(Graz 1888–1949 New York)
“Dame im Garten (Thea)” / Lady in the park (Thea), 1936/37, oil on canvas on hardboard, 44 x 31 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Welz, Salzburg, 1977
Private Collection, Austria (since the late 1970s)

Registered and illustrated in:
Im Sog der Moderne, Neue Galerie Graz, 2013, full-page colour ill. plate 146, cat. rais. no. 340 (with title)

The Parisian years from 1931 to 1938 are among the happiest and artistically most fruitful years in the life and oeuvre of the Austrian painter Wilhelm Thöny. During this time he developed a new type of full-figure portrait which was both a continuation and reinterpretation of Impressionist stylistic devices. In 1936/37 he completed three paintings with the motif "Lady in the Garden" (cat. rais. no. 339–341), in which the shadowy facial features lend the figures a sense of ideal femininity. The present painting can nevertheless be identified by the sitter's dark hair as a portrait of Thöny’s second wife Thea Thöny (née Herrmann), an American with Jewish roots, whom he married in 1938.

This picture gains a remarkable surreal liveliness from the contrast of the dynamic and shimmering blue and green tones, charmingly accentuated with red spots; it gains a sovereign elegance from the pure modelling from a mesh of colours.

“Nothing can deceive like a photo, truth is a matter of the heart, achievable only through art.”
Franz Kafka