Self-Portrait with Hairnet, 1923

With irony and in caricature style, Albert Birkle (1900–1986) invokes the pictorial tradition of Renaissance portraits by depicting himself in sharply outlined profile against an Alpine landscape with lush green meadows, violet and purplish mountains and picturesque snowy peaks, and, thrown into the scenery, a little church with a bulbous spire. In this setting, the artist’s sculptured face appears somewhat bizarre, its characteristic traits heightened and painted with broad strokes in oil on cardboard, apparently fixing a focused gaze under lowered eyebrows on some point in the distance. The austere impression of his dark smock and white mandarin collar is countervailed by the depiction of the tight hairnet he is wearing, heightening the strange effect to the point of grotesquerie. Similar motivic ambivalences are found in Birkle’s oeuvre until the early 1930s—often in connection with the religious or socially critical tendencies of his New Objectivity realism.

MH, 2021