The present work was painted in 1910, during Kokoschka’s visit with his patron, Adolf Loos, to the Mont Blanc sanatorium in Leysin in the Swiss Alps, to visit Loos’ girlfriend. The subject, Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac, was a patient at Mont Blanc, who would go on to become the Duke of Fezensac in 1913. Kokoschka’s portraiture at this time broke convention in almost every aspect, with his primary aim to bring the invisible inside of a person – what he would come to call his “soul paintings” – to the surface. The artist’s treatment of medium in Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac is one of the most refined and unusual of his oeuvre. He used the end of his brush, his hands, his fingernails, the tips of his fingers, small bits of cloth to wipe away paint – virtually any object that would allow him the most immediate contact with the oil and the canvas.

Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac is known to have been with Alfred Flechtheim by 1927. It was sold by Alex Vömel – a member of the Nazi party who took over Flechtheim’s Düsseldorf Gallery – to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1934. In the 1950s, the work was transferred to the Moderna Museet, where it remained until it was returned to Flechtheim’s heirs earlier this year.

SOTHEBY’S PRESENTS: THE BEAUTIFUL & DAMNED
This November, as the world pauses to remember the events of the First World War on the centenary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that drew it to a close, Sotheby’s will bring together a group of works that illustrates the tremendous and varied impact of the War on the artistic production of those whose lives it transformed.

Incorporated into Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York on 12 November 2018, the offering will assemble works that capture the period from immediately prior to the outbreak of the war through to its aftermath, together telling the artistic history of that momentous period. The works will be presented under the moniker The Beautiful and Damned, in reference to the 1922 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald – the title of which alone captures the vicissitudes of the time.

Oskar Kokoschka’s Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Das Soldatenbad will be incorporated into this themed group and contextualized in greater depth within the larger historical moment in which they were produced.