Künstler - - Stift Admont

Oskar Herzberg
Accounted for from 1912–1914, Dr. Schilder, Vienna
Herzberg referred to himself as a typesetter and newspaper seller from
Frankfurt/Main, but was actually a porter by trade and probably a patient at the
Leipzig Psychiatric Clinic.
The old porter, as he is called by Prinzhorn, fabulated himself into the lives of his
contemporaries, painted the everyday and celebrations, prosperity and
destitution, the exotic and the sensational.
Ice skaters and fellow patients appear, along with dancers, comets, rock
formations, giant Christmas cakes and herd of camels.
In his insecure orthography, he creates a “disertation” on the subject matter of a
picture and spins yarns like an Oriental storyteller.
As opposed to “naive” painters, his gaze also disclosed mental and social layers,
such as the interior of “Frau Gern”, freed from its protective facade. Herzberg
himself approached the bedridden woman as a magnetiser, while her husband
and dog sit to the side. In the adjoining room to the left – to be read as though it
took place previously – the dog and husband caress each other.
The structure drawing is generally succinct and lavish, just like the relaxed,
mellow dappling technique.
Despite a lack of academic schooling, Herzberg moved ever closer to more
complex motifs, found vivid forms of expression for mimicry and gestures, for the
exotic and the transcendent.
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