HERBERT GURSCHNER (Innsbruck 1901 - 1975 London), Triumph of Death, 1927

HERBERT GURSCHNER*
(Innsbruck 1901 - 1975 London)
Triumph of Death, 1927
oil/canvas, 65 x 50 cm
depicted in Herbert Gurschner, Innsbruck 2000, p. 90
Provenance: estate of the artist, Brenda Gurschner London, private collection Austria

ESTIMATE °€ 15.000 - 30.000
START € 15.000

Austrian painter and stage designer of the 20th century especially the interwar period. Representatives of Tyrolean modernism such as Artur Nikodem, Ernst Nepo, Wilhelm N. Prachensky, Hans Tyrol-Weber, etc. Stylistic development between Expressionism and New Objectivity. Nephew of the sculptors Emil and Gustav Gurschner. Attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Innsbruck and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1918 to 1920. In 1920 he lived in Mühlau in Innsbruck, exhibited with the Mühlau Circle around Alfons Schnegg, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Nepo. Early 1920s landscapes and cityscapes from travels through Tyrol, Salzburg and Italy. 1924 Married the English noblewoman Dolores Cherwadsky-Damarkow, established contacts with London artist and collector circles. 1929 first exhibition at the London Fine Art Society. Contacts with aristocratic, diplomatic and business circles, exhibitions in London and New York. Married his second wife Brenda Davidoff. Created landscapes, portraits and religious representations. Figure conception comparable to Albin Egger-Lienz, Tyrolean landscape artists such as Alfons Walde and Oskar Mulley. Religious and sacred themes with influences from traditional votive pictures and dance of death representations.

Gurschner's talent for painting was evident early on. In 1918 he was accepted as the youngest student at the Academy in Munich. From 1920 he lived in Innsbruck's Mühlau district and exhibited together with the other artists of the "Mühlauer Kreis", Nepo, Schnegg and Lehnert. From 1925 on he undertook numerous trips to Italy, Spain and France, exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in 1929 completed an acclaimed solo exhibition at the London Fine Art Society. In 1931 the Tate Gallery bought his Annunciation. Gurschner made a living from numerous commissions for portraits and was thus associated with aristocratic, diplomatic and business circles. In 1938 he went into exile in London, where he met his second wife, Brenda. After the war, Gurschner turned to stage design, working for Covent Garden Opera, the Globe and Hammersmith Theaters. As early as 1927, Herbert Gurschner exhibited a painting in his first exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London that dealt with the "Triumph of Death". This work was created in the same year as the present smaller version and was shown a second time in 1928, when Austria was a guest exhibitor in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In comparison to the Biennale version, our version of the "Triumph of Death" is the more new objective and artistically goes beyond it. In addition to religious pictures, Gurschner painted a number of effective, symbolic-existential pictures in this period, in which expressive tendencies were combined with new-objective pictorial means, the effect of which was close to magical realism.

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