(Vienna 1929–2008)
‘Figur mit erhobener Hand’, monogrammed, dated M 66, inscription on the stretcher: 1966 Figur mit erhobenem Arm Mikl, oil on canvas, 190 x 190 cm, framed, (K)

Exhibited:
XXXIV Biennale d’Arte di Venezia 1968 (label on the stretcher)

Provenance:
Galerie Ulysses, Vienna
Viennese Collection

About the object
What one sees, what one has seen, cannot be completely forgotten.
Therefore, there are no really fictitious or purely non-objective images.
Only an object lends meaning to a picture.
Meaningful content goes hand in hand with form and technique. Only an airhead can claim that a painting is a bad one but well painted, or that its creator has got imagination but no sense of form, and so on.
A picture’s content is inevitably figural in character, for one can only express what one means in a specific context. Drawing from life supports this figurative way of thinking. A tree, a child, a nude function as proportional models for the draughtsman; they teach him how to transfer spatial volumes to flat surfaces and how to think logically.
The history of art only knows logical pictures, each of which is a world of its own although it is made under the impression and based on the experience of reality; it must to justice to all demands, even those posed by fools: by the schoolmaster, for whom form suffices, by the superficial person, who only sees the technique, and by the idiot, who asks for nothing but content.
Josef Mikl – from Werner Hofmann, Josef Mikl, Gesellschaft der Kunstfreunde, Vienna 9