There is a new discovery to celebrate: the fin-de-siècle painter Oskar Zwintscher, who was born in Leipzig in 1870 and died in Dresden in 1916 at the age of only 46.

He is the great unknown of art around 1900, although it is not without reason that he was called the "Saxon Klimt" - he was friends with Klimt and exhibited together with him.

In terms of painting, Zwintscher can definitely keep up with the Symbolists Böcklin, Hodler and Klimt.

His Dresden "Portrait of a Lady with a Cigarette" from 1904 is an icon of the self-confident woman who experienced a completely new perception in the life reform movement and in Art Nouveau.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The redhead with the big green eyes, sitting frontally opposite us, doesn't let the viewer gape at her, she effortlessly withstands the gaze - judging by the facial expression also intellectually.

In a loose, corset-free reform dress, she sits black on black – if you didn't know better, you would think she was a French intellectual of the 1960s – with her legs crossed, while her hand resting on her knee gracefully holds a cigarette, the tip of which is glowing deep red.

The fact that Zwintscher's picture quite rightly deserves the worn-out title "icon" can be seen from three unique selling points: unusual, expressive eyes, upside-down forms (the self-confident one's neck and back of the hand are "spackled over" in a modern way,

to make the filigree fingers and the photographically precisely modeled face appear all the more delicate) and a use of color that even the wildest symbolists could not think of.

With the fiery red of the cigarette burns, an inner fire of the prematurely accomplished blazes out of the picture, which is second to none.

Without the wealthy woman he would probably have starved to death

A solo exhibition is now dedicated to the painter in Dresden's Albertinum.

Fifty paintings are from him, who left a total of only 140 paintings, most of which have either disappeared or were lost in Dresden during the turmoil of the Second World War.

Fifty other works are by painter friends such as Klimt, admired artists such as Böcklin and Hodler or Zwintscher's "followers".

Even in Dresden it is only the second show after 1982, although the painter spent most of his life here.

Although the Albertinum owns the largest inventory of paintings by Zwintscher, with fifteen paintings, he was quickly forgotten due to his sudden death in the middle of the First World War, the change of style to Expressionism during his lifetime and the lack of students - although he had been teaching since 1903,

i.e. already at the age of 33, as a professor at the art academy in Dresden.

To make matters worse, Zwintscher's almost legendary inability to do business without any significant networks that would have secured him a glorious afterlife.

Due to financial difficulties, he drew numerous caricatures for the Meggendorfer Blatter, a politically milder competitor of "Simplicissimus".

The exhibition in the Albertinum begins with a sensitive approach, using well-chosen examples to create an awareness of Zwintscher's painterly qualities.

The first picture to the right of the entrance, "Mondnacht" from 1897, could be a kitsch scene from the romantic, blissful old town of Heidelberg in the nineteenth century if it weren't for the red roofs and, above all, almost psychedelic, wild Art Nouveau tendrils on the walls.