The Praying Girl. The Holy Grave, Fragment II, 1900/01

It is childlike wonder, devotion and religious awe that the painter Albin Egger-Lienz (1868–1926), who was from Stribach near Lienz in East Tyrol, makes, with atmospheric intensity, the subject of his pictorial invention. With broad, short, open brushstrokes in a dynamic, spontaneous-looking painting style, Egger-Lienz makes the figure of a white-clad, barefoot child emerge in an upright, praying posture from the diffuse darkness of an apparently sacred room. Colorful luminous spheres in the background glow with a mystical light of oscillating colorfulness. The bright child figure and the horizontal band of light at the height of the girl’s upper body form the shape of a cross that shines out of the dark. Already in his earlier work Good Friday of 1893, still delicately elaborate in painting style and more detailed in narrative, a vernacular custom of his home region is the starting point of a similar depiction: for the church Easter services, illuminated colorful glass balls are arranged around the “Holy Sepulcher.”

MH, 2021