Lot 233: - Wilhelm List , Austrian 1864-1918 A Woman in Profile oil on canvas

signed W. LIST upper left oil on canvas

84 by 40cm., 33 by 15¾in.

The vibrant polychrome motifs behind List's sitter, her heavily styled and stylised coiffure and the elaborately ornamental garments and accessories she wears, embody the Jugendstil Gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic of decoration of one's person and environment. Her elegant, fine features, milky skin and flaxen hair, set her within her decadent surroundings in a similar manner to the elegant ingénues of Botticelli more than four hundred years before (fig. 1). List's sitter holds her hands in a devotional manner, injecting a sense of spirituality into the representation, while continuing references to early portraiture.

List was, along with Gustav Klimt, one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession, and is above all celebrated for his graphic contributions to the Secession journal Ver Sacrum, and for the catalogue he created for the 14υth Secession exhibition in 1892, dedicated to Beethoven.


FIG. 1, Sandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1480, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
553D08103