T. Lux Feininger

Portrait N. Gardener

Repro: SC/art-archives.net

1941, in New York, 129 Perry St.
Oil on canvas
20 ¹⁄₄ × 17 inches(51 ¹⁄₂ × 43 cm)
Inscr. upper right: Lux; verso centered on the canvas: Lux 1941

TLF: no title (female head) (Portrait N. Gardener from photograph) destroyed [sic], 1941 [101]

Private collection Germany
Provenance: 2011 estate of the artist
TLF: "Another visitor came without appointment. ... Her purpose was, to remind me that I had “always wanted” to do her portrait. ... I had every right to view the offer as having expired, but lacked the courage to say so. ... I took a few snapshots of her, and from one of them painted, later on, a life-size head of N.G. As a motto I chose Goethe again: "How singular a collar for this charming neck / Would be a modest blood-red thread, / No wider than the thickness of a knife.(Faust I, transl. by TLF). Faust, in the Walpurgisnacht, beholds the vision of his ex-Gretchen as the Medusa. – I never had a chance to ask my own Ex-Gretchen how she liked the embellishment of her own fair throat that I ornated her with." [105]

[See below: Related artworks]
Themes: Family & Friends