(Graz 1888–1949 New York) In the garden, middle of the 1930s, handwriting of the artist’s wife on the reverse: I confirm that this picture is an original work by my husband, Wilhelm Thöny. Thea Thöny, oil on canvas mounted on canvas, 35 x 44 cm, framed, (K)

Provenance: Galerie Würthle, Vienna; private ownership, Vienna ‘Because of the jewel-like, sparkling gleam and intensity of the colourful materialising force, the studies from Southern France belong to the most precious documents of Thöny’s painterly work’, in the opinion of Bruno Grimschitz. ‘These are unheroic landscapes, details of landscape, onto which the gaze of the artist has focused. In them architecture takes a secondary role to the organic forms of nature, but also to the life of the atmosphere. Things are seen more directly, are more striking in their objectivity, and yet the power of the impact of reality is achieved by a still bolder and more concerted abbreviation in the Parisian pictures, by means of a coloured stenograph, so to speak, which arrays fragment after fragment and interweaves them.’ The world of Cézanne was never nearer to Thöny than in those days of summer and autumn in Southern France. He sought his pictures where he found them. In Aix en Provence he went searching with the 83-year old brother-in-law of Cézanne. He admired Cézanne like no other artist, even more than Munch. The really modern art came from his work, in his opinion. How many related motifs offered themselves up to his gaze in the Mediterranean landscape – and yet, however much he wanted to draw them to himself, how far the Austrian artist remained in his nature from that of the Frenchman! How much more transient, agitated, nervy this nature is in Thöny’s work. Thöny worked in ‘hot activity’, as Grimschitz called it once, in an almost febrile restlessness, as if there was not enough time to hold on to everything which thrust itself at him as an impression. Cézanne’s great calm was foreign to him, the static structure of the pictures as an equivalent of duration – the secret harmony parallel to nature – an artistic ideal, which he never felt called to emulate. Cézanne was rooted here and remained here; Thöny entered this nature as a visitor, fleetingly as the taking of a breath, for a moment never to be repeated. Certainly, this Meditarrenean world also gave him the experience of duration, and appeared to him as a timeless paradise, always in bloom. But this experience only served to give him a more painful sense of human transience. Wieland Schmied, W. Thöny, Porträt eines Einzelgängers, Verlag Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1976