Conversation with Schönberg about painting Catalogue raisonné
Hands
Watercolor on paper
32 × 21,5 cm
annotated, signed and dated: to Franz
Schreker / Schönberg / Christmas 1929
1929
Catalogue raisonné 74
private possession
After attending a performance of Franz Schreker’s opera “Die Gezeichneten,” Arnold Schönberg gave his friend a paraphrase of his early oil painting “Hands” for Christmas in 1929, which had been symbolically used in the opera. In Franz Schreker’s opera the symbolic level of art is represented by painting and phantasmagoria, the artificial paradise in the form of the isle of Elysium. Carlotta’s two long monologues have the following context: Alviano Salvago, the crippled Genoese nobleman, and Carlotta, a painter, only confess their feelings for one another via their affinity to art. Carlotta has secretly painted Alviano and asks him to come with her into her studio so that she can complete the picture. In the studio scene, while she paints Alviano’s portrait, Carlotta talks about a strange motive that was painted by a girl-friend and that appears as a leitmotif in all pictures: hands in every conceivable pose: “Refined, slender, with delicate blue veins, coarse, bigboned male fists, a woman’s ringed hand, voluptuous and soft, with nails, pointed and rosy, sparkling like drops of pale blood. I saw a hand there, clutching live flesh.” The eerie climax is reached with the following pictorial vision: “But one picture was particularly odd: a hand, pale and waxen, like the hand of a dead person, with uncannily long, skinny fingers, holding something you couldn’t see, in a relaxed manner.”