Portrait of Cornelia, undated

The smiling girl represents both a lifeless portrait and a sensual figure, attractive and aloof in equal measure. Her eyes, as dark as the background, are of a fullness that could also be construed as emptiness, like a mask. In this painting, Karl Hofer (1878–1955) managed a balancing act between creating a neutral portrait and discreetly taking part in his model’s inner life. In 1955, when he was embroiled in a grueling polemic with the representatives of post-war abstraction, the Berlin artist stated: “The central problem of the fine arts is, and will always be, man and the human aspect, the eternal drama.” While his approach to his subjects reveals formal similarities with Expressionism and New Objectivity, Hofer always kept his distance from the radical forms of European Modernism.

IR, 2021