171 - Hans Makart

Hans Makart 1840-1884 Study for a Ceiling Painting Oil on cardboard 46.5 x 66 cm, with frame 62.7 x 82 cm Hans Makart did not limit his outstanding talents to massive canvases teeming with figures or to portraits no less commanding of respect. He also scattered them in smaller, all the more precious forms—as sketches, studies, or etudes. Alongside his penchant for the grandiose, his painting exhibits an equally pronounced tendency toward the intimate. The loose, even ethereal quality of the execution, in contrast to the stricter style of his major works, has always been regarded as a virtue. One drawback is that these small formats—which could be described as fragments of Makart’s overall body of work—usually lack a signature; this is also the case with the present small nude painting, Were this not ultimately too general a characteristic, one might already see a clue to Makart’s authorship in the view from behind, for he often employed the deviation from the “front view”—whether in nudes or portraits—as an artistic device. Another typical Makart characteristic is that the artist introduces a motif of movement even into the classically serene pose of his model—namely, the outstretched right arm, even though it is actually reaching into the unknown—for the static was simply not Makart’s element. This motif recurs—quite casually, yet still—in the branches of the vegetal background, thereby establishing a close connection between the figure and the surrounding nature. The reclining figure is thus presented as a creature of nature, interwoven with her plant-like surroundings, which, in Makart’s work, always have a somewhat artificial quality. Very typical of his painting is the almost cozy, warm sepia tone of the entire pictorial space, here in transitions from the reddish ground to the autumnal pallor of the background. This uniform color scheme is “disrupted” only by the cold sky blue breaking through the branches, which Makart—as in so many of his works—employs as a dramatic color effect in contrast to the homogeneous brown tone. The almost exaggeratedly supple curves of the nude could be interpreted as having an eroticizing effect, but they could also be cited as evidence of the alleged “bonelessness” of Makart’s conception of the human form—an argument often used against Makart, but one that must yield here in light of the exceptionally harmonious composition. There is, in fact, nothing about this painting that does not speak in Makart’s favor, and there is therefore no doubt that it is a work of his hand; a masterpiece that, despite its small format, possesses a well-rounded character and stands as a work in its own right. As for its chronological dating, the years 1870-75 are the most likely candidates. Nikolaus Schaffer