Girl’s Head, c. 1919

Imbued with lyrical dreaminess, strangeness and mystery, Alfons Walde (1891–1958) makes his Girl’s Head stand out from the opaque darkness of the backdrop, bringing us really close to the face of the black-haired young woman with wavy bangs leads and a matte complexion. The expressive shell-shaped eyes, veiled in gloom, look to the side, covered by what seems like a mysterious gauze that sets them off against the rest of the oval face and the faintly smiling lips. Done in oil on cardboard with impasto technique and delicate dense coloring, the work was probably painted by Walde in 1919—a phase of focusing, stylistically and thematically, on his Tyrolean homeland in the form depictions of alpine landscapes with idealized human figures in them. Walde increasingly defined himself as a depicter of the palpable, of everyday universality and real-life sensibility. His earlier work features a large number of erotic female nudes and depictions of a sultry atmosphere as seems fitting for the nervous decadence of the big city. In his later oeuvre, Walde defined himself as a “natural, simple, and sincere man” whose art was therefore meant to be a “mirror of the soul.”

MH, 2021