ABSTRACT

The painting was evidently not actually finished until the following year as it is signed ‘Ida Gerhardi 1898’. Living mostly in Paris, then, as a German artist, Ida Gerhardi became active in negotiating exchanges between German art centres and the French capital. Ida Gerhardi had, without a doubt, a particular facility in initiating exchanges, in negotiating, in pushing and promoting artists. Yet it seems clear that she could – as in the case of Frederick Delius – sometimes overdo things, to the annoyance of the parties concerned. In the intensification of colouring, as in the tautness and severity of line, there is a greater degree of abstraction than in the earlier, realistic portraits by Ida Gerhardi, and yet she did not take the path to total abstraction. Furthermore she puts her painting style at the service of the portrait and remains pledged – despite her subjective interpretation – to her subject that is to the sitter and his personality.