Still Life with Partridges and Cheese

With complete disregard for public success and the art market, the Viennese painter Carl Schuch, who joined the circle around Leibl in 1870, produced a series of still lifes in which he pursued his investigation of artistic means. He translated visual perception into a system of tonal values and applied this to the picture as a whole. Thus the medium of painting — the colour material, the alla prima method, the structural nature of the brushstrokes, and the tectonics of the colour fields — all come to dominate so that objects lose their materiality. The sheer colour which glows from within disperses form and space alike. Painting as a generative process: after Schuch’s death this concept of the visual led to his recognition in the Centenary Exhibition of 1906 as the modernist that he was.