(Vienna 1847–1922)
An Italian Pergola, c. 1907, signed Robert Russ, oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm, framed

Provenance:
Sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 23 November 1936, lot 85;
Collection of Alois (1877–1956) and Josephine Glingar (1877–1963), Vienna;
Thence by descent - Private Collection, Austria.

Exhibited:
Vienna, Künstlerhaus, memorial exhibition, 1923, cat. no. 387, (“Pergola”).

Catalogued and illustrated:
Andrea Winklbauer, Robert Russ. Monografie mit Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Vienna 2016, cat. raisonné no I.385.

Robert Russ had a remarkable career. He was the first of his class with Albert Zimmermann at the Vienna Academy to achieve early success and recognition with his painting. His expansive realism hit the nerve and taste of his time until shortly before 1900. Was it the experience of the southern light on his many travels in Italy, how it made the air, the colors, the landscape shimmer, that prompted him to invent a new way of painting? In any case, he gradually began to peel his motifs out of a structure of numerous dots and strokes of color, breaking up the smoothness of the surface in order to capture the impermanence of a moment. Up close, an abstract, gestural spectacle of color becomes an incredibly atmospheric, magical appearance of the landscape from a distance.

This „Italian pergola“ is a major work from this style period. With its considerable dimensions, the frame seems like a window from which one looks into a colonnade lushly overgrown with vines. Spots of light dance playfully on the cool floor of the pergola, imaginatively illuminating individual sections of leafs. At the end of the walkway, a young girl with heavy grapes in her hand is seen in conversation with a gardener. These motifs are narrative ingredients for what the painter is actually concerned with: the air filled with light, translated into a tangle of color spots, weaving through everything, shaping and dissolving at the same time.

Robert Russ‘ independent way of translating an impression into a painting was little recognized in his time and he died lonely and impoverished. Today, it is precisely these paintings that present him as an outstanding artist who opened up new paths for painting.