Albert Birkle Lot n° 29

Albert Birkle Insanity 1925 Oil on canvas. 63.5 x 57.5 cm. Framed. Signed in black lower left 'A. Birkle'. Signed and titled on the stretcher 'A. Birkle "Irrsinn"' and inscribed 'Akademie Ausstellung 1925' and 'Preis 1200' [crossed out]. - In good condition. We thank Roswita and Viktor Pontzen, Archiv und Werkbetreuung Albert Birkle, Salzburg, for their scientific advice. The work is listed in the internal catalog raisonné under number 803. Provenance Owned by the artist until 1977; Neue Münchner Galerie Dr. Hiepe, on commission; privately owned Munich (1978); since then in family possession Exhibitions Berlin 1925 (Prussian Academy of Arts), spring exhibition, cat. No. 9 ("Madness"); Berlin 1927 (Johannes Hinrichsen, Künstlerhaus in der Bellevuestraße), Albert Birkle, cat. No. 10; Ulm 1929 (Städtisches Museum), collective exhibition Albert Birkle, handwritten exhibition list No. 7. Literature Albin Rohrmoser, Albert Birkle, oil painting and pastel, exh. Cat. Museumspavillon im Mirabellgarten, Salzburg 1980, fig. 7 (not shown in the exhibition); Silvia Kraker, Albert Birkle, Phil.Diss., Innsbruck 1992, cat. No. 394 With his characteristic, exaggeratedly depicted physiognomies and his old-masterly precise painterly execution, Albert Birkle occupied a unique artistic position. Surreal pictorial objects and a neo-objective aesthetic combine in his oeuvre to create a magical realism of a special kind. "Irrsinn" from 1925 thematizes the abysses of the human psyche and a person's all too realistic fear of death. Together with the painting "Der letzte Kavalier" (The Last Cavalier) from the same year (Salzburg Museum), Birkle created his own dance of death with this work, based on late medieval models. These depictions with drastic personifications of death, for example in the Totentanzfries in the Marienkirche in Lübeck (around 1460) or the woodcut series by Hans Holbein the Younger (around 1530), served as memento mori to remind the living of the inevitability of their own mortality. In Birkle's version, the theme takes on a particularly dramatic dynamic. Death as a greenish shimmering skeleton, still showing traces of decomposition, assaults his victim with a leap from behind and grasps his throat. The fear of death that seizes the man in his madness is made abundantly clear in the panic-stricken eyes and the fingers pressed tensely to the temples. The red background, which also accompanies "The Last Cavalier," captures the scene in a nightmarish nowhere. As Silvia Kraker suspects in her dissertation, Birkle's wartime experiences, a possible serious illness of his own, or Baudelaire's literature, which he preferred, could have led to these extraordinary confrontations with death.