Pathological portraits
Peter Altenberg portrait by Gustav Jagerspacher
1909, watercolour and pastel applied wet on woven cream paper applied to board
Gustav Jagerspacher was a regular at the writer Peter
Altenberg's café table in Vienna. He produced a number of
caricatures of the famed 'Fool of Vienna', which Altenberg often
inscribed, collected and displayed in his own rooms. Altenberg was
a known night-owl and neurasthenic, hard-drinking,
caffeine-stimulated and nervously agitated. Jagerspacher depicts
him scurrying across the city at night, framed by a poster
advertising the Apollo variety theatre on the Gumpendorferstrasse.
Despite this poster, the portrait was destined for Adolf Loos's
tiny bar off the Kärtnerstrasse, which opened in 1908.
Inscribed recto in pen and black ink at bottom edge of secondary
support: "Are we not all only caricatures from the truly and ideal
wishes, which God and Nature made with our souls and our
bodies?!?"