成人快手

Breaking Free: The World of the Second Viennese School in 5 Objects
The Laughing Self-Portrait

The Second Viennese School was a group of composers active in early 20th-century Vienna.

Its chief protagonists were Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

But many others were attracted to the to Schoenberg and his school - artists, poets and philosophers - including Richard Gerstl.

Gerstl was a young Viennese painter who, for a time, was a central figure in Schoenberg鈥檚 life.

Gerstl taught Schoenberg to paint and was one of his close friends.

However, in the summer of 1908, things started to go wrong.

Schoenberg鈥檚 wife, Matilde, ran away with the painter.

She eventually returned, but the affair brought Schoenberg close to suicide.

In the end it was Gerstl who took his own life a few months later.

He stabbed and hanged himself in front of a mirror after burning the majority of his work.

One surviving piece is the disturbing Self Portrait, Laughing.

Painted shortly before his death, it now hangs in the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in Vienna.

The ordeal inspired Schoenberg into a period of creative frenzy that shifted his music towards expressionism, making Gerstl鈥檚 suicide a transformative moment in the development of 20th-century music.

Self-Portrait Laughing by Richard Gerstl (1907). Belvedere, Vienna

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