Blue Self-Portrait

1910

Oil on plywood. Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

A head-and-shoulders self-portrait by the composer: a blue-grey head set against a flat salmon-orange ground. Self-portraits form the largest group in his art, with 75 catalogue entries.

He dated it to a single day, 13 February 1910.
His talks with Richard Gerstl, starting in 1906, spurred him to paint.
He insisted that painting never ranked with his music and counted himself an amateur in it.
In a 1938 text he wrote that he painted gazes, not faces; here the head serves mainly to carry a fixed, wide-eyed stare.
In 1911 Kandinsky invited him to the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich; this picture was not among the four works he showed.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-old-70-expired