(Stribach near Lienz 1868–1926 St. Justina near Bolzano)
Kalvarienberg bei Bozen / Calvary near Bolzano, c. 1922/23, signed Egger-Lienz, inscribed on stretcher: “Kalvari-Berg bei Bozen (Haselburg)”, oil on canvas, 80 x 118 cm, framed

Registered in:
Wilfried Kirschl, Albin Egger-Lienz, Das Gesamtwerk vol. II, Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Vienna, 1996, supplement of the catalogue raisonné, page 624/M658 (there with measurements including frame)

Compare:
Kirschl 1996, vol. II, page 564/M542-M547 and vol. I, page 356–357

Provenance:
Max Welz (1878–1942), Vienna
acquired by the present owner before May 1938

Exhibited:
exhibition Albin Egger-Lienz, exhibited at Tiergartenstrasse 21a, Berlin,
30 May – 26 June 1938, no. 9
55. Ausstellung des Kunstvereins für Kärnten, Albin Egger-Lienz, Gemälde und Zeichnungen, Künstlerhaus, Klagenfurt, October 1938, no. 38

Between 1920 and 1922, Albin Egger-Lienz worked on a series of landscape paintings in the area of Bozen / Bolzano in South Tyrol. The striking and, in their rhythmic arrangement, distinctive forms of the hills elevating from the plain of the Adige Valley/Etschtal mounted with the castle of Siegmundskron on the one hand, and the Church of the Holy Ghost on Mount Calvary (Haselburg Castle) on the other, became the painters epitome of a landscape built from forms. The topographical view itself, however, offered him only an idea, while he assembled its various components of boulders, connecting and opening the valley from different points of view into a composition of calm and movement.
The series is undoubtedly one of the most important groups of works in the painter’s late oeuvre. The present work, which was included in the supplement to the catalogue raisonné, is the largest of the six known variants. Characterized by a balanced yet complex harmony between enigmatic stillness and energetic dynamics of form, Albin Egger-Lienz’s Mount Calvary offers a characteristically independent variant to Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical still images and Edward Hopper’s landscape interpretations executed sometime later.