Sposalizio (Double Portrait)

Oskar Kokoschka, a contemporary of fellow Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, was known for the expressionist, psychological, and penetrating quality of his portraits, particularly in the years before World War I. After 1919, he continued to make portraits but turned ever more toward landscapes and works based on historical or classical themes, maintaining the deep colors and intensity of paint application of his earlier years.

This painting, titled with the Italian word for "wedding," shows a couple who have been identified as the writer and critic Emil Alphonse Rheinhardt (1889- 1945) and his second wife, Elsa Romanic. In 1958, Kokoschka could himself no longer remember their names, writing to AMAM curator Chloe Hamilton that "the real names of the young people I have forgotten and only remember having heard long afterwards that the man had been gassed and the girl died from starvation during the Russian occupation of a part of Austria. .!.!. You see a very sad fate befell my sitters as, unfortunately, most of my friends of that époque." Kokoschka further wrote that he had given it the title "Sposalizio" because he understood that the couple intended to be married one day. (Both Rheinhardt and Elsa Romanic were depicted in drawings made by Kokoschka in 1912, and Rheinhardt did die in a concentration camp.)

The painting formerly belonged to Mrs. Lotte Franzos (1881-1957), who held a salon in Vienna in the early twentieth century where artists, writers, and politicians would meet, and whom Kokoschka painted in 1909. He wrote of her after her death, "She had meant a great deal in my life. And she remained loyal to my work, very different from many other people of my youth. I will always be grateful to her beyond death and especially that she left Sposalizio to the Oberlin Museum." Her bequest to the AMAM included paintings by Anton Faistauer and Carl Moll, prints by Dürer and Rembrandt, and a Kokoschka drawing of a nude youth from about 1907.