Kneeling Narcissus

After the First World War, Anton Kolig went back to Nötsch, a village in the Gail valley in Carinthia, and tried to found a school there. Students began to arrive in the early 1920s, and the male nude became the subject he returned to for the rest of his life. This canvas is from 1920. In the Greek myth, Narcissus is the youth who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. Kolig’s young man kneels on one leg with an arm flung out and his head bent low, while the bottom of the canvas turns into a broad field of blue. The body is built from strokes of pink, violet, green and orange, and its outlines stay open, so the green around him runs into the figure. The Belvedere bought the picture in 1951 from the Galerie Würthle in Vienna.