had so long determined and limited its presentation and so to restore life to hollow figures drained of all sensuality” (Lothar Brauner and Andrea Bärnreuther, Lovis Corinth, p. 106).

There are two versions of Corinth’s Susanna of 1890; the present, primary composition, which he exhibited at the Salon of 1891 and untraced until recently, and the second version in the collection of the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany. Corinth would return to the subject throughout the subsequent decades in his career, including versions dating from 1897, 1909 and 1923, revealing his changing perspective on the narrative and his evolution as an artist. The composition also served as the basis for an etching made in 1920 (Müller no. 465).