Portrait of a woman

Signed, titled, located and dated lower left: ‘Kreolin’ Paris 1928 / LSteiner

Gouache on paper

52.5 x 36.7 cm. (20 ½ x 14 ½ in.)

Provenance:

European Private Collection;

Kunsthandel Widder, Vienna.

Lilly Steiner (fig. 1), née Hofmann, was born into a Jewish Viennese family in 1884, just as the city was beginning its intellectual and cultural renaissance. Between 1899 and 1904 she trained under the painter and etcher Ludwig Michalek at the Wiener Frauenakademie (the Vienna Women’s Academy). The Academy had been founded in 1897 and gave Viennese women, for the first time, the same artistic opportunities as men, allowing them, for example, to learn to paint and draw from the nude. This had long been considered a central tenet of an artistic education but had usually been denied to women in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and indeed elsewhere in Europe) on grounds of impropriety.

Fig. 1, Lilly Steiner, Self-portrait in the studio, 1937, oil on canvas,

130 x 97.5 cm, Belevedere Museum, Vienna

Upon graduation in 1904, Steiner married the industrialist Hugo Steiner, her elder by a decade and likewise interested in the arts. He was a friend of the writer Karl Kraus and the Secessionist architect Adolf Loos, with the couple commissioning the latter to design the Haus Steiner on the outskirts of Vienna. The house, considered one of Loos’ major architectural works, became an artistic and social centre. Indeed, the Steiner’s were deeply connected with the avant-garde ideas and movements within Vienna, with Egon Schiele, for example, drawing a number of charcoal portraits of Lilly in 1918 (fig. 2).

Fig. 2, Egon Schiele, Portrait of Lilly Steiner, 1918, pencil on

paper, 44.5 x 26.5 cm, Private Collection

It wasn’t until 1917 that Steiner fully devoted herself to an artistic career, exhibiting in that year for the first time. In 1925 Steiner joined the Hagenbund, an artist’s group which dominated the Viennese artistic scene in the post-Secessionist era. As a woman, Steiner could only join as an ‘Extraordinary Member’, meaning that she could participate in discussions and exhibit her work but had no right to vote. She was also a founding member of the Vienna Print Club. 

Following the loss of their fortune in the market downturns of the 1920s, the Steiner’s moved to Paris in 1927. It was only upon arrival in the French capital, more accepting of female artists than Vienna, that Steiner achieved the success that her talents deserved. Drawing close to the École de Paris, the loose association of émigré, often Jewish, artists active in Paris, Steiner’s style became calmer and her palette cooler, as she moved away from the expressionistic style of her Viennese years. In 1928 she participated in the arts section of the Olympic Games. In Paris Steiner exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants and in 1937 participated in the exhibition Les femmes artistes d’Europe at the Jeu de Palme, which brought together the work of leading international female painters (though the only other Austrian artist included was Mariette Lydis).

After 1937, Steiner’s art often reflected political ongoings, responding to Hitler's 1938 march into her native Vienna, for example, with a painting she titled Baroque Composition, which depicts a shattering of the old order.[1] She spent the first three years of the war in the French zone libre, quietly returning to Paris in November 1942 and managing to avoid Nazi attention. Much of her later career was dedicated to book illustration, lithography and tapestry design.

The present work was executed in Paris in 1928, a year after moving to the city. Steiner’s interest in Expressionist painting is clearly visible in the loud use of colour and dynamic wash. Steiner’s Expressionist portraits from the 1920s, influenced by the painting of Oskar Kokoschka, are amongst her most impressive works. This watercolour, alongside the stupendous 1927 depiction of the American artist Lilian Gaertner (fig. 3), counts amongst the very best of these portraits. 

Fig. 3, Lilly Steiner, Portrait of Lilian Gaertner , 1927, oil on

canvas, 104 x 78 cm, Private Collection

Steiner has titled the portrait ‘Kreolin’, the German for ‘Creole’. A French loanword which originally gained widespread usage in Louisiana, the term came to denote someone of mixed racial heritage, usually including African ancestry. Almost certainly therefore Steiner’s sitter is an African-American in Paris, her presence there linked to the craze for Black culture that was prevalent amongst avant-garde artists and bohemian types during the Années Folles.

This passion for Black culture, termed at the time ‘Negrophilia’, encouraged a wholesale exodus from America to Paris of black intellectuals, artists and performers, who in the French capital had many more opportunities to advance their careers than in 1920s America, where both legal and de facto segregation were the prevailing reality. Prominent Afro-Americans in Paris included the Jazz musician Henry Crowder, the poet Langston Hughes and, most famously the dancer and cultural phenomenon Josephine Baker (fig. 4).

Fig. 4, Murray Korman, Portrait of Josephine Baker, 1929 

Like Baker, who was sometime known as the ‘Creole Goddess’, an interesting moniker in light of the portrait’s title, Steiner’s sitter was very likely a singer or a dancer. Following Baker’s explosion onto the Parisian scene in 1925, when she captivated audiences with her ‘Charleston’ dance, black entertainers became a mainstay of Parisian nightlife, performing at clubs such as Le Grand Duc, Chez Florence, Chez Joséphine and Bricktops (the latter owned by the black Jazz singer Ada Smith). The musicians who worked in these clubs initially came to Paris with shows such as the Blackbirds or Baker’s own Revue Nègre, staying on in France as the demand for performers meant that they could quickly make a name for themselves.

Whilst Steiner may have been interested, at least in part, in depicting her sitter because of her skin-colour, the musical angle presumably also had some appeal: the artist portrayed several of the leading musical figures of her day, including the composers Alban Berg (fig. 5), Arthur Honegger and Arturo Toscanini. 

Fig. 5, Lilly Steiner, Portrait of Alban Berg, oil on canvas, Gesellschaft

der Musikfreunder, Vienna

Who the sitter is, and how and why Steiner came to draw her we cannot say for sure. Yet, whatever the case, the result is a portrait which is amongst the most important of Steiner’s oeuvre and also a rare artistic testament to a unique cultural moment in 1920s Paris.