GERTRAUD REINBERGER- BRAUSEWETTER (Vienna 1903 . 1992), Sunset, 1925

GERTRAUD REINBERGER- BRAUSEWETTER*
(Vienna 1903 . 1992)
Sunset, 1925
woodcut/paper, 79 x 44,5 cm
signed Gertraud Reinberger, dated 1925 and inscribed Sonnenuntergang Handdruck
Provenance: private property Vienna

ESTIMATE °€ 800 - 1.500
START € 800

Austrian artist of the 20th century. Studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in the youth art class of Franz Cizek, there contact with Kinetism. Occupied with theosophy, antroposophy and religious themes. From 1915 for several years associated with the writer Gustav Meyrink. In 1931 the Albertina purchased 58 woodcuts, a year later participation in the exhibition Christian Art in the Secession in Vienna. After Cizek's death, 1946 to 1948, head of the youth art class. Stylistic development between fin de siècle, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, interest in ornament, line, rhythm, light and shadow. Female nudes, women, themes around love, life, death, closeness, tenderness, symbolic and iconic representations. Created mainly woodcuts, figural representations comparable to Carry Hauser.

The Viennese graphic artist and woodcut artist Gertraud Reinberger-Brausewetter is one of Franz Čižek's lesser-known students at the Vienna School of Applied Arts. She was born as the second eldest of four siblings in the master builder family Brausewetter, founders of the still existing company Pittel & Brausewetter, and at the age of 14 she was already in the youth class of Čižek, which she was to direct after his death from 1946 to 1948. The first major artistic commission for the eleven-year-old was the Annunciation scene, which was still entirely committed to Art Nouveau and was executed in tempera technique in 1914 in the porch of the Church of St. Othmar in Mödling, which her father had built in 1904. In 1916 she made her first woodcuts. After the end of the First World War she returned to Čižek at the School of Applied Arts, where she studied in the modern art department until 1921 and subsequently dealt with theosophical and anthroposophical themes. These woodcuts also date to the 1920s, some of which are still rooted in the ornamental practice of Secession art and Art Deco. The present picture shows a sleeping female figure with closed eyes and bowed head. Night, sleep and dreams are discussed as different reality and mirrors of human consciousness. According to anthroposophical understanding, the "dream consciousness" is a transformed rudiment of the "image consciousness" that man had on the "old moon". The dream is associated with vivid images and intense feelings, the ego-consciousness in the dream is only vaguely present, since the dream does not sufficiently differentiate between inside and outside: "We swim together with our dream world and cannot really distinguish ourselves from it." The surreal moment is particularly expressed in "Sunset" through the hair, in which the otherwise naked woman is partially wrapped and which must have reminded the artist, inspired by Christian imagery, of the depictions of Mary Magdalene, which go back to the Legenda Aurea. A mystical power seems to emanate from the setting sun, which is reflected in the lake and illuminates the scene. The fact that the stars are already in the sky takes the scene further away from the sphere of waking everyday reality.

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