With his life cut short at the age of just twenty-eight, Egon Schiele did not personally experience the critical acclaim that only became associated with his name after World War II. The son of a station master in a town not far from Vienna, he arrived in the Austrian capital in 1906 to attend the Kunstgewerbschule, having lost his father. He left the academy after three years and founded the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group), finding a mentor in Gustav Klimt. After an initial period of affirmation, his trial and brief imprisonment in 1912 for exhibiting immoral drawings reveal the disapproving attitude of the provincial environment towards Schiele’s eccentric lifestyle. Having joined the army in 1915, the year he married Edith Harms, the painter returned to Vienna in January 1917 with the intention of relaunching
his activity in a field that had lost its driving force of the start of the century. Despite his financial difficulties and thwarted plans, such as the foundation of a Kunsthalle, Schiele’s exhibition career really took off, with his success continuing all the way through to the 49th Exhibition of the Vienna Succession, where he occupied the central room with twenty-nine works on paper and nineteen paintings. Albeit without any references to the identity of the subject immortalised therein, they included the great Porträt von Viktor Ritter von Bauer (fig. 1), one of the prestigious commissions Schiele received between 1917 and 1918. 

Dr Victor Moritz Peter Maria Ritter von Bauer-Rohrfelden (1876- 1939), a wealthy Jewish industrialist with a passion for travelling and aviation, had founded the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research) in Vienna in 1915. By September 1917, Schiele met Professor Erwin Hanslik, Bauer’s editorial director, with whom he embarked upon a collaboration that came to an end a year later upon the artist’s premature death. With Hanslik acting as the go-between, Schiele was commissioned to paint the portrait. The creative process began with the watercolour drawing in the Cerruti Collection and a study of hands (fig. 2), both dated to the end of 1917. Schiele only recorded the sitting sessions in his notebook from 5 January of the following year, when he noted a “bust of R. von Bauer”. A comparison between this indication and the painting confirms a change of format, from a bust to a full figure. Only a small number of elements were added in the painting, including the dominant yellow colour, the hint of space in the background and the beautiful Chinese gold cufflinks, from which Bauer was inseparable. The sitter’s failure to purchase the painting leads to doubts about whether it actually was a commission, although the industrialist also rejected the portrait painted by Oskar Kokoschka four years earlier. The collecting history of the drawing does not follow that of the canvas, which was purchased in 1918 by Karl Grunwald and then passed into the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere as early as 1930. Perhaps initially having remained with Bauer, it was exhibited with other drawings and watercolours in 1928 on the ground floor of the Galerie Würthle, as part of the major exhibitions held in memoriam ten years after Schiele’s death. Having passed into the collection of the merchant Arthur Stemmer, with whom it emigrated to London during the Nazi occupation, the drawing probably only returned to Vienna after 1953, when it entered the already immense and highly prestigious collection of Rudolf Leopold. A few years later, the collector celebrated the revival of interest in the forgotten “genius” of Schiele in an article illustrated with the first reproduction of the Portrait. The work then passed into the hands of another of the key figures involved in the rediscovery of Viennese painting, Serge Sabarsky, and following a period in Zurich with Walter Feilchenfeldt between 1973 and 1976, it reached the Ronald Lauder Collection in America. In 1980, it was bought back by Sabarsky’s Neue Galerie and featured in numerous touring exhibitions that established Schiele’s fame around the world. In 1997, Cerruti purchased the work at a Sotheby’s auction: he had been looking for works on paper by the Austrian artist since at least 1995, primarily sifting through female nudes, although the choice of a portrait of an industrialist, whom he met at one of the Sabarsky exhibitions, perhaps suggests that Cerruti also had an autobiographical reason for the purchase. 

[Filippo Bosco]