Viennese painter. Gerstl’s early and passionate interest in music led him in 1905 to frequent the circle around the composer Arnold Schoenberg. An unhappy romantic attachment to the latter’s first wife, Mathilde, was the cause of his suicide. Gerstl’s work included life-size portraits of friends and relatives, numerous self-portraits as well as a series of small-scale landscapes, which are among the most accessible of the works created by this sensitive, nervous and complex artist. In the last two years of his life Gerstl created remarkable pictures that seemed to be far in advance of contemporary painting, including the portrait of the Composer Alexander von Zemlinsky and the group portraits of the Schoenberg Family that Schoenberg encouraged Gerstl to paint. In this work Gerstl attempted to achieve in painting a similar effect to that which Arnold Schoenberg achieved in his early atonal music: Gerstl’s painting was spontaneous and lively, almost becoming non-representational. His exceptional interest in music meant that he avoided contact with other artists. He never exhibited during his lifetime, and financial security through his affluent father meant that he never needed to sell any work. The comparatively small number of surviving works has limited the extent to which he is considered significant, although he is certainly a key figure for Austrian Expressionism and for early expressive art in general. —Grove Art Online